Langley et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaba3831 12 June 2020 SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE 1 of 8 ANTHROPOLOGY Bows and arrows and complex symbolic displays 48,000 years ago in the South Asian tropics Michelle C. Langley 1 *, Noel Amano 2 , Oshan Wedage 2,3 , Siran Deraniyagala 4 , M.M Pathmalal 5 , Nimal Perera 4 , Nicole Boivin 2,6,7,8 , Michael D. Petraglia 2,6,8 , Patrick Roberts 2,6 Archaeologists contend that it was our aptitude for symbolic, technological, and social behaviors that was central to Homo sapiens rapidly expanding across the majority of Earth’s continents during the Late Pleistocene. This ex- pansion included movement into extreme environments and appears to have resulted in the displacement of numerous archaic human populations across the Old World. Tropical rainforests are thought to have been particu- larly challenging and, until recently, impenetrable by early H. sapiens. Here, we describe evidence for bow-and-arrow hunting toolkits alongside a complex symbolic repertoire from 48,000 years before present at the Sri Lankan site of Fa-Hien Lena—the earliest bow-and-arrow technology outside of Africa. As one of the oldest H. sapiens rainforest sites outside of Africa, this exceptional assemblage provides the first detailed insights into how our species met the extreme adaptive challenges that were encountered in Asia during global expansion. INTRODUCTION South Asia, and Sri Lanka more specifically, has emerged as a partic- ularly important region for understanding how our species managed to successfully colonize a wide variety of environments among a backdrop of changing climates and interhominin contacts (1–4). As early as the 1980s, it was proposed that microlith technologies along- side bone technologies and ochre use appeared in Sri Lanka earlier than they did in Europe (5). Despite these suggestions, and the recog- nized importance of the region for human evolutionary studies, de- tailed studies of the material culture recovered from its most ancient sites have thus far been lacking, particularly with regard to postulated personal ornaments (6–7), potential projectile technologies (4, 8), and other forms of material culture that provide insight into how human societies negotiated the South Asian tropics during the Late Pleistocene. It is only recently that multidisciplinary excavation of long, well-dated cave and rockshelter sequences is enabling these questions to be investigated and the findings to be compared to re- cords from more customarily discussed regions (9). As the site of the earliest fossil appearance of Homo sapiens in South Asia (5), Fa-Hien Lena cave in southwestern Sri Lanka is a crucial locale for understanding the adaptive capacities and cultural flexibility that humans required as they first moved throughout the diverse environments of Asia. Ongoing analysis of the site has al- ready found that it holds the earliest microlith assemblage in the region (9) and attests to targeted hunting of prime-aged semi-arboreal and arboreal monkeys and squirrels (4). Here, we present evidence for the earliest use of bow-and-arrow technology outside of Africa—a unique tradition using innovative osseous-based arrow heads. Also described is a diverse toolkit of bone and tooth tools indicating the manufacture of plant- and/or hide-based items that may represent some of the earliest clothing or nets in a tropical setting, alongside a complex array of symbolic artifacts—this record stretching from c. 48 ka (thousand years) through to c. 4 ka BP (before present) (Fig. 1). RESULTS On the basis of stratigraphy and dating, four distinct phases of oc- cupation have been identified at Fa-Hien Lena (Fig. 1). Phase D con- tains evidence for Late Pleistocene occupation of the cave from c. 48 ka to 34 ka cal. BP and probably involved several episodes of occupation, each of which may have been relatively short-lived. Phase C spans the Terminal Pleistocene occupation from c. 13 ka to 12 ka cal. BP, while phases B and A span the Early (8.7 ka to 8 ka cal. BP) and Middle (6 ka to 4 ka cal. BP) Holocene, respectively. One radiocarbon date falls outside these phases (29,120 to 27,870 cal. BP) and may rep- resent a short-lived episode of human presence within the cave (4). Osseous hunting technologies Analysis of the recovered faunal remains determined that the osseous tools to be described below were made on site. Blanks, unfinished tools, and waste pieces were identified in each of the four phases, with broken fragments of finished artifacts, along with several points displaying cut marks consistent with those produced during retooling activities, suggesting that maintenance of weapons was also regularly practiced. Of the artifacts made on terrestrial bone, 130 are consist- ent in size, morphology, weight, and use wear with having served as projectile points. Flaked and ground into shape, three broad categories of point were identified: unipoints (n = 24; 18.4%), bipoints (n = 18; 13.8%), and geometrics (n = 2; 1.5%), with the majority of the col- lection made up by fragments exhibiting both manufacturing traces and impact fractures, though not complete enough to determine the original form (n = 86; 66.1%). Unipoints exhibit notches on their left and/or right sides around their midline indicating fixed hafting using ligatures (Fig. 2, D and E). Similar notching attributable to hafting measures was also observed on a number of the bipoints (Fig. 2, C and F) while others, such as the geometrics, show no signs of having been fixed to a shaft (Fig. 2, A and B). Decoration or 1 Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 2 Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany. 3 Department of History and Archaeology, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Gangodawila, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka. 4 Department of Archaeology, Government of Sri Lanka, Colombo, Sri Lanka. 5 Department of Zoology, Centre for Water Quality and Algae Research, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Gangodawila, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka. 6 School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 7 Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. 8 Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA. *Corresponding author. 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