A boomerang is a throwing stick used by certain Australian aboriginals. The better-known kind is the returning boomerang: upon reliably missing its target, its flies around in a circle and back to the person who threw it, possibly whacking him upside the head for a comical effect. Most of the ones in existence are Australian souvenirs, along with the didgeridoo, which is a hollow stick that makes a funny noise. Such must been the life in Australia before the White Man descended upon it: you went out and try to hunt with a crooked stick that flies back and eventually hits you upside the head, then gave up and went home, where you sat around making funny noises with a hollow stick. To complete the technology suite, there was also the digging stick, for digging up some wild tubers when you got hungry.
Outside of a niche application of flushing out small game animals, it is a joke weapon that is rarely, if ever, offered for sale in serious hunting shops. Anthropologists working in Australia did find an old skeleton with skull and rib fractures they thought were made by a boomerang, having ruled out the didgeridoo and the digging stick for lack of a sharp edge. This led them to think that the boomerang could have been used as a weapon of murder and war. An alternative theory is that the poor person who once owned this skeleton simply had the habit of throwing his boomerang and then forgetting that he threw it. And so he just stood around gawking until it flew back and hit him.
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