hybrid_throwback, the smooth oval shaped stones are the best you can get for distance.

Hold your horses everybody. Ill need to make conical lead glands, go to the Mojave dessert or some place with high elevation and wait for the right wind conditions before Ill be able to break a world record, so obviously its not going to happen for at least eight months and Ill have to get the money to go there.

I do note an article discussed in this forum earlier

http://pennstate.academia.edu/documents/0010/4106/brown_vega_craig2009_slings.pd...

Here, the measurements were done with GPS. The slingers were inhabitants of the Andes, who sling all their lives. The projectiles were pebbles, 3 cm x 5-9 cm.

The distances ? Women, on average 50+ m; men, just under 80 m. (BTW, the archaeologists were pleased, because there had been a hypothesis that sling range was even lower).

FWIW-- these are rigorously documented distances.

Thearos wrote on Dec 19^th, 2009 at 4:27pm:


Just because you saw that documentary makes you believe that people cant sling much further than the recorded distances? I can throw a rock by hand 50 yards for peats sake. No offense toward you or anything.

Wanderer - the silly bit in the middle is the red scorched stuff - mainly we leave it alone so that backpackers and alien contact hopefuls have it all to themselves   I live in Southern QLD... cow country... the other half of the year it's pretty brown and hopeless looking, especially in winter. Mucho moo poo and nitrogen from the storms that hover around the mountain gives it that toxic green glow.

xxkid - a volcano littered this area with lumps of molten stone with a very high iron content onceuponatime... the "bombs" it threw out range from tiny things the size of an ant to foot long specimens. They have been shaped into assymetrical ellipses by their travel and cooling in the air, with a flattened "foot" from impact. Not many came out the right size for my pouch but once in a while I get lucky and they soar like birds. Maybe they can remember being up up n away   If only I could find a few hundred of em at the same time!

interesting to see those traditional figures... maybe something there similar to how just because a .303 can throw a bullet multiple kilometres away, in practice noone hunts at those distances and a bang on shot at 100m is worth more kudos than a wild air shot that noone can see the end of. Might be a social construct designed to stop the number of people getting stones in the skull from the neighbours being over ambitious too. More to people's actions than physics and the like. Maybe they don't like to let outsiders know just how far their defensive perimeter can extend if it needs to Wouldn't blame them!

MrBoss: it's not a documentary, it's a scholarly article. And it's rigorously documented; your claims to throw 50 m by hand are not.

Thearos wrote on Dec 19^th, 2009 at 7:54pm:

I think he's mixing up 50m for 50 ft.

Must be remembered though that the average western male is probably a fair bit taller (not to mention has more mass to put behind a shot, all those beers add up) than the average Andean mountain man....though they'd be some buff lil blokes that's for sure. wiki says the average Mayan Indian male (for example) was 1.57m, vs the 1.7m fairly typical for males in most other parts of the world. When talking of leverage, rotation and force, length and weight of the lever makes a tremendous difference to the outcome. Even mass... i would expect a machine weighing 100k to have 20 percent more output than one weighing 80kg (in purely abstract terms, of course.It could just have a heavier case in the real world ).

Hill people tend to be shorter, stockier and sturdier with more mass in shoulders and hips, with shorter long bones. Likewise plains/grassland people are typically taller, slimmer, with their bulk more evenly distributed and a tendency towards long, lean bones.

I wouldn't want a batallion of stumpy and talented Andeans to start slinging at me anytime soon... but some equally competent Masai or Pitjanjatjara could be expected to throw just a touch farther than someone 15 or 30cm or more shorter than them, at the very least... surely?

I know not everyone uses metres in a daily sense... most forum software tells me I have spelt metres incorrectly,and spelt too, for that matter... lol... but 50 metres is not very far to throw by hand. A metre is of course more than a yard, but only by 10cm. You need quite a few of em laid end to end before that cumulative difference makes much real difference at all. Perhaps we should adopt a universal measurement just for slingers called the "mard". It's around 95 cm  

I just threw 40ish metres with any old rock (no wind for once) and  have no background in cricket, baseball, whatever. hated sports as a kid.  50m is  about two or three typical aussie suburban home frontages. If you can't land a rock on the roof of the ppl three doors down, you need to be eating more vegetables A standard cricket pitch is 20m long. Most schoolkids here could easily double that distance, and often do, from the number of balls on roofs near sports fields!

Working in feet does make for some big numbers, but the distance itself doesn't change. I am 6 foot 4 inches. that sounds heaps taller than saying I am 1.94m, and not as tall as 194 cm.

Playing with google earth shows me that my average "stuffing around" sling distance is about a hundred metres, the longest I could actually see the impact of was 160. "plinking" or lightweight shots (if there are people or pets around I keep shot under the 30mm mark, and use a conglomerate so it shatters instead of rebounds)  shots fall around the 60, 70 m mark. My accuracy is best between 60 and 90 metres. At 160 I'd be lucky to hit a postcode, haha. My average "trying for distance" is 120m. Somewhere in there between the vagaries of my projectiles and different ways of moving my body is the other 30 or 40 m. Not too unreasonable. As I age and gain skill and middle-aged muscle density I reckon I could average 150 more often than not.

If I can get power and technique balanced, I can hopefully flatten my trajectory quite a bit. A lot of shots must go half as high as they do long, using natural stone I think I need the height to overcome the drag etc.

Distance becomes harder exponentially... anyone can throw to 10m, sometimes accidentally   . 50, probably. 80, with some practice. 100 , with time and oomph enough. much past that you enter the realm I think of "wow, I nailed that one! now what did I do differently that time? doh!". I cannot reliable belt em out to 160m, but then the poll did ask for longest, not average.

I'd say anyone that can hit the side of a bus at 100m is doing extremely well, likewise any shots that land within a few shorts steps of each other or that just make you feel good should be sources of pride. If  I was 5 feet tall I think I'd be average 120 at the absolute outside, newb that I am.