10 Amazing ORGANIC WEAPONS! Wood, Bone & Tooth weapons from around the WORLD

So you're used to seeing things like swords and axes and spears on this channel, but for most of human history people have used weapons not even made of metal. For most of history they've been using weapons made of other things, so that's what we're going to look at here. But even to narrow it down a bit more, we're not even going to look at the weapons which use stone. Let's look at some of the most amazing and notable weapons from around the world made of only organic materials. Hi folks, Matt Easton here, scholar gladiatorial and eastern antique arms. I'm an antique arms dealer but I'm also a former archaeologist and when you study pre-history or indeed when you study any period of history where you're looking at ethnographic weapons, you will note that an awful lot of weapons from around the world throughout human history have not been made of metal and in fact a lot of them haven't even been made of stone. Many of them have been made of other things such as wood, horn, bone and even tooth. So in this video we're going to look at about a dozen amazing weapons that I think are really cool and you should know about. And do you know all of them? And they're all going to feature only organic materials, that is something that was grown in a creature or a tree. And let's see how many of these weapons you knew already and how many of them you thought that I was going to mention and did I? Let's see. But just briefly before we go on I want to thank today's sponsors for this video who are Mover Globes. We're massive fans of Mover Globes, we absolutely love them, we've got a few of them in the house, we've given them as presents and we absolutely love them and so do the kids. And of course geography is hugely relevant to this channel, knowing where different countries are, where different borders are, where different wars happened, different cultures and traditions. 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You can get 10% off right now using the code SCHOLAR on either the six inch or eight and a half inch globes at moverglobes.com. So thanks once again to Mover Globes for sponsoring this video. Check out that link down below and don't miss out on my special discount. So let's get back to it and let's have a look at some of these amazing organic material only weapons from around the world. Now before we dive into these I just want to mention one caveat and that is we are not going to look at bows, spears, for the most part, or shields. Why? Because predominantly they are made of organic materials, okay? So most bows are made entirely of organic materials, wood, horn, sinew, things like this. Most shields are made primarily of organic material, usually wood or hide, wood and leather, this kind of thing, although they might have metal attachments on them. And spears are obviously primarily a long stick or pole with various types of head at the end. But I do want to give a special credit to all of these weapons because, of course, throughout human history these are probably the three most important weapons. Bows, spears, and shields. And they're predominantly made of organic materials and I think it's worth mentioning that. Anyway, putting those aside, now let's look at some amazing, incredible, and ingenious, for the for some parts, organic material weapons of other sorts. Because you've been asking me to talk about this weapon for years and it's been hanging over my shoulder over there on my garage door, we're going to look at this one first and it is the Maori patu. Let's take this outside. So for anyone who doesn't know, the Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand down there just next to Australia, down on the bottom of earth as we conventionally view the world. Now the patu is just one of many incredible and fascinating weapons in New Zealand and it has to be said, of course, that Maori weapons in general are all made of organic materials. They didn't use metal at all, although they did use stone. Now I've mentioned we're not going to look at stone here. Now the patu itself is a shorthand weapon. They certainly have some big weapons as well which we might look at. But the patu is essentially like a short sidearm, the equivalent of a knife or a pistol or something like this. It has this characteristic shape but it's not always made of wood. This is made of wood so it can feature in this channel. It has to be said some of them are made of stone, various types of more unusual stone, and there's some very highly prized ones. Or it can be made of whalebone which of course is organic. So I've included the patu here because it's an incredibly cool weapon that I have one off to show. This is a sort of modern recreation one. And how were they used? Well it seems they were used particularly as a sort of backup weapon but also sometimes having ritual significance which I know you'll hate me for saying as a former archaeologist. But essentially it's a bit like a hatchet. Now although it looks a bit like a paddle, okay, and you could hit someone with the flat of it, you'll notice it essentially has an edge around and that's a feature we'll find quite a lot here. So I think people think of edges on metal weapons but they don't always think of them on wooden weapons. But wood can be pretty sharp and of course it can be pointy. And if wood is what you primarily have access to and you don't have access to metal then you sharpen the wood. So this is a striking surface all the way around, can be used either way. But interestingly these are often used for thrusting. So we have various references and people that have gone on both in the 19th century and more recently talked to Maori groups about how these things are used and they surprisingly are used for thrusting, particularly at the head and neck area. And bear in mind of course that the Maoris, when they first arrived in New Zealand, this was an island inhabited by megafauna, by giant birds and stuff. So there were some incredible kind of prehistoric creatures still living in New Zealand and these people essentially conquered and in some cases wiped out some of those species using nothing but weapons of organic material. So I'll probably do a deeper dive on this weapon in the future but that is an introduction to the Maori patu. So another weapon which has some superficial similarity to the Maori patu is from the Solomon Islands, specifically Maleta Island, and it