A mammoth tusk boomerang from Poland is 40,000 years old

A boomerang sculpted in a defense of Mammoth is one of the oldest in the world, and it can be even older than archaeologists originally, according to a recent series of radiocarbon dates.

Archaeologists have found the mammoth-test boomerang in the Oblazowa cave in Poland in the 1990s, and they date from around 18,000 years, which made it one of the oldest intact boomerangs in the world. But according to a recent analysis of the researcher at the University of Bologna, Sahra Talamo and her colleagues, the Boomerang may have been manufactured about 40,000 years ago. If they are right, it offers attractive clues about how people lived on the hard tundra of what is now Poland during the last glacial period.

A boomerang carved in the defense of Mammoth

The Boomerang of the Tusk Mammoth is about 72 centimeters long, curved gently and shaped so that a end is slightly more rounded than the other. He always wears scratches and scratches from the life of the mammoth, as well as beautiful parallel grooves which mark where an old craftsman has shaped and smoothed the boomerang. At the rounded end, a series of diagonal brands would have made the weapon easier to grasp. It is smoothed and carried from frequent manipulation: the last traces of the life of a Paleolithic hunter.

Based on experiences with a replica, the Polish mammoth boomerang is flying gently but does not come back, similar to certain types of Aboriginal Australian boomerangs. In fact, it looks very much like a style used by the Aboriginal people of Queensland, Australia, but it is a case of people at different times and places that offer very similar conceptions to meet similar needs.

But critically, according to Talamo and his colleagues, the boomerang is about 40,000 years old.

It is a huge jump from the original date of the radiocarbon, carried out in 1996, which was based on a sample of boomerang equipment itself and estimated an age of 18,000 years. But Talamo and his colleagues say that the date of origin would not go well with the age of other artefacts near the same layer of the floor of the cave. This made them suspect that the Boomerang sample may have been contaminated by modern carbon somewhere along the way, which makes it younger. To test the idea, archaeologists dated samples of 13 animal bones – more one of the human thumb – unlike the same layer of cave floor sediment as boomerang.