Though academic awareness of hunting by African people using poison-tipped arrows stretches back for centuries, information regarding the ingenious practice has been also present in chemistry, entomology and anthropology texts.

A latest comprehensive research on the hunting tradition of the San peoples of Namibia has shed fresh light in their use of beetle and plant poisons for boosting the lethality of their arrows. Presently, the research has been carried by the peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys.

Lead author Caroline Chaboo, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas said that the more slender threads of information he has woven together from reports extending back to the 1700s, the more confident he has become that there were some few firm facts and many hard-to-believe assertions.

Chaboo added, “The San are traditional hunter-gatherers and thus have special place in history of man. As I learned more about modern San, their history, weak political status and endangered languages and cultures, it became urgent to me to document this aspect of their culture”.

Chabooalong with her co-authors combined historical and anthropological literature and carried out their own fieldwork to better seize how beetle arrow poisons were used by the San.

She said that the fieldwork was a memorable experience. Describing the experience she said that they took all their water and food into the Kalahari, where water was quite expensive for baths. They slept in a pop-up tent atop the Range Rover, and roamed in the middle of the night along with hyenas sniffing around the location of their camp, among many unforgettable activities.

Chaboo said that arrow-hunting are seen in ancient rock-paintings of the San, but it time of adoption of poisons isn’t clear so far. She said that they suspect poisons were adopted quite early.