Oldest boomerang doesn't come back | Hacker News Reader

Oldest boomerang doesn't come back

bbc.co.uk

6 pointsljf10 comments

"It gives a "remarkable insight" into human behaviour, she said, particularly how Homo sapiens living as long as 42,000 years ago could shape "such a perfect object" with the knowledge it could be used to hunt animals."

It's a heavy object that you throw, shaped better to fit your hand as opposed to a rock. It's not that complicated.

Also, most boomerangs (throwing sticks) aren't made to return to the thrower cause that would be a bad thing.

To expand on that last sentence for anyone who doesn't know, a well-shaped hunting boomerang is meant to fly in a straight line, faster and farther than throwing a similarly-heavy stick that you just picked up off the ground. Which lets you hit targets (such as the animals that you're hunting) from farther away with more accuracy. If it's designed to return to you, it must necessarily fly in a curve, which makes it a lot harder to hit a target than a stick designed to fly in a straight line (and if you do hit a target, it's not going to return to you as it expends its kinetic energy on the target).

"It was probably used in hunting, though it might have had cultural or artistic value, perhaps being used in some kind of ritual."

Ah, the good, old ritual explanation. Surprised that it’s still being used, instead of just saying "we don’t know".

How useful is coming back anyway?

I have wondered this myself. I can see how it would be useful if you missed your target and it returned to you. But the demonstrations I have seen, where the boomerang is thrown and returns, the boomerang is usually thrown at an angle up in the air rather than near the ground or treeline where a person would be hunting. It seems like in a realistic hunting scenario the boomerang would most likely be thrown in a way that would cause it to hit the ground or some vegetation and not return.

A boomerang is a throwing stick that returns to the thrower, so a boomerang that doesn't is an oxymoron and a throwing stick.

Boomerang can be returning or non returning .

Etymology in both the language of Dharwal and in English indicate it has been used from the start to include non returning ones as well.

there has been strong efforts to make it only to returning ones (official competitions do not allow throwing sticks for example ) the inclusive use however is still quite active .

Webster defines it explicitly without the return part (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boomerang) other dictionaries define it differently

If the definition is unambiguous it would be an oxymoron, but isn’t so.

In the era of attention grabbing headlines to survive even for the BBC it is quite natural the editor or author wanted to use a catchy title , but it isn’t oxymoronic

Q: Then why not just call it a "throwing stick" and move on? A: Because throwing sticks that return are cooler than those that don't. Analysis: Click bait.

It is also quite cool that proto-boomerangs were designed for flight characteristics and actively being used as long as 42,000 years ago.

Not all throwing sticks are the same, these early sticks glided some distance, they are not same as spear which is what comes to most people's mind when you describe them as throwing sticks.

If the bar for click bait is so low, then we should only read peer-reviewed, edited academic journals which are not top tier (i.e. not Science/Nature etc) for driest factual titles.

"Researchers worked out from its shape that it would have flown when thrown, but would not have come back to the thrower."

So, a step up from a big stick ...

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