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Hunter-gatherers in Africa may have been using poison-tipped arrows for more than 70,000 years, according to a new analysis of ancient arrowheads.

This would be the oldest known use of poison arrows in the world, says Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

In southern Africa, Kalahari San people have used poison-tipped arrows to hunt for thousands of years. They often obtain poisons from the intestines of the larvae of Diamphidia leaf beetles. But it isn鈥檛 clear when this practice started.

鈥淒irect evidence of truly ancient poisoned-arrow use in the Old World is sparse,鈥� says Lombard. In China and Egypt, poison arrows have been used for 2500 years, she says, while in India the practice dates back at least 1000 years. They are also mentioned in Homer鈥檚 epic poem the Odyssey, composed sometime before 700 BC.

Most of the accepted archaeological evidence comes from the past 8000 years. However, there have been hints that southern African peoples invented poison arrows long before. In April, Lombard鈥檚 team . They concluded it was an arrowhead and was coated in a sticky liquid: this may have been poisonous, but they couldn鈥檛 establish this with confidence.

To help identify ancient poisoned arrowheads, Lombard has compiled data from 128 known examples, all collected from southern Africa within the past 150 years. She measured the cross-section area of the tip of each arrowhead, which gives an indication of how sharp it is. She found that poison-tipped arrowheads are distinctive: they are sharp enough to cut, but not sharp enough to go deep, because they only need to get in far enough for the poison to enter the bloodstream.

Lombard then compiled data from 306 similar bone points from archaeological digs, dated from the last 40,000 years. Many had the same tip cross-sectional area as the modern poisoned arrowheads, suggesting they were used the same way.

She also examined 11 older bone points, between 50,000 and 80,000 years old. Eight fit the profile of poison-tipped arrowheads. This suggests people in southern Africa were using poison arrows tens of thousands of years ago, although Lombard cautions that the sample size for this earlier time period is small.