The Heritage Museum issued the following announcement.
Imagine you woke up 12,000 years in the past. You are in Florida at the end of an ice age. It’s cold, and you start to feel hungry. You look around, but sadly you are the only animal near by. A slight hint of a breeze sneaks past you, and that’s when you hear it…the clumping of a large animal’s feet. You can tell that you are very small in size compared to this creature, but you have to eat. What do you do?
This situation was very common for people living in a time absent of farming techniques and grocery stores. Hunters living 12,000 years ago did not have obvious means for catching their food, so they had to get creative. Stones and rocks were easy to come by during this Paleolithic period, so people crafted darts out of stone. They were attached to the end of long sticks to create spears so the people could hunt larger animals with thicker coats.
By the time the Archaic period started, the ice age was coming to an end, and the global temperature was increasing. Larger animals were becoming extinct, and spears were too slow to catch smaller, quicker animals. In order to adapt to their environment, they invented the atlatl. An atlatl was a throwing stick that had a dart on the end of the tip that could propel these weapons through the air more quickly and accurately toward their target.
Want to see these fascinating Archaic-era hunting tools in person? Stop by the Heritage Museum of Northwest Florida to see this piece of history and much more.
Original source can be found here.
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