wanderer wrote on Jan 5
th, 2008 at 4:43am:
I think that archaeologists may have been guilty of taking 'abscence of proof is proof of abscence' line with the sling.
It seems more plausible to me that the sling long preceded the bow and arrow.
Remembering the times when these researches were started, it may just have not been considered seriously by the academics of the time, who probably had never seen a sling in action.
As C_A remarks, once you have cordage, it is quite a small step to a sling. A bow takes a lot of work to become anything more than a toy, and is then no use for anything but as a weapon. It is awkward to carry and easily broken, or harmed by getting wet.
A sling is trivial to carry, doesn't get ruined by getting wet, can be made relatively quickly from any number of different sources, and is also still a piece of rope which if you need to carry back your kill is useful, and weighs almost nothing - unless you have to lug the rocks around
I love than line about absence of proof and vice versa. Though to give archaelogists there due, unless you've seen a good slinger in action they look fairly innocuous. When my dad made me a sling when I was around five years old and told me how they had been used in ancient warfare I questioned him, "But Dad you couldn't actually kill anyone with one of those?"
Even though the sling is in itself a simple device and much simpler to make than a working bow, it is still a pretty clever idea to come up with just out of the blue. I wonder if there was a "stepping stone" in its discovery, ie. whether the the original "sling" was just a weight tied onto a cord, thrown as a unit. One day the string breaks or the knot comes undone and the stone flies off. Our clever little Neanderthal gets the prehistoric equivalent of a lightbulb coming on in his head and tries to think of a way of replicating the event reliably. Lots of the world's greatest discoveries have been made by accident. Just a thought. Absolutely impossible to prove one way or another. But then again absence of proof..............