hi! this may be more a question for our sister sub /r/AskAnthropology (or /r/Archaeology), but you may be interested in this previous post, which has the most comprehensive response we've seen so far in this sub to similar questions:

How far back were people using arrow symbols as direction markers?

Apologies if this is too tangential.

The two Pioneer spacecraft which left our solar system after they were launched in 1972 and 1973 both carry a gold plaque with a message to any alien species that might encounter them. (Highly unlikely, but that's besides the point). This plaque was designed to be universally interpretable, and built up a number system from scratch using some fundamental properties of Hydrogen along with some pictures, in order to communicate where Earth was in the universe and what sort of life humans were.

However, there was one symbol on plaque that was criticized for being too human-centric: the arrow. Ernst Gombrich, an artist art historian who wrote several books on the psychology of perception, said between the launches that arrows have deep hunter-gatherer roots that would not translate to creatures with a different anthropological background.

EDIT: I have no idea if anyone's going to see this 2 days later, but I was interested to see what he actually wrote and I couldn't find a copy of the Scientific American article online. So here is a reprinted copy from my campus library: "The Image and the Eye" pp. 150-151. Unfortunately he doesn't do anything more than speculate that the printed arrow originated from bows and arrows.

Ernst Gombrich ‘The Visual Image’, 1972 in Scientific American "Communication". San Francisco, California, Freeman, pp. 46–60; originally in a special issue of Scientific American, September 1972; republished in Gombrich (1982) "The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation", London, Phaidon, pp. 137–61.

There is the manicule, which has had a bit of a resurgence in recent times. I still see original examples on signs and painted on walls around London. I’m sure they don’t predate arrows but are an interesting alternative. http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/09/21/index-fist-or-manicule/

All the answers in here seem to be assuming that the directional arrow is based on the hunting arrow, but is there any evidence of that? I mean, > functions as a directional sign but doesn't have a shaft. Is that not a directional arrow? Couldn't the "shaft" on the directional arrow have just been an effective method of directing attention to the point? It seems to me like humans could have just as easily made directional signs and hunting arrows are called arrows because they look like the preceding directional sign. Also, the bow and arrow wasn't the earliest weapon. Spears and spearthrowers/atlatls existed before the bow and arrow. We were already speaking before we invented bows and arrows, so it seems at least plausible that people were making directional marks before the invention of the bow and arrow, and a point with a shaft to draw attention seems like it would have been just as effective a marker as it is now.

There may well be no evidence of this, but I'm not sure this question is synonymous with "when did humans start hunting with bow and arrow."

The traditional 'woodsman's' trail marker in North America uses two horizontal lines to indicate a turn with the top line displaced to the right or left to indicate the direction of the turn. Did they inherit that from the native Americans?