Quote:Korfmann has a map showing worldwide distribution of the sling. Australia is noticably vacant.
Aborigines arrive there in 40,000 BC and by 20,000 BC had covered the mainland. This would suggest that the sling is not older than 40,000 years.
It is a good assumption for the discovery date of the sling, although the absence of archaeological specimens donīt implies the nonexistence of the weapon, been perishable its materials. The fact that it donīt exist archaeological projectiles of sling in Australia, could mean that it was not longer used in the times in which manufactured projectiles were used, but not that the first settlers did not take the sling with them, who would use it with natural stones that canīt be identified. It is possible that the sling was not useful in the Australian environment, or who knows. And also, as you say, it is possible that first Australian settlers did not take the sling with them, but that doesnīt means that it didnīt exist previously in other places.
The well-known writer Jean M. Auel, authoress of the prehistorical saga of Ayla (so admired by Ulrica) place the use of the sling in the time in which Neanthertals and Homo Sapiens coexisted, that is to say, around 40.000 years B.C. Of course we canīt grant scientific value to the viewpoint of a novelist who is not antrhopologist, but she certainly counted on the advising of archaeologist and anthropologist to write his novels.
Nevertheless, the archaeological evidences place the appearance of the "bolas" long before, around 200.000 years B.C. when other previous human species, the Homo Erectus, had spread from Africa to everywhere. If we admitted that the sling could be derived from the bolas, it would locate its discovery long before the 40.000 years. But this is only a possibility, the invention possibility of the sling, because its archaeological evidence does not appear until the Neolithic, around the year 7.000 B.C., date in which are dated the clay projectiles.