The latest edition of the peer-reviewed Science Advances journal, published last month, features an article revealing insights that will humble those who assumed sophistication arrived quite late in human history and outside Africa.

The article is about a recent discovery by two Swedish archaeologists and their colleague from the Palaeo-Research Institute at the University of Johannesburg. After analysing tiny stone-arrow tips excavated from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter, in KwaZulu-Natal, using microchemical and biomolecular techniques, they found chemical residues of plant-based poison dating back to about 60 000 years. This is by far the oldest direct evidence of poisoned weapons anywhere on Mother Earth, with the previous record standing at 35 000 years.

The poison in question came from Boophone dosticha, the so-called poison bulb, a plant that is still known and used by San and Khoi hunters in Southern Africa. Two alkaloids – buphanidrine and epibuphanisine – were detected on five of the analysed arrowheads. These compounds are not accidental contaminants; they are stable, identifiable, and specific. In other words, this was deliberate chemistry.

What makes this discovery extraordinary is not simply that early humans used poison; it is how they used it.

Poisoned arrows are not brute-force technology. They are the opposite, relying on the idea that a small wound can have a large, delayed effect, that the outcome of an action may unfold hours or days later, and that success does not require immediate feedback. This is cognition operating at full stretch – planning, prediction, and restraint.

The researchers state in the paper: “Because poison functions chemically . . . the hunters must have relied on advanced planning, abstraction and causal reasoning.”

This sentence alone should end any remaining debate about whether people who lived 60 000 years ago were like us in terms of cognitive reasoning.

Those folks were not guessing; they were running mental simulations. Consider what had to come together for this to work. First, they had to have sound knowledge of toxic plants, including what part to use, how to process it, and how much is enough or too much. Second, they had to be skilled in crafting microliths small enough to carry poison efficiently rather than deliver blunt trauma. Finally, they had to understand animal behaviour: a wounded antelope will run, tire, weaken and eventually fall.

Rather than primitive survival, this is indicative of systems thinking.

There is also something worth mentioning about where the discovery took place. Southern Africa has long been central to debates about the origins of human behaviour. However, discoveries such as this one still surprise because they contradict Eurocentric narratives about innovation trickling slowly from particular regions of the world. The researchers demonstrated that innovation can be deeply embedded in an intimate knowledge of the ecology of an area.

When writing about early humans, it can be tempting to marvel condescendingly at their exploits, posing questions such as: Who would have thought they were so clever? The more fitting question should be why we ever thought they were not. There is evidence galore from archaeological excavations that they possessed a high level of sophistication. Such evidence includes complex adhesives, bone tools and bow-and-arrow technology. The poisoned arrows discovered in KwaZulu-Natal simply make this undeniable.

The discovery also blurs the line that many like to draw between technology and knowledge. Those hunters who lived 60 000 years ago did not have laboratories, and neither did they have written formulas or formal chemistry. What they had was procedural intelligence, that is, the ability to learn, refine and reproduce complex practices across generations.

There is an irony about the discovery that is worth savouring. The poison bulb used 60 000 years ago is still known today. The knowledge from that early period in history has not vanished. This raises an uncomfortable possibility, namely that modern societies are not yet at the peak of human ingenuity but merely exhibit its latest configuration.

So, the next time you hear someone loosely talking about primitive weapons or early minds, picture that quartz microlith from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter. Picture also the hunter who made it, tested it and trusted it, and then walked for hours, or even days, confident that an invisible process was already unfolding.

That confidence, more than the poison itself, is the real breakthrough.