The use of spears by the people of the “Stone Age” (Late Paleolithic) was ubiquitous to an amazing extent.  I once heard an anthropologist say that "the spear is to humans as dams are to beavers.  In most photographs of hunter-gatherers at the time of initial contact the men are holding spears."

The spear is the oldest human weapon, for taking pray at a distance.  The spear took advantage of the radial speed of the human arm when it throws and the mass (from the length of the spear) concentrated on a sharp point.  (Perhaps also a large moment of intertia inhibiting rotation along the hunter to target axis, [1/12 mh^2, since it is a long small diameter cylinder]).

The atlatl, which is a spear thrower, goes even further by increasing the radius of the throw by a little less than a meter, with a piece of wood fashioned into a launcher for the spear, acting as a lever arm.  However the atlatl launched a significantly shorter and lighter spear or “dart“.  For tens of thousands of years the atlatl was the primary hunting weapon on earth and ataltl points have been found in mammoth bones.

However the bow and arrow begins to be a little more interesting from a physics perspective because it is essentially a spring.  This allows the human to load the device with energy at an arbitrarily slow speed, and then release the same energy almost instantaneously, i.e. like a lever or pulley applied to time. 

The arrow is credited by Robert Ardrey in his book the "Hunting Hypothesis" as having giving  humans a golden age of hunting because the human could kill at a distance which the inherited instincts of most animals considered safe.

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