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Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80K years ago?
Lithic weapon points occasionally found in Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthal sites are large and do not differ in size, shape or type from those used in other activities such as butchering or plant gathering. The presence in a same assemblage of various types of projectile armatures, some of which are microlithic and designed for this purpose, has only been documented in Modern Humans sites. Recent studies indicate that light projectile points, which would become a key element in Upper Palaeolithic lithic industries, were already present in its formative stages. However, they remain marginal in debates regarding the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. We present the initial findings of a traceological search for weapon heads in the oldest layers of the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter in Uzbekistan, dating back around 80 ka. The lithic industry of this settlement is forming part of the Levantine Early Middle Paleolithic continuity but with several innovative traits. This site, located in the western foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains, northeastern Uzbekistan, has yielded throughout 10 meters of Pleistocene deposits covering 40,000 years a lithic industry characterized by the systematic production of blades (regular thick narrow blades from unipolar and bipolar sub-prismatic and narrow-faced cores, thin and wide blades from flat-faced Levallois-like cores) along with shorter pieces from convergent or centripetal Levallois cores, and bladelets from burin-cores and other small cores. Three types of projectile armature are identified over a selection of 20: retouched points, bladelets and more particularly unretouched triangular micropoints which had previously gone unoticed due to their fragmentary state. According to the fundamental principles of hunting weapon design these micropoints are too narrow for having been fitted to anything other than arrow-like shafts. They resemble the armatures described in a pioneer settlement by Sapiens in the Rhône Valley, France, 25,000 years later.
Citation: Plisson H, Kharevich AV, Kharevich VM, Chistiakov PV, Zotkina LV, Baumann M, et al. (2025) Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago? PLoS One 20(8):
e0328390.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328390
Editor: Marco Peresani, Universita degli Studi di Ferrara, ITALY
Received: January 14, 2025; Accepted: June 30, 2025; Published: August 11, 2025
Copyright: © 2025 Plisson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.
Funding: Authors who did not received a specific funding: V.M.K., P.V.C., L.V.Z., E.P., F.A.M. H.P. was supported by the CNRS International Research Laboratory Artemir (https://www.cnrs.fr/fr) and by the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (https://ifeac.hypotheses.org/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. M.B. was supported by the CNRS International Research Laboratory ZooStan (https://www.cnrs.fr/fr). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. A.V.K. was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (https://rscf.ru/en/), grant agreement # 22-18-00649. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. K.A.K. was supported by the Project of the IAET SB RAS № FWZG-2025-0007 "The Application of Digital Technologies in the Analysis of Archaeological Data and the Reconstruction of the Ancient History". The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests