The Balearic slingers

The Balearic slingers emerged in the main European armies of antiquity as true elite units. Their skill with the sling, until then a throwing weapon of goatherds without use on a large scale, led them to fight copper in contests that decided history and shaped our environment as we know it. That is why we approach the figure of the “foners” of the Islands, the first snipers in history.

We look back and go back in time some 2,500 years. A mother walks away from her and places at the feet of three children who are waiting expectantly a bag with massive stones, of various calibers. Boulders, cuttings from the nearby quarry and stones from the road, among them. Children are young, but not young enough to hurt themselves. They have been fiddling with them as toys since babies, they have seen their elders use them thousands of times and now it is their turn.

This story probably combines mythical characteristics with other real ones about the rigorous teaching process of the