Fa-Hien Lena

Why this is extraordinary

Fa-Hien Lena, also called Pahiyangala, is a cave in the wet-zone forest near Bulathsinhala. The occupation comes in four phases. Phase D is the late Pleistocene, about 48,000 to 34,000 calibrated years before present, probably several short stays. One date falls outside the phases, 29,120 to 27,870. Phase C is about 13,000 to 12,000, phase B about 8,700 to 8,000, and phase A about 6,000 to 4,000. A chronology built from 30 radiocarbon dates replaced an older working age of about 38,000 years for the earliest use. The cliff in the photograph is the place. The mouth is a shelter in that rock, not a separate monument the picture picks out.

In those layers, 130 points made on monkey long bone match the size, the weight, and the wear of projectile tips. Twenty-four are unipoints, 18.4 percent. Eighteen are bipoints, 13.8 percent. Two are geometric, 1.5 percent. Eighty-six, 66.1 percent, are fragments with manufacturing traces and impact breaks, too incomplete to class. Notches at the middle of the unipoints, and on some bipoints, are read as the mark of a binding to a shaft. The shaft is inferred to be thinner than a centimetre, from a median width of 3.5 millimetres at the base. One point carries grooves read as decoration or as a hold for poison. The points were made in the cave: blanks, unfinished pieces, and waste are in every phase. Prime-aged adult monkeys are the prey the teeth suggest, which is a pattern a trap, taking animals as they come, does not usually leave.

The study’s conclusion is the bow and arrow, from at least 48,000 to 34,000 calibrated years before present. Blowgun darts are set aside because the points are too short, too heavy, and hafted, while a dart has to be long and light enough to seal in the tube. A single-pointed spear is set aside because the points are too small. A multipronged spear is the size they would fit, and the study says that weapon needs a long arcing throw which closed forest does not allow. The same paragraph says that wear alone cannot yet tell an arrow from a spear. The size, the hafting, the impact chips, and the forest are asked to do that work together.

A published comment calls the arrow reading suggestive and not definitive. Fish bones are in the same sediments, and a multipronged spear, thrown or thrust at fish, is the alternative that comment offers. Another comment asks for scans of the inside of the points, the method that made a South African bone point older than 60,000 years readable as an arrow, before the surface chips are treated as settled high-speed damage. The study and the comments are the two sides. No azimuth of the shelter, and no star, is published for this cave. The Sigiriya zenith sun is a different hill and a different millennium.