More on Bolas: Eskimo and African bolas

Continuing with my series on Bolas, I found an article written by H. S. Harrison, A bolas-and-hoop game in East Africa, (Man, Vol. XLVII, 170, Dec, 1947 p.153), in which the author wonders if a game played by children in East Africa, called namuziga a is a relict of the original bola used by the paleolithic humans. Recalling Leakey's discovery of stone balls in Kenya, Harrison mentions the game and asks if it is a "degenerate survivor" of the orignal throwing balls.

He includes an image of these bolas from the Horniman Museum and interestingly mentions the use of bolas by Eskimos to hunt birds. Below is the image.

The game is described as follows: "Two sides were chosen, and the object was to win over members of the opposing side, one by one, by dint of skill in throwing and aiming the bolas. This consisted simply of about a yard of string to each end of which was attached a small piece of wood or a dry maize cob-two weights only. The hoop was made of flexible creepers or cane twisted and bound together; this was flung by a boy of one side so as to roll along the ground, and as it rolled each boy of the opposing side, in turn, threw his bolas in an attempt to entangle the hoop and stop its progress. When this was achieved the thrower of the hoop passed from his own side to that of the successful thrower of the bolas, and so the game proceeded, each side taking its turn in rolling the hoop."

So, in fact they are not made of stones, or round projectiles, they are "short cylindrical pieces of light wood, about 3¼ inches long by ¾inch diameter."

Inuit bolas

Regarding the Eskimos, he wrote that "the Eskimo, with their peaceful habits, have only a small bolas, used against flocks of birds."

The Inuit bolas are known as ka-lum-uk-toun, the one pictured in the image had bone and walrus ivory bolas, and dates to the Thule period 300 to 800 years ago.

Harrison concludes that as there are three varieties of bolas, one with two stones, another with three, and finally, the one-stone option (bola perdida), that , "These three types suggest a not too improbable way in which the bolas might have been evolved, possibly in more than one region of the world, if we prefer to think so."

Finally, he notes that "The bolas, like the boomerang, is ill adapted for use in densely wooded areas. Under the more favourable conditions provided by open country in parts of South America, it has been a favoured weapon of hunting peoples." Interestingly, bolas were used initially in the southern tip of South America, abandoned for several millennia, and readopted when the natives adopted the use of the horse for their hunting expeditions. A bola is easier to aim and fling at an escaping rhea (South American ostrich, or ñandú) or a guanaco (a wild relative of the llama), than using a bow and arrow (only the Mongols seem to have mastered the art of aiming straight and riding a horse).

In Patagonia

Compared to these Inuit and African "bolas", the South American ones were much more elaborate.

Alfredo Prieto, 2020 writes about southern Patagonian bolas and provides a timeline: they are first reported in sequences dated to 8500 years BP, and reached their peak in development by 4500 BP with different standard varieties (lemon-shaped, bi-conical, and bi-lobulated, with the typical spherical ones, with an equatorial groove being the most frequent ones).

The "biconical" bolas has finally settled a question I had about some "double cups" found in Patagonia, which I mentioned, and included some pictures of them, in a post back in 2013, where I reported an explanation for their use as symbolic artifacts, which I questioned. It is never to late to learn something new.

They were abandoned around 1500 years BP and bows and arrows were adopted at that time. This hiatus lasted for around 3200 years, until the 1700s, when they started riding horses.

They were made following a series of steps, Prieto provides a description and the following image showing how they were produced.

A granite stone was shaped by percussion and abrasion till it was almost perfectly rounded (upper left images: natural stone, preform) and then polished using a semi-spherical hole in a rock, a groove was then shaped along its midpoint (central top: finishing, grooving). Finally they tied a cord made from twined sinew to the groove. Some balls were painted red, with ochre to make it easier to find them on the ground. Others were polished so that they reflected light and could be seen and retrieved.

Later they were encased in a horse-hide seath as shown in the image a cord was tied around the groove and a seath was sewn around the stone (lower part of the image).

