War is a difficult place. Overcoming conflicts, now or in the past, is not easy and humans have had to sharpen their ingenuity in order to survive. Sometimes it was to develop artifacts for life and other times, inventiveness was used for death.
In Indonesia, 7,000 years ago, someone chose the second option and created some unique and deadly artifacts: two knives with blades made from tiger shark teeth. The pieces, as explained by researchers from the Australian Griffith University in an article published in the magazine Antiquity, are the oldest found made with this material. Until now, the oldest shark tooth blades discovered were less than 5,000 years old.
Archaeologists found the surprising items during excavations on the island of Sulawesi (or Sulawesi), located east of Borneo. Both knives, attributed to the Toalean culture, were formed from shark teeth that were modified to be attached to blade-like handles.
The Toaleans are an enigmatic foraging society that lived in southwest Sulawesi around 8,000 years ago and are known for small arrowheads made of finely worked stone called Maros points that were discovered in caves.
The newly found shark teeth are both similar in size and come from tiger sharks (Galeocerda cuvier) that were approximately two meters long. Both are perforated and specialists consider that they were most likely used in rituals or wars.
A complete tooth, found in Leang Panninge Cave, has two holes drilled into the root. The other, found in a cave called Leang Bulu' Sipong 1, has a hole, although it is broken and probably originally also had two perforations.
Microscopic examination discovered that the incisors were once firmly attached to a handle using plant-based threads and a glue-like substance. The adhesive used was a combination of mineral, plant and animal materials. The same attachment method is seen in modern shark tooth blades used by cultures throughout the Pacific.
Examination of the edges of each tooth discovered that they had been used to pierce, cut and scrape flesh and bone. However, there was much more damage than a shark would naturally suffer during feeding. Although these residues suggest that the Toaleans used these knives as everyday cutting instruments, ethnographic (observations of recent communities), archaeological and experimental data suggest the opposite.
Experiments by scientists at Griffith University found that these weapons were equally effective in creating long, deep cuts in the skin both when used for striking (for example, during a fight) and when cutting into a fresh pork leg. .
In fact, the only negative aspect that has been found is that tiger shark teeth dull relatively quickly, too quickly for their use as an everyday knife to be practical.
“Both this issue, and the fact that shark teeth can inflict deep lacerations, probably explains why these types of blades were restricted to their use as weapons for conflict and ritual activities, both in the present and in the recent past.” , they point out.
Many societies around the world have integrated shark teeth into their material culture. Coastal peoples who have fished and fish for large squalids are more likely to incorporate “a greater number of teeth into a wider range of tools.”
Observing communities today has shown that, when not used to adorn the human body, shark teeth were almost universally used to create swords for war or rituals, including ritualized combat.
For example, a combat knife found throughout northern Queensland, Australia's second largest state, has a single long blade made of approximately 15 shark teeth arranged one after the other on a hardwood shaft shaped like a knife. oval, and is used to hit the flank or buttocks of an opponent.
Weapons of all kinds - including spears, knives and clubs - reinforced with shark teeth are known from mainland New Guinea and Micronesia, while mourning dress in Tahiti also incorporates spears. Further east, the people of Kiribati are famous for their daggers, swords and pikes with squalid incisors that were used in highly ritualized and often fatal conflicts.
Teeth found in Mayan and Mexican archaeological contexts are even believed to have been used for ritualized bloodshed and shark teeth are known to have served as tattoo blades in Tonga, Aotearoa, New Zealand and Kiribati. In Hawaii, so-called "shark tooth cutters" were used as hidden weapons and to "cut dead chiefs and clean their bones before customary burials," the researchers say in their study.