is called the supi or sapi. Now this is made entirely of hardwood, a type of ironwood in fact, and you can see it has a sort of diamond shaped head. But interestingly in functionality what you end up with at the edges are points, you could say edges as well, so a little bit like the Maori patu, but you have a pointy end as well so it's a thrusting and bashing or piercing weapon. And much like the Maori patu, while most are carved of wood they can also be carved of whale bones, so you're looking at what you have available on the island but also what's available in the sea. Some are more high status and are carved or inlaid with things like shell and things like this and sometimes they have their handle bound which can be done with coconut fibre for example. So being a similar size to the Maori patu, about 30 centimetres long, it has probably a similar form of use and a similar place in a place where obviously they also had things like spears and stuff so it's a sidearm and in some cases a weapon of status. Now of course next on the list has to come pretty much any type of wooden club. Now wooden clubs we know have been used since prehistory by just about every human group because it's just about the most simple weapon that you can make so therefore we can find it all over the world and obviously later on some people used stone to enhance the basic idea of a mace or wooden club but what we're going to focus on here over in Africa is the famous Zulu knob carry and so this was a weapon, it was a weapon of status, it's still carried today in certain places and for certain purposes. There's certain stick fighting styles associated with it so while the primary Zulu weapon was the spear used with the shield the knob carry was quite a useful sort of civilian everyday carry but also an additional backup weapon as well and yes they did also have things like axes so they had metal working and for both the spearheads and for axes and other things as well but importantly they still kept the knob carry. Now while I'm focusing on the Zulu one here in fact if you look all over Africa or if you look all over the world you can find wooden clubs of various different forms and of course these did become walking sticks to some point as well so due to various legal reasons in South Africa there was a restriction on the size of the heads of knob carries so they just reduced the size of them and they became very very popular as walking sticks but they're still useful if you get attacked by a wild animal or if you get into disagreement with someone and we could say that in the modern world the equivalent of this is the police baton or truncheon so in a form we still have these even today and in Zulu culture the knob carry was incredibly important. Now for our next weapon we're going to go over to North America and the bull-headed club. Now in fact if we look around the world there have been various instances where instead of having a club which is or rather a shaft which is central to the head the head is offset to the side and that's what we see with the famous American bull-headed club. Now I should mention that in period sources these are often just referred to as tomahawks. Now in fact these weapons with stone heads and of course the more famous this is a pipe hawk but these these are more associated with the word tomahawk but in period sources these bull-headed clubs often get referred to them referred to as tomahawks. Now these bull-headed clubs seem to have spread really right the way across North America but seem to have initially been more common in the eastern side of America and as groups shifted west they may have gone with them. We don't really know when they started what their origin point is and what the earliest ones are they have been found archaeologically there were many examples gathered throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by Europeans in fact Europeans are even pictured with them sometimes in paintings and we absolutely know that these were a very common type of sidearm of hand weapon that was used all over North America really and probably became less popular as metal came in and people started trading for these sorts of tomahawks but they were probably the most common type of hand weapon other than spears and bows up until let's say about the early part of the 19th century. Now they weren't always all organic most of them were made of the root of a tree so the ball itself would be the the root and there'd be a branch coming out and be carved out like that. Some of them were made of separate parts some of them were very simple some of them were very ornate sometimes we find animals carved around the back holding the ball sometimes we find things like crocodiles or rather alligators and lizards carved along the back here and obviously these have symbolic and religious and cultural significance and they were used in sort of ceremonies as well not just in war as fighting weapons and as I mentioned they don't always they're not always fully organic so sometimes we find in the early traditional ones a stone antler perhaps even horn spike sticking out of the front and this is quite common but it's not on all of them a lot of them are just a simple ball and of course once once iron and copper and bronze and other brass and other metals started being traded into the Americas often that spike would be a traded piece of metal could even just be something like a nail to make it more lethal essentially so but before they had metal they did use things like stone or antler instead but many of them are just a simple ball and many of them are purely organic materials. So staying in North America we're going to look at another famous type of Native American war club which is the Gunstock Club. Now there've been a lot of theories around this club did it come about because it was modeled on the shape of muskets it seems probably not exactly so one theory is that because Native Americans saw muskets being held by the barrel and swung acts like as hand weapons they thought well that's a good striking weapon we will copy this shape. I'm skeptical of that as an exact explanation I think that a pre-mass adoption of firearms by Native American tribes in America I suspect that the muskets were coveted and they were sought after but they were still rare and so there was perhaps some symbolic or status sort of kudos to owning things which were musket shaped possibly but if we look at the basic shape of the