English: In July 1985, during the first season of excavation works in the Obłazowa Cave in the Białki Gorge Nature Reserve near Krempachy, an object made from a mammoth tusk was discovered, which was considered to be a boomerang.

It was in the centre of a system formed by massive granite and quartzite boulders, undoubtedly brought into the cave. Nearby there were human bones – two phalanx bones, three pendants made from the polar fox fangs, fossil shells of the Tertiary Conus snail with traces of processing, horn wedges for mining, bone bead and stone artefacts – stone blades made of raw materials not found near the site. These items, including the boomerang, were covered with a red mineral dye – ochre. Its presence, as well as finding human bones in this cluster of items of exceptional significance to the Palaeolithic culture of Homo sapiens, suggests that the boomerang most likely performed a ritual function.

The item is preserved completely. It has the shape of a crescent; it is convex on top – it is a fragment of the natural surface of the tusk. The bottom side is flat and is formed by the inner part of the tusk with visible subsequent incremental layers of dentine. Also, here, clear scratches running in the direction of the long axis of the object can be identified. At one end, on both sides of the boomerang, delicate longitudinal scratches are also visible.

The object was identified as a boomerang referring in size, crescent shape (both ends pointed) and a flat-convex cross-section to boomerangs known to ethnologists as the Queensland type i.e. specimens not returning to the thrower, which are considered combat boomerangs, as well as ceremonial boomerangs in the culture of Australian Aborigines. A replica of the boomerang from the Obłazowa Cave, made of epoxy resin, was used for experimental throws. As a result, the flight trajectory was established, whose parameters significantly exceeded the results obtained during the projections of a bent stick of similar sizes used for comparisons, but with a circular rather than a flat-convex cross-section.

The boomerang from Obłazowa, because of its deposition among the artefacts from the older part of the Upper Palaeolithic, whose radiocarbon age was determined to be about 30,000 years old, can be linked to the Pavlov culture known from Moravia or the Aurignacian culture, approximately contemporaneous to it, whose artefacts have also been found in this part of the sediments in the Obłazowa Cave.

Dimensions: height 71 cm, width 5,2 cm, thickness 1,5 cm