Regarding the Bola perdida it was used to kill opponents, and it was documented as being used to hunt sea lions on the Atlantic coast. The two ball bolas had a similar use, one ball was firmly held in the hand and the other used to pound the skull of the animal or human enemy.

If stones were not available, as in the vast Pampas prairies, the natives could use terracota, compacted clay placed in a seath, or bone.

Prieto notes that bolas were effective: the prey was entangled, immobilized and easy to kill and take back to camp. Using bow and arrow was more complicated: a wounded prey did not die instantly, it fled, had to be tracked, and then carried on foot for long distances back to camp. The Selk'nam (a Tehuelche group in Tierra del Fuego) used bow and arrow into the historic period, they never adopted the horse. Until the early 1900s they continued hunting with bow and arrow. But their environment was different from the dry steppe. They lived in grassy areas and open forests by the Andean foothills.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Bolas - stone balls around the World: Oldowan / Acheulean tools?

In my previous post I mentioned the stone balls, or "bolas" found in Miramar, Argentina, originally claimed to be 2 or even 3 million years old in the early 1900s, they are now believed to be either a hoax, or later, Paleoindian tools. However, genuinre and uncontroversial stone balls h ave been unearthed in the Old World, dating back to Oldowan and Acheulean times, meaning that they are around 1.5 million years old, and were made by Homo erectus or even older ancestral hominins.

Red Crag Stone from Bramford, England

Pictured below, (Red Crag stone. Source) this stone is not a sphere, instead it has an elongated shape, and unlike the other Old World finds, it has been quite controversial.

J. Reid Moir wrote an article about the stone three years after it was found by one of his assistants, by the name of John Baxter. It came from Pliocene sediments at Red Crag, Bramford, a site near Ipswich, in England, UK. The 1929 article titled "A Remarkable Object from Beneath the Red Crag". It was roughly egg shaped. Henri Breuil, who was a witness of the discovery wrote: "While I was staying in Ipswich with my friend J. Reid Moir, we were examining together a drawer of objects from the base of the Red Crag at Bramford, when J. Reid Moir showed me a singular egg-shaped object, which had been picked up on account of its unusual shape. Even at first sight it appeared to me to present artificial striations and facets, and I therefore examined it more closely with a mineralogist's lens. This examination showed me that." Rather than a South American bola, this ovoid was thought to be a sling stone like the ones used in "New Caledonia". TWhe Pleistocene to Eocene sediments at Bramfored are over 2 million years old.

However, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, 2011 warns that even thouth the age is correct, the setting may be wront: "the Red Crag deposits date from the Gelasian chrono-stratigraphic phase, 2,588,000 to 1,806,000 years ago during the earliest phase of the Lower Pleistocene, when this part of Britain was under a shallow sea, and it seems most likely that the “sling-stone” is a simple case of misidentification, its natural grooves being mistaken for human manufacture by an expert who was overtaken by his colleague’s enthusiasm for finding objects in the deposit in question."

Below is a Melanesian Sling stone , the resemblance is striking, yet this one is evidently manmade, and polished.

Sling stone from New Caledonia. Source

Olduvai stone balls, Tanzania

The Museum of Stone Tools shows the following image captioned as a quartzite spheroid from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, age: Early Pleistocene Oldowan-Acheulean 0.4 to 1.9 million years ago.

Another example can be seen here, online, at the British Museum, which in its description cautions, that although Louis Leakey suggested that these rounded stones were used as bolas, like the throwing stones from the Pampas, "experiments have shown that such pieces can be produced by repeatedly using the same quartz pebble as a knapping hammer"

The Oldowan tools, are crude, like struck pebbles, and believed to be the work of Homo habilis, manufacturing spheroidal stone balls seems to be beyond their cognitive abilities. Could primitive hominins like them fashion sinew cords or treat leather adequatly to be able to fasten them to stone balls like the bolas or boleadoras of the Pampas?

An excellent summary of the Olduvai spheroids can be found in Ignacio de la Torre & Rafael Mora, 2010, which I summarize below:

Clark reported them in 1955, and their deliberate manufacture by flaking and battering to shape the speroids. He suggested they were used as missiles, and also as hammerstones for stone tool manufacture and to crack nuts open.

