alt Hacker NewsThe Sling: Humanity's Forgotten Power
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Thanks for this post. Sometimes you need a relatively simple tool for controlling a problem. I think this is something that I need to employ here on my place.
I have a problem with deer. My property is effectively an interstate highway for them with lots of delicious grazing available in my native grass pasture and in my orchards and gardens. I have fenced the important areas where we grow our food using deer fencing and it is effective. It does not stop the traffic though, it merely redirects it. I want the deer to avoid my property and using the scented repellent products is ineffective.
I bought a slingshot with a bunch of mudball ammunition and started using that every time I found them over the fence on my property. It is effective enough that you can make them leave if you tag one of them. After a while, they recognize the sound of the slingshot release and will trot off a little ways to buy time to determine whether there is an issue. Aiming and hitting targets is not hard and your skills improve over time so that it is pretty easy to score on 80% of targets in no time. The real problem is the effective range of the slingshot. For deer more than 50m from you the ball has lost most of the energy and when it thumps on the deer the usual result is that the deer raises its head from the grazing and looks around to locate the source.
I think a sling will be the next tool that I employ to make them graze someone else's property. The improved range should help me keep them on the other side of the fence.
Around 2018 I got obsessed with slings - I've made a couple from paracord and was practicing almost every day. After about a year I only managed to consistently launch stones in the rough desired direction. Another (COVID) year and got to the level where my spread was about 5 degrees. Systematically hitting a reasonably sized target was still beyond my ability. Plus early symptoms of tennis elbow...
Slinging is hard, requires a lot of dedication and systematic practice. Stil, the feeling when the rock hits a target and "explodes" is worth it.
Speaking of ranged weapons, I used to throw boomerangs. Not the heavier, non-returning kind made for hunting, but the lighter returning boomerangs. It felt like magic when I finally got good enough to throw one and not have to take a step to catch it. I should get back to it. I think they’re fascinating. And I just read in Wikipedia that tests on the International Space Station found they function the same way in zero gravity as they do on Earth.
Recently came across this website after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpxSaOiT2LE. Seems like a cool hobby to try for when I'm finally replaced by AI. I knew about the sling from movies but I didn't know this is actually a thing to do. Very impressed how far you can sling something with it (477m/1564feet). Sharing this in case someone is on the hunt for a new cool hobby.
Perhaps to some degree, kids recapitulate in their childhoods the weapons evolution of their homo sapiens forebears.
Around age 4, I learned how to flake spear points from a local flint deposit. That, string and Elmer's glue from mom & dad's repair goodies got me into the spear biz. Band-Aids were in demand.
A couple years later, I'd made arrows and single curve bows from pine branches and bowstring from braided water rushes. Flint knapping scaled down well to arrowheads and string+glue still worked.
Then I read about atlatls, and found new interest in my spears. Finally, I discovered slings, and there was no going back. I got good enough that in later life, I had no trouble crediting scientific studies that proposed early humans brought down a great range of game species with slings.
Alaska was a great place to be a kid.
A naive estimate of accuracy is that, at a rotation speed of 5/sec (1800 degrees/sec) a 1 ms error in release time causes a 1.8 degrees aim error, or 3 yards at 100 yards. You could hit the broad side of a barn, but not a buffalo.
But humans can’t reliably time things to 1 ms, and good slingers aim better than that, so there’s more to the technique than the naive version.
I learned by making a paracord sling and flinging marshmallows.
I like to believe it’s so fun because I’m tapping into some primordial fascination with spinning objects, like a dog chasing a wheel.
I have a couple slings my cousin brought back from Tibet, and a few years ago when I was in Peru I brought some back from there as well (they're called 'huaraca' in Quechua I think). I find it interesting that many cultures used them historically but it never became a sport like archery, javelin, etc., did.
They're very lightweight and are definitely an underrated backpacking tool for keeping marmots at bay when they're attacking your tents and gear, haha.
I made a couple slings when I was a kid… I put a lot of effort into researching the right form of the thing, carefully braided it… and then couldn’t figure out how to use the thing even one bit. Couldn’t even figure out when to release the cord. I had poor hand eye coordination in the first place, but I could throw the rocks farther and more accurately by hand.
Still think they are very cool though.
There's a youtuber that makes some really cool performance slings out of modern materials (dyneema and what not). Too lazy to search right now, but if this interests you, its worth checking out.
Yeah well, the first time I tried to use a sling to trow a rock, I managed to knock said rock right on my head. Fortunately it wasn't too bad but it also market the last time I tried to use a sling.
And also explains why the bow was much more popular. Gotta try much harder to shoot yourself.
Oof FYI site is being hugged to death.
The culture of my home island of Mallorca has a pretty deep link to slings, the ancient Greeks and Carthaginians both named us after our slingers, and later on we became a key Roman foothold in the punic wars partly because of the slingers, who became part of an elite unit of shock troops in the Roman Empire
It was our weapon of choice for defence, protecting us from pirates and would-be conquerors as well as farming, as shepherds used both slings and dogs to herd and protect their animals.
I find it pretty fascinating, I'm also a terrible shot with a sling, you have to try it to really understand how hard it is to aim when swinging a rock at something.