The first paragraph of "Viscous Fluid Flow" by F.M. White goes something like this:

By stretching a point one could say that the study of viscous fluid flow reaches back to antiquity, for it was probably in the prehistoric times that human weaponry developed from simple sticks and stones into streamlined, weighted spears and slim, pointed, fin-stabilized arrows. One can conclude that primitive man recognised and solved in part the problem of viscous resistance.

Did he really? I always thought that innovations of early human were driven by need (e.g. the wheel). So, the development of pointed spears and arrows must have been driven by the need to hit and kill animals while hunting. The fact that such such weapons travelled longer and faster was only a side-effect, atleast that's what I thought until I came across the above quoted lines. Did the pre-historic humans developed pointed weapons because they thought it could really hurt animals or because they thought it could make them travel more effectively (as the book seems to suggest) ?