Willoughby proposed in 1987 that they were the result of flaking that began with the typical choppers, and that ended up as speroids, or, altermtively that they were used as hammers, an unintentional outcome of their use was the shaping of rounded spheroids.

Texier and Roche (1995) consider them as deliberate objects that arose from a method of knapping flakes. A core is battered, through controlled reduction to produce flakes and this results in a polyhedron, or a spheroid.

Java stone balls made by H. erectus

Leaving Africa, and the Oldowan, stone balls were found in sites associated to Homo erectus, who has been in Eurasia for around two million years. Weidenreich, 1943 describes in Indonesia at the Homo erectus site in Solo: "The most interesting specimen illustrated by Oppenoorth is a stone ball from Ngandong. Similar stone balls have been found at several places in our excavations in the Solo Valley. They are made of andesite, are perfectly round, and are never polished. According to Oppenoorth, their diameters range from 67 to 92 mm... [2.6 - 3.6 in], and some may be even a little larger. They closely resemble primitive stone cannon balls as used in Java in medieval times for the old bronze cannons. They occur so regularly in the layers that they might actually represent "implements" used by Solo men." He attributes them a Mousterian, and therefore Neanderthal similarity, citing similar stones found in La Quina, France, Techik Tach, Russia. Adding that "Mousterio-Levalloisian of Florisbad, South Africa, Dreyer and Lyle mention "dozens of round balls" about 3 inches in diameter made mostly of dolorite, and also a few of blue shales." Weidenreich mentions that the oldest balls were Acheulean, from Kenya, reported by Leakey, who found them "in many cases in groups of three strongly indicating the use of the bolas, still used as a hunting weapon in South." Weidenreich suggests that although their purpose is unknown they were either sling stones or bolas.

According to Bartstra (1983), cited in van Heteren & de Vos, 2012 describes tools and remains found at the Ngebung site in Java, belonging to H. erectus there are three levels, the deepest (lowest) has tools that are absent in the upper ones of Upper Pleistocene age: "elongated choppers, spherical balls (so called sling stones or bolas) and crude axes, all made of andesite. The larger stone tools, like the bolas are considered to be Upper Pleistocene/Lower Holocene of age." No explanation given for assigning a more recent age to the bolas.

Acheulean bolas in Israel

My own research into these primitive bolas has revealed other sources, for instance, outside of Africa, made by Homo erectus in Ubeidiya, Israel, with an age of 1.4 million yearws, as reported by Muller et al., 2023 with a clear spherical shape. The paper suggests that they were deliberately fashioned that way, to resemble speheres and its title echoes that suggestion: The limestone spheroids of ‘Ubeidiya: intentionalimposition of symmetric geometry by early hominins? Some of the stone balls studied in this paper are pictured below:

This article points out that their shape has bewildered archaeologists, as they can't understand what was their use. Furthermore, they have been used for millions of years, starting with the crude Oldowan stones industry, and into the Acheulean, and Mousterian, their use in Southern South America persisted until the late 1800s. Their widespread geographic dispersion, from Africa, to Asia, Europe, and America is notable.

There are two schools of though about these balls: (1) that they were the byproduct of a flake producing technique that left spheroids as waste, a totally unintentional production of stone balls. (2) That the hominins that made them selected a nodule and then deliberately fashioned it into a polyhedron, and gradually into a spheroid or bola. The balls found in Israel, according to the authors , "are a complex formal technology that represent a manifestation of the complex cognitive and skilful capacities of Early Acheulean hominins. If similar intentional shaping can be demonstrated on Oldowan spheroids, this would likely represent the earliest evidence of hominins imposing a desired symmetrical geometry on their tools." In other words, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were much smarter than we imagined.

Ancient or Modern?

