The oldest known boomerang was carved from mammoth tusk in Poland
Boomerangs are icons of Australia, yet the oldest certain find comes from a cave in Poland's Carpathian Mountains. Carved from mammoth tusk, it is thought to be around 40,000 years old. Whether it ever flew back to its thrower is another matter, because most ancient boomerangs were never meant to return.
Strictly speaking, a boomerang returns: it is shaped with airfoil sections and spins on an axis perpendicular to its flight, curving back toward the person who threw it. The word comes from an Aboriginal language of the Sydney area, and official competitions still reserve it for returning designs. Non-returning throwing sticks, sometimes called kylies, were far more common. A two-kilogram throwstick could bring down large game at around 100 metres.
Australia's record is ancient. Rock art in the Kimberley region, possibly up to 50,000 years old, shows boomerangs thrown at animals such as kangaroos, and the oldest surviving Aboriginal example, found in 1973 in a peat bog at Wyrie Swamp in South Australia, dates to about 10,000 BC. Use was patchy, though: one researcher estimated that about 60 per cent of Aboriginal peoples had both returning boomerangs and hunting sticks, 10 per cent only the sticks, and 30 per cent neither. Rock art in West Papua suggests boomerangs were known there during the last ice age.
Similar tools turn up worldwide. Ancient Egyptians, Native Americans in California and Arizona, and people in South India used non-returning versions to hunt birds and rabbits; Tutankhamun owned a collection, and examples from the 1st century BC have been found in the Netherlands. Beyond hunting, boomerangs served as clubs, musical instruments, fire-starters and toys, ranging from under 10 centimetres to more than 180.
Nobody knows exactly how the returning kind arose. One idea is that hunters tweaking throwing sticks to fly straight noticed that some curved instead. Returning boomerangs may have startled birds into nets; in southeastern Australia, one was reportedly made to hover over ducks like a hawk, driving them toward waiting hunters.
Source: Boomerang
