Stone dart tips found at Idaho site are oldest known weapons in Americas, experts say

Thirteen “razor sharp” stone dart tips uncovered in western Idaho are “roughly” 15,700 years old, making them the oldest weapons ever found in the Americas, according to archaeologists at the Oregon State University.

The “full and fragmentary projectile points” — which look like arrowheads — are about 2,300 years older than any previously excavated, the university reported in a Dec. 23 news release.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘We think that people were here in the Americas 16,000 years ago’; it’s another thing to measure it by finding well-made artifacts they left behind,” anthropology professor Loren Davis said in the release.

“These discoveries add very important details about what the archaeological record of the earliest peoples of the Americas looks like.”

The well-preserved points are an half-inch to 2 inches long and were found on “a terrace of the lower Salmon River of western Idaho,” according to findings published Dec. 23 in Science Advances.

The dig site, about 220 miles north of Boise, was “traditional Nez Perce land” and home to a village known as Nipéhe, historians say. The land is today called the Cooper’s Ferry site and is controlled by the federal Bureau of Land Management, the university says.

Davis says the dart tips represent “technology of that time” are were likely “attached to darts, rather than arrows or spears, and despite the small size, they were deadly weapons.”

“There’s an assumption that early projectile points had to be big to kill large game; however, smaller projectile points mounted on darts will penetrate deeply and cause tremendous internal damage,” he said in the release.

“You can hunt any animal we know about with weapons like these.”

Years of excavations at Cooper’s Ferry site have revealed 65,000 artifacts, along with “a 14,200-year-old fire pit and a food-processing area containing the remains of an extinct horse,” the university reports.

The projectile points were uncovered between 2012 and 2017, and the excavation site has since been recovered with soil, the university said.

This story was originally published December 26, 2022 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Stone dart tips found at Idaho site are oldest known weapons in Americas, experts say."