Here a rabbit stick I am working on.
https://youtu.be/d-3V3pgW7dw
Here a rabbit stick I am working on.
https://youtu.be/d-3V3pgW7dw
Too bad the dog wouldn't retrieve the sticks.
Alan
Geezer Squad....Charter Member #1
Evoking the 50 year old rule...
First 50 years...worried about the small stuff...second 50 years....Not so much
Member Wahoo Killer knives club....#27
That is what it is, we just use a different name.
The flat planing surfaces allow the stick to work best with the side arm throw needed to strike small game near the ground. An overhand throw sends the tool bouncing off into the distance as shown on the film.
Most of the Australian boomarangs in use by natives in the outback did not do the famous returning trick, their planing surfaces were to allow the stick to skim the ground and hit small targets.
Even in the 1950s members of my family carried a "rabbit stick" while hunting with firearms. Often game is not killed with the first shot, just wounded, and a stout stick was needed to dispatch the critter. If you fired a second shot the meat would be full of shot pellets. If you cracked its head with your gun stock you might crack the stock, which is exactly why so many of the old SS guns we encounter have cracked stocks. A good stout stick carried in the belt was just right for such work, just as it has been for a couple million years.
Back in the 1980s there was some work done documenting the efficiency of nomadic food gatherers in the Amazon basin. Anthropologists were following the band and weighing all the food they harvested as they traveled following the big game.
They discovered that almost half the meat gathered by the tribe was contributed by the children, ages 5-12, using nothing but stout sticks as their weapons. Possums, turtles, armadillos, rabbits, squirrels and slow moving birds.
Next to the spear a rabbit stick is probably the earliest game killing tool in existence. The old cartoon cave mans' club should probably have some curve to it and one side scraped flat.
If you didn't bring jerky what did I just eat?
Actually A Rabbit stick and a boomerang are two different animals.(also realize that some names of things are used differently in other countries ie. tribal Indian versions of a boomerang is more inline with a rabbit stick where as Australian Boomerangs are accredited for being the boomerangs that we associate with today. Another example of how terms can be associated differently around the world, our "Soccer game" is Britain's "Football"
Some versions of rabbit sticks resemble a boomerang, as they are shaved down to flatten sides for less wind resistance, and they have a curvature, but unlike a boomerang that when thrown will come back to you, the rabbit stick has an incomplete curvature and will not come back to the original thrower. Other rabbit sticks still have a curvature but at the end of the stick there is usually aa huge Knot for added weight
Throwing a rabbit stick one will usually get the hang of it rather quickly, while the Boomerang, well, I have yet to have it come back to me without having to haul A$$ to try to catch it. Spent years trying to learn to throw the boomerang after i was introduced to it by one of my Asian teammates from our Ultima Frisbee team in Calif. 30 years later and I still can't throw a Boomerang to save my life.
If memory serves, the Atlatl, the hatchet, spear, shepherd sling, and even the bola (not to be mistaken with the Bolo knife) were used prior to the boomerang by many many many years.
Last edited by Michael aka Mac; 02-21-2022 at 03:50 PM.
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