Arrowhead

When an invention is universal and cross cultural...  It's almost never something that doesn't work.

Mythbusters had a segment on how an unadorned sharpened arrow shaft was just as good as a flint arrowhead.  Not just that, but that the labor put into making the point was not worth it.

Willard brought this to my attention.

Allow me someone else to retort!




The take-away I get from digging around in my gaming notes...

Mr Heineman needs to practice his knapping technique; it would speed up his manufacturing time.

Technique is something Mr Savage unknowingly added to his making of the sharpened shafts.  He's the product of our culture and inserted that knowledge of how to get a concentric tip onto his shaft.

That concentricity matters.  What a stone arrow head gives, if nothing else, is a symmetric shape on the front of the missile.  What it also does, which matters for the flight and not terminal performance, is shifts the balance point of the projectile.  Fin stabilization with a nose heavy bias flies better.

Despite the extra time spent making the head, they were universally used by every stone age culture.  Things that don't work just don't get that kind of widespread adoption and the universality of the use precludes cultural bias being the reason for the adoption.

Mythbusters can be very entertaining, but it is entertainment first with a veneer of science slapped over it.