I was thinking more along the lines of people with a lot of time to spend on both making and learning to use slings. As well as the many uses shepherds make of slings.
Plus before slings they'd have thrown stones as a matter of course.
So a way to throw further would have been something a shepherd would have sought.

The sling made it across to North America and across the pacific islands which is a migratory journey that began waaaay before agriculture. I have no doubt that the sling and atlatl were invented by early modern humans in Africa and went with us on the migration out of Africa into Europe/Asia and beyond.

This is a selection of probable projectile points in Africa over  60,000 years old, before the migration out. The article calls this evidence for the bow and arrow, but I call BS on this. The spearthrower was the technology that went with migrating humans to Australia and America, and was used in Europe as recently as 15,000 years ago, the bow only appears later.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11086110

We cannot place the sling in pre-migration Africa yet, but there are these possible projectile points. If these are evidence for the spearthrower then the principle of arm-extending throwing tools is established and would strengthen the case for the sling if, for example, a cache of rounded weight matched stones were to be found from that period.

David Morningstar wrote on Sep 3^rd, 2012 at 6:53am:


That would help. But there is no incentive for the hunter gatherer to have developed sling use.
Weapon development is pretty clear.
Blunt object to hit things with.
sharp object to stab things with
long sharp object to throw at things.
better ways to throw the long sharp object.
firearms

There is just no incentive for hunter gatherers to develop slings. And as far as I can find, bugger all evidence that they even considered it.

Whereas once you get people guarding flocks all day, cord making would have been a natural pastime. Some way of herding the animals and deterring predators would have been at the front of their desires.
Slings and shepherds go together perfectly. They have the materials, incentive and most importantly - the time to spend getting proficient with a sling. Time no hunter gatherer would have spent when he had  a perfectly functional spear thrower.

One of the classic examples of this are the australian aborigenes. Always hunter gatherers - never took up herding. never developed the sling.
One of the few landmasses on the planet where the sling was not developed. And the only one where no aspect of herding was done before western society landed there.

Counter to that I suppose would be the polynesians. Who did develop slings without a herding culture, but probably as a side effect of fishing techniques. Plus they were so war oriented that they would have spent the time developing obscure weapon usage.  And could well have taken the sling idea from raids on herding societies.  

The more you consider the anthropological, physical and practical aspects of the sling. The more likely it becomes that slings are just not as old a weapon as we've generally believed.
And were most probably never used to hunt big game.

I disagree with C_A. The Native North Americans didn't herd anything but the sling is found from Alaska to Tenochtitlan.

From our article http://slinging.org/index.php?page=the-chumash-sling---paul-campbell

"The Pomo made a sling for hunting or war... Sling throwers stood a little to the rear of the front battle line. Boys brought them stones in baskets. For geese, hunters hurled a round stone 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. But for ducks or mud hens balls of clay 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 inches in diameter were used. "

The Pomo were not herders or farmers: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomo_people#_

"Traditionally they relied upon fishing, hunting and gathering for their food."

Curious Aardvark wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2012 at 2:56pm:


C_A, I wrote the section on sling use, both past and present. While no specific dates were given, I did say that the sling is mankind's second oldest projectile weapon system, preceded only by the atlatl.

Forgive me, as I've written a couple of articles for archaeological journals (well, three, two published and one being printed right now) I learned to avoid accurate affirmations like "the sling is the second (or the third) most ancient ranged weapon", if there're not enough evidences.
This to avoid the risk of spreading inaccurate information, and to leave room for future corrections.
Just my two cents 
Greetings,
Mauro.

The difficult thing about history is withour real observation, nothing can be scientifically proven.

I'm going to stick with the Bible and put this out there, The Bow is mentioned in Genesis 20 with Ishmale becoming an archer. That's a little more than 800 years before David.

  I'm just going to go with they came out pretty close to each other, and they have both been along for a long time, there's really no way to prove any weapon preceded the other. This is all just speculation. Both Archery and Slings can be found pretty universally, I'd estimate that various people groups needed to eat and made do with what they had.