Why New Guinea Warriors Prized Human Bone Daggers
When facing rivals, the warriors of New Guinea had a choice of deadly bone daggers; they could fight with daggers crafted from human thighbones or weapons shaped from the thighbones of cassowaries, flightless, dinosaur-like birds.
But which type of dagger — the human or the cassowary — is stronger?
According to a new study, the dagger fashioned from human bone is stronger than the giant bird's thighbone, largely because of the way the warriors of New Guinea carved the weapons.
"It looks like both bone types are equally suited for making daggers," study lead researcher Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told Live Science. "The difference is that when men are shaping human daggers, they're retaining a lot of the curvature, which gives it a natural, superior strength." Read more.
