The 6,500-year-old hunting kit contained pieces of a spear thrower and a boomerang, as well as wood- and stone-tipped darts. It was found in a cave in West Texas near the remains of a small fire, and a pile of well-preserved human waste — evidence of those who had once sheltered inside.
The weapons, discovered over the past several years near Marfa, a small desert town about 40 miles northwest of the border with Mexico, could be among the oldest near-complete sets of wood and stone hunting tools found in North America, according to archaeologists at Sul Ross State University and the University of Kansas.
The researchers have yet to publish their full findings, but they said that dating suggested that one of the weapons was about 7,000 years old. The artifacts, researchers say, could help shed light on the complex ways in which ancient humans hunted for their prey and fixed their broken belongings.
“We were just stunned, because I’ve never even seen that stuff,” said Bryon Schroeder, the director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University and one of the lead researchers on the project.
The kit, which includes various pieces of weapons, as well as a folded antelope hide that was most likely used to sew a bag or clothing, was discovered over the past several years at the San Esteban Rockshelter — a partly collapsed cave between Marfa and Alpine, Texas. In 2019, researchers from the University of Kansas began excavations at the site in collaboration with Dr. Schroeder and his team.
Looters have ransacked the site for years, Dr. Schroeder said, making it challenging to find an untouched area to dig in. The researchers crawled between rocks, eventually locating a spot where they believed they might still find some salvageable artifacts. “We quickly found out that it’s really, really, really deep in that part of the site,” Dr. Schroeder said. “The reason we were out there is to find really old stuff,” he added. “So we kept going deeper.”
That’s when they found the first pieces of the hunting kit, he said. As they continued to dig, more parts of the kit were uncovered.
The number of tools and their location suggests that the cave was most likely used by hunters to take stock of and repair damaged weapons, Dr. Schroeder said. “They’re just kind of doing an inventory, he added, “and they’re throwing out the broken stuff.”
The oldest item is an atlatl, otherwise known as a spear thrower, which the researchers described in a 2023 paper in The Journal of Big Bend Studies.
One of the researchers, Devin Pettigrew, an assistant professor of anthropology and an expert in ancient weaponry at Sul Ross State University, said that part of what made the find remarkable was the well-preserved wood, sinew and feathers. Usually, he said, “all we find left around are stone tools.”
In addition to the atlatl, the archaeologists also found a fragment of a boomerang, long wooden tips that might have been used to deliver poison to prey, and wooden darts and stone tips.
“Imagine traveling all this distance on foot daily and finding a place on the landscape that you know about, where you know you can go find shelter,” Dr. Pettigrew said. The hunters, he added, would have possibly spent a night or two there, building a fire and working on their equipment.
“It’s kind of rare to get this kind of perspective of ancient people,” he said.
Christopher Morgan, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Nevada, Reno, described the findings as important, especially given that so few cave sites in North America remain with intact deposits. He was not involved in the study but has worked with Dr. Schroeder.
“The proof is in the pudding in terms of the close description of whether or not those artifacts really go together,” he said, noting that objects from separate time periods could sometimes be found very close together. “But so far,” he added, “I think it looks pretty good.”
Though the age of the items is impressive, the more interesting thing, Dr. Morgan said, is the possibility that they belong to one weaponry kit that was stored in the cave thousands of years ago, and what that reveals about the behavior of ancient people.
“That’s what this represents — the kind of thing a hunter, living 6,800 years ago near the modern Texas-Mexico border — this is what they carried around with them every day,” he said. “It shows that they were very well equipped with sophisticated technology. It shows that they were planning,” Dr. Morgan added. “Hunter gatherers — they’re just people like you and me, and they’re super smart.”
James David Kilby, a professor of anthropology at Texas State University and an expert in hunter-gatherer archaeology who was not involved in the research, said it was rare to find tools that were so well preserved with the wood and other organic materials intact. “They sort of remind us that stone tools are just one component of these much more complex tool assemblages,” he said.
Dr. Schroeder said that he and his team still had a lot of analysis to do on the weapons, as well as on the human feces, which can provide information about diet and DNA. They are working with Indigenous groups to gain approval before they proceed with some of that testing, he added. The researchers hope to eventually publish their findings in full.
“It makes the past way less abstract,” Dr. Schroeder added of the findings. “It’s like, ‘Wow, these people were people.’” He noted the intelligence of those who lived thousands of years ago and their remarkable adaptation to the environment.
“We kind of argue that all the time as archaeologists,” he added. “Well, here’s the proof.”