S. J. de Laet mentions stone balls in the History of Humanity Volume I (see p. 454) in line with what I have mentioned further, up, but he questions their antiquity in Indonesia, suggesting a modern Homo sapiens origin:

"round stone balls (resembling small stone cannon-balls) that are allegedly found in terrace sediments along the Solo. They are made of andesite, are not polished and measure on average 10 cm in diameter. They are associated with Homo soloensis(on account of their assumed stratigraphical position), and they are regarded as a primitive hunting weapon, which is why these stone balls are oftenreferred to as bolas or sling-stones. Von Koenigswald even saw in them evidence for theNeanderthal character of the Solo hominids: similar stone balls do occur at such famousNeanderthal sites as La Quina (France) and Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan) (von Koenigswald,1951). In Sangiran too these stone balls are found (and they are displayed in the local museum); but around the hill of Ngebung it can be demonstrated that they certainly do not lie buried in high-terrace sediments. In Ngebung the stone balls can be associated with young, post-Pleistocene alluvial deposits (Bartstra, 1985). The question therefore ariseswhether the stone balls found along the Solo do not in fact originate also from recent sediments, and reflect the activities of Holocene hunters rather than those of ancient Homo soloensis"

Spheres with symbolic purposes

There are some intriguing rounded stone ballls that were discovered in a site known as El Guettar, in Tunisia, first explored by Gruet in 1954) (S. J. de Laet, see p. 352). The stones were found, accomodated in the shape of a cairn!

"El Guettar did yield the best evidence for symbolic behaviour in the constructed heap of stone balls (Gruet,1954, pp. 67–77). The site had some 7 m [23 ft.]of Middle Palaeolithic deposits around a spring, and the stone heap was found near the base of the sequence, built on a flat surface by the edge of the spring pool. The heap was conical, with a basal diameter of about 130 cm [4.2 ft] and a height of about 70 cm [2.3 ft.], and was built of about sixty balls, almost all of them oflimestone, which were graded from large (18 cm in diameter [3.1 in]), rather roughly shaped one sat the base to small (4.5 cm in diameter [1.8 in]), perfectly shaped ones at the top. The interior of the cone was filled with a mass of bones and flaked stone artefacts (approximately 2,000 ofthe latter, including a typical tanged point). The bones and artefacts seemed to have been simply gathered up from the surrounding surface (they do not differ overall from those found elsewhere in the excavation), but some care was taken to reserve the finest artefacts for the upper part of the fill. At the base of the interior of the heap were two thin plaques of a non-local limestone.The detectable method and consistency in the construction of the heap suggest that it was built on one occasion, rather than over a period of time. That the heap stood undisturbed thereafter until it became buried indicates that it was not just a convenient way of storing stone balls. The excavator believed that it represented an offering to the genius loci of the spring. Practical explanations have not been forthcoming and we too are brought to conclude that its purpose must have been symbolic."

I must add that Gruet believed the site was of people with a Mousterian culture, i.e. Neanderthals, however other scholars, like Clark, consider it to be later, belonging to the more recent Aterian culture, of modern Homo sapiens and about 40 ky old.

Below is a picture of the stone cairn at El Guettar

Cairn found at Guettar. Source

Hammers?

A recent article by Assaf, Preysler, and Bruner, 2023 analyzes the shape, size and flaking used to fashion them and concludes that "Based on the current data available, we link the development of SSBs [shaped stone balls] with an increased consumption and extraction of fat of large-medium sized herbivores in the Lower Paleolithic period. Indeed, SSBs may also have been used as percussion tools for processing vegetal material, perhaps similarly to handaxes, which were primarily used for butchering, but were occasionally used for woodworking. However, current functional and experimental data associate these items with marrow extraction activities, as well as some contextual data linking these items with faunal remains. We thus argue that these are designated tools shaped in a complex procedure—a technological solution invented during the LP in order to respond to the growing need for fat consumption."

Closing Comments

The use of stone balls is ancient, dating back to the first stone tools used by our ancestors in Africa. They survived across species (H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans), and vast distances. They ended up in America where they were used for tens of thousands of years in the Pampas and Patagonia.