Gunstock Club in fact first of all two things first of all the grip of it is very similar in many cases to the ball headed clubs so I actually think in its initial phase it's very closely related to the ball headed clubs if we remove a ball from a ball headed club we often end up with something which looks a little bit like a Gunstock Club so I think there's a relationship there it's very much a Native American weapon and perhaps you know an important point that some people have made they didn't go to any great lengths to make it look like a musket you know the the stock is vaguely shaped like a musket a bit but there's no you know suggestion of a trigger guard or a lock or anything else so I don't think they were trying to make something that looked like a musket I think they just found it was a shape that worked well as a weapon moreover and we're going to look at some other weapons in a minute there are other Gunstock shaped clubs in other cultures completely from different parts of the world so it's clearly just a shape that works well as a weapon made out of wood now important thing to mention this is primarily an organic material weapon that's why it's in this video however some of them did have blades added sometimes multiple blades so yes indeed where metal was available they did sometimes put spikes into these things but basically the basic Gunstock Club is an entirely organic material weapon and the spike doesn't have to be metal the spike can be made of something like bone or antler instead now to demonstrate that point we're going to go long long distance away to the south pacific okay um not that far away well actually a long way away from Australia but a long long way away from the North American tribes using Gunstock Clubs we're going to go to a very similar shape of weapon a form of Gunstock Club found in Fiji that's right now Fiji has an amazing variety of organic material weapons which I could do a whole video about and perhaps I will do at some point but the Fiji weapon is known as the Sally but essentially it's very similarly shaped to the Gunstock Club it's just a shape that works now the Sally from Fiji is made of a type of wood called ironwood very hard very good for weapons and it's perhaps differentiated and you can instantly recognize it from the North American Gunstock Club in that generally speaking they're usually bigger but in addition it has this spur sort of kicking off the back which gives a lot of blocking parrying trapping and of course striking options now in fact this actually gives us its shape which gives us its name because the Sally is a type of flower or plant I think and it has this particular shape and so this weapon is named after after that flora so you often see that these weapons made of organic materials societies which don't have access to metal yet base their weapons on organic things around them that just happen to be really effective for hitting people with and one of the features of Fijian weapons is unlike Native American weapons which are somewhat fairly often painted or have inlays and stuff the Fijian weapons are carved sometimes incredibly intricately often with geometric sometimes with more organic patterns so the Fijian clubs are an incredible platform for demonstrating their art form now we couldn't do any video on organic material weapons without mentioning the archetypal big stick in this particular example is from the Solomon Islands I believe this type is called a ngela I think it's pronounced the Solomon Islands if you don't know are sort of north of Australia near to Papua New Guinea now the Solomon Islands much like many Polynesian areas actually have a wide variety of organic material weapons a huge variety of different types of clubs big ones small ones all different shapes this is one particular example which I happen to own so I thought it would be useful one to show I have shown this before on the channel incidentally and this ngela which I think it's called that is very very interesting because it has pointy ends at both ends and has many features of the patu that we mentioned before so although it's made of hardwood it's got edges okay so this is like a sword this is this is a sword if you only have access to organic materials so it has edges which hugely focus the striking force there and of course it has points at both ends as well so to some extent you can use this like a two-handed sword or you can use it like a staff or a poleaxe so it's an incredibly versatile weapon and let's face it they're not wearing armor in this plate in these places so this is an incredibly effective striking weapon particularly on bony bits or heads but equally it's a very effective stabbing weapon as well now I should mention usually at least originally these are bound so this should have had binding probably from about here all the way down to here to make it more comfortable to grip although I have to say it's pretty comfortable to grip as it is and I think that would have been coconut fiber usually so that would have been a sort of lattice kind of entwined usually in patterns quite decorative binding all the way up the shaft here but as mentioned we do find the big stick particularly with these edges a feature actually in a lot of different places and it makes sense as a design so you will see it over and over and again in different cultures now one such other place where you see big two-handed sticks like this essentially large wooden two-handed swords that in some ways are the organic weapon equivalent of the montante behind me is the Australia is the Australian aboriginals they have a large two-handed sword but there's a particular weapon I want to focus on of theirs here because I think it's quite interesting and not that many people know about it so many of you might know about the more simple aboriginal clubs the nula nula and indeed the boomerang I think most people would think of the boomerang or indeed the woomera for throwing spears but not a lot of people out there know about the liangle now the liangle is funnily enough as it might sound from the name an angle okay so it's essentially a right angle which means that you have a wooden club a little bit like a boomerang that bends at an angle at the front now these are hand weapons these are not throwing weapons you might immediately think of boomerangs these are primarily hand weapons and they were usually used with a shield now having that angle at the top means that you have some of the benefits in fact a lot of the same benefits to an axe blade it means that if a person puts their parrying stick up so you've essentially got a parrying stick with a grip in the middle that the the weapon can come around the edge of the parrying stick and still hit you that's the first thing the second thing is just by the fact that it projects and essentially has a point at the end means that it's going to have a penetrating effect like a pick war pick spontoon tomahawk this type of thing a warhammer even so it means that it's going to have more penetrative power but additionally because you've got that angle there you can also hook so it's got the advantage that much like with axes if a person puts their parrying stick up to block your blow you can actually pull it down and come in for another blow or potentially even thrust past from there so the liangle usually made of hardwood nothing else just really a bent stick but by virtue of its shape and having that pointy end you have a lot of the benefits and advantages of something like a tomahawk or a war pick okay these last couple are particularly distinctive now we're going to go to the trobriand islands which by pure coincidence i had to study when i was studying anthropology while i was doing my archaeology degree now combat on the trobriand islands near papua new guinea is um quite ritualized okay so they primarily use spears as in most other places but they do have this very characteristic style of sword or is it a club so the massim sword club is in some ways a bit similar to the maori patu in that it's made of hardwood it has edges but it has not a pointy end now this is sort of interesting because the edges are thin so it can be used for slashing or at least for focusing the energy but the end means that it doesn't stab like a point now it should be mentioned that these are carried everywhere around by men of status and not used in fighting very very much maybe at some point they were but in recorded times it recorded by westerners um spears were primarily the weapons of combat although as i say combat was very ritualized so maybe this led to this very peculiar and distinctive style of sword but one of the things that's really characteristic about these is the hilts of them the bit that you grip um are actually quite sword like and to me they kind of look quite similar to certain western swords a little bit like a viking hilt anyway there we go it's the massim sword club it has some bludgeoning has some slashing cutting sort of potential uh bigger than a maori patu um perhaps not used that much in warfare very characteristic design so next time you see one of these you can say that's from the trovery and islands so the last weapon in the list is perhaps the first one that came to mind and it's in some ways the most distinctive it's certainly one of the things when i think of organic weapons that first springs to my mind now we need to go to kiribati the region of kiribati and particularly to the gilbert islands where not only do they use wood and other organic materials to make their weapons but they use shark's teeth and in fact they primarily use them a little bit like the obsidian blades are used on for example aztec swords and and spears in fact as well but they essentially use them around the edges and the point of the weapon but the weapon in question can come in many different forms it can be knife sized sword sized spear sized and it can have multiple blades so essentially they were attaching shark's teeth to all sorts of different blades in fact they were so prolific at making different types of weapons that at least 13 categories of weapon were recorded in 1923 when they started looking and kind of categorizing kiribati weapons but the shark's teeth were attached to the wood and that was usually coconut wood incidentally using palm fiber and human hair now there are in fact two main categories of attaching the shark's teeth to the wood or coconut wood and one was involved embedding a bit like the obsidian blades and aztec weapons embedding the teeth in the wood and then essentially binding or tying them further and another method was to actually carefully drill through each teeth bind through that and then use other kind of slats and more binding again involving palm fiber and human hair and human hair is apparently recorded in most of these weapons to the to the to the main body of the weapon the wooden body of the weapon but then that blade itself which would be a wooden blade with teeth attached to it could then itself be attached to a pole to form something equivalent to a glaive or a spear for example so although there was consistency in the kiribati weapons using shark's teeth with with wood they and then bound with fiber the end form of these they had you know like i say knives short swords bigger blades and indeed forms of pole arm as well equivalent to things like glaives so just incredible ingenuity and incidentally there they also had some funky forms of armor involving using pufferfish and all sorts so very very ingenious using what was available to them to come up with actually a surprising variety of arms and armor anyway thanks a lot for watching i have been matt easton and will of course continue to be i hope this has been an interesting tangent to the normal course of the channel because we focus so much on european weaponry and sometimes indian weaponry but particularly you know metallic weapons and we must remember throughout human history for most of human history most weapons have been predominantly of organic material and again a big shout out to all those spears and shields and bows out there that have been the primary weapons for most of human history and they're mostly made of organic material so organic material incredibly important kind of available to everybody regardless of where you are with no mining or smelting required so hopefully this gets you a little bit more interested in this field of arms and armor and are there particular weapons from the set that i've shown here ones that i didn't mention that you'd like me to do a deeper dive on in a future video get commenting down below hope i'll see you on the channel again soon make sure you're subscribed please give me a like if you've enjoyed the video and as i say i hope i'll see you again cheers folks thanks for watching we've got extra videos on patreon please give our facebook a like and subscribe if you haven't already cheers folks