When you consider how long humans have been killing one another, the sword is a surprisingly

recent invention. Frankly, it seems like the first tool you'd come up with to do that job. It's simple,

it's intuitive, it's a big sharp object that you could figure out how to use just by glancing at it. Nobody's ever picked up a

sword and asked, what's this thing for? You'd think that if an early hominin was in a bad mood,

it'd be the first idea they'd come up with. But it was only invented about 5,000 years ago.

Now, humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, so think about that.

It took anatomically modern humans tens of thousands of years to make the first sword.

And that seems especially weird, given that seemingly far more complicated killing tools such as the bow and arrow, were invented as early as 70,000

years ago. It wasn't that we lacked imagination, we lacked material. We could make daggers pretty early and quite easily out of stone.

But if you make a stone blade significantly longer than your hand,

it'll fall apart after a couple of swings.

Even if you found a stone suitable to be trimmed down into the shape of a sword,

at that length and comparative thinness, it would break the moment you tried to use it. Stone is too inflexible and too brittle.

So, to make swords, we humans needed a material that was both flexible and strong enough to survive being swan,

while being sharp and resilient enough to cut flesh.

Bronze first filled that role around 3,000 BC, again, 5,000 years ago.

And then swords really came into their own with the rise of iron and later steel.

Materials, not mines, were the limiting factor in the invention and implementation of the sword.

If you want to make a sword, you might not need to be particularly creative, but you do need the necessary hardware.

Today's animal is born with the hardware. Today's animal has been carrying a sword on their face for millions of years.

And if you're wondering what their sword is for, look at it and listen to your intuitions.

Today we're going to talk about the swordfish.

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