Were they introduced into the New World by H. erectus? and if so, is their great antiquity (as suggested by Ameghino at Miramar) could be an indication of that origin.

Finally, the Patagonian myth of Tachwull, them proto-human maker of bolas may be a memory of the presence of erectus in America.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

The controversial "bolas" from Miramar: 2 to 3 million years old

Florentino Ameghino, had, during the late 1800s found crude stone tools (eoliths), and remains of baked clay in deep, ancient sedimentary layers along the steep banks of some rivers, and the coastline, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. He attributed them to a locally evolved, Pampean hominin from the Tertiary period, that evolved into modern humans and then peopled the World (see this post about it). This was controversial and attacked by U.S. scholars who supported a later peopling of America ~3,000 years BP and, surely not older than 10,000 years ago. They attributed the tools, and bones found by Ameghino to Holocene Native Americans, and the baked earth to volcanic activity (the earth had been cooked at temperatures of around 1,000 °C (1,850°F).

In a recent post I mentioned that the Pampas in Argentina was an ideal spot to look for Denisovans or Homo erectus in America. One year ago I mentioned relatively old human footsteps on the Atlantic coastline of Buenos Aires, at Claromecó, 30,000 years old.

Miramar Bolas

When Florentino Ameghino died in 1911, his brother Carlos, who had always worked on the field, searching for fossils and ancient tools for Florentino, continued the work of his brother and visited some sites along the coast of Buenos Aires. He was sponsored by the museums of La Plata, and Natural History of Buenos Aires, finding tools in sediments belonging to the Chapadmalense layer, a Pliocene formation roughly 2 or 3 million years old. Named after a coastal area between Miramar and Mar del Plata, on the seabord of Buenos Aires.

Among the tools reported by Carlos Ameghino, were some spherical "bolas" (balls) on the seaside cliffs in Miramar, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina (Google map), which were of a Late Miocene age! Pictured below, they were made from bone (Source).

Below is an image with some of the tools recovered in Miramar by Carlos Ameghino (Bonomo, 2022):

Figure 7. Pre-Ensenadean and Pre-Belgranean materials from Punta Hermengo, Miramar: lithic artifacts on quartzite (a-b), bone bolas point and ball (c-d) and stone bolas (e-f)

Bolas

Bolas (also known as "Boleadoras") were used by historic Natives in the pampas to hunt animals, and kill their enemies. There were different types of bolas, but the principle was the same. They were stones balls sheathed with leather and attached to strong tendon straps that were whirled above the head to gain momentum and then thrown so as to entangle around the hunted animal’s legs. Bolas could have one ball (bola perdida or "lost Ball"), something like a single sling shot that goes off, stone and sling. Or two or more balls tied with individual cords to a knot. These were used to hung rheas (South American ostriches), deer, guanacos (a wild relative of the llama), and other smaller animals. They were deadly. Ancient bolas were carefully crafted in hard stone, and grooved along their midline to attach the sinew there. Later historical natives were not as skilful as their paleoindian ancestors and made them from softer soapstone. Below is an image from Musters journey (1869-70) in Patagonia, showing a Tehuelche native using bolas on horseback.

Patagonian hunting, notice the boleadoras in his hand and slung on his waist.

Controversy and Rejection

The Miramar findings were disputed by Antonio Romero, 1918: "the artifacts, similar to classic Neolithic types, found at Brusquitas and attributed to a human being already existing in the Miocene period, are a fallacious supposition, whose audacity surpasses even the famous discovery of the California skull by Blake and Widney. The being that made fire and cracked pebbles in a crude and rudimentary way at the end of the Late Miocene (Puelche and Chapalmal), according to F. Ameghino, was not a human being but a remotely distant precursor of humankind."

Romero claimed that the tools were recent and the work of historic "Indians" which were dragged or moved into older sediments due to erosion on the cliff. Adding that ancient fossils were removed by the sea, eroded from older layers and redeposited in more recent ones. The cliff wasn't made of ancient Chapadmalal sediments, but more recent ones. That the baked earth (which Ameghino attributed to coarse ceramics made by ancient hominins) were the outcome of natural fires that burned the dry grasslands and cooked the clay in the soil.

Vignatti, 1919, on the other hand, defended Ameghino, and cited the conclusions reached by the auditing committee sent to inspect the site in 1915, composed of experts (Santiago Roth, Walther Schiller, Lutz Witte, M. Kantor, L. M. Torres, and Carlos Ameghino, the brother of Florentino). Their affidavit says that "the visual inspection of the site where the aforementioned artifacts were found has not given cause to suppose that they were buried under one circumstance or another at a time subsequent to the formation of the layer; that they were in their original position and that, therefore, they should be considered as objects of human manufacture, contemporary to the geological floor in which they were found deposited." This means that they were of the same age as the sediments in which they were found, from the Chapadmalense, and didn't slip down into it from more recent layers. Furthermore, the committee (Source) saw a bola-shaped stone unearthed in their presence, from the cliff, in the same layer that other bolas had been found. A flint knife was also retrieved as well as a flat stone like the ones used by the historic natives to make fire. Finally, fossil remains of a ground sloth (Gravigradae) were discovered, associated to a round stone.

However, a renown geologist Frenguelli in 1920 revised the stratigraphy and dating of the cliff, and assigned an Early Pleistocene age to the layers that Ameghino had thought were Miocene (source).

In 1924, Frenguelli and Outes dig in Miramar and ratify that the sediments are not Tertiary, but from the Quaternary. They found a bola with an equatorial groove, roughly 6.5 cm (2.5") diameter made of white quartzite weighing 340 g (0.75 lbs). They attribute it to a "Mousterian" appearance and add that the bola was firmly buried in the soil. Both authors conclude that: "The polished projectiles ("balls"), clearly defined, coexisted with industrial artifacts that morphologically represent all periods of the Early and Middle Pleistocene. They point out, then, that the discovery of "balls" in ancient sediments should not surprise any specialist, since their presence had already been noted in Europe by one of the most distinguished forerunners of archaeology, Boucher de Perthes, who recalled that "European Pleistocene balls" appeared mostly in Mousterian sites."

Hoax?

Some authors even suggested that Lorenzo Parodi, a local amateur archaeologist who helped Carlos Ameghino in collecting and finding fossils, was the author of a hoax. He placed recent objects in ancient sediments and then "discovered" them by "chance" (see Tonni, 2016). Below is a photograph of a bola in Tertiary sediments in Miramar, from that same source:

Too polished and well finished to be so old

Vignatti, 1941 included an image of polished stone bolas from the Chapadmalense sediments. As you can see in the image below, they are neat, polished, and quite different from the coarse knapped flint knives found close to them. He states that these supposedly ancient bolas are hard to tell apart from those used by contemporary Pampas gauchos (local "cowboys") and historic Indians. Yet he did not dispute their antiquity.

The coarse vs. polished finish had been brought up in 1924, questioning the bolas and tools unearthed by Frenguelli and Outes: "many specialists harbor suspicions. This suspicion arises from the coexistence, at such ancient levels, of carved stone objects with polished ones characteristic of more recent cultures. Outes and Frenguelli state that they do not share these scruples, as the Stone Age in Argentina has not yet been systematically studied, primarily from stratigraphic and technological perspectives. The authors believe that, to date, it can only be stated, and even then only relatively, that "the peoples most closely linked to the matter under discussion manufactured a large number of Paleolithic stone tools and weapons, and, exceptionally, a limited group of polished stone tools.""

As I will discuss in my next post, stone balls were common around the Old World, and found in very ancient sites, together with Oldowan tools, the oldest tool-making technology used by our hominin ancestors. Though coarse, the African and Eurasian stone balls are the work of H. erectus, and possibly Neanderthals. They are uncommon in more recent humans, and were only used as boleadoras in South-central Argentina by historic natives, and their ancestors, the paleoindians. Could they have been brought here by Old World hominins, to the cul-de-sac at the end of the Americas, the point that is furthest from Africa, where it was adopted by the later waves of modern humans?

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©