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Italian police capture a pen gun
The Carabinieri (Italian gendarmerie) have seized a pen gun from a mobster in Naples.
The Yagua Indians of the Peruvian Amazon are known for their skill with the blowgun. It was the Yagua that gave the Amazon River its name. The Yagua wear grass skirts, when the Spaniards saw them through the trees with their blowguns they thought that they were women warriors. Thus, the Amazon river was named after the Greek myth of the Amazon women warriors.
The blowgun was invented twice, once in the Americas and once in the islands of Southeast Asia. It was unknown anywhere else outside of these two distant regions. Because of this abrupt separation, the birth of the blowgun is a prime example of convergent invention by two independent origins, propelled by convergent environments. For hunters constrained by a thick jungly understory with plentiful game overhead in the canopy, the blow dart made more sense than "costly" arrows which can easily get deflected and lost. The gun as devised by these two separate cultures is expectedly similar — a hollow tube, often carved in two halves, then bound together. In essence it is a bamboo or cane pipe, so it can't be much simpler. What's remarkable is a nearly identical set of inventions supporting the air pipe. Tribes in both the Americas and Asia use a similar kind of dart padded by a fibrous piston, they both coat the ends with a poison deadly to animals yet which does not taint the meat, both carry the darts in a quill to protect the poisoned tip from being accidentally pricked, and both employ a similarly peculiar stance when shooting. The longer the pipe the more accurate the trajectory, but the longer the pipe the more it wavers during the aim. So both in America and in Asia the hunters hold the pipe in a non-intuitive stance with both hands near the mouth, elbows out, and gyrate the shooting end of the pipe in small circles. On each small revolution the tip will briefly cover the target. Accuracy, then is a matter of the exquisite timing of when to blow. All this invention arose twice, like the same crystals found on two worlds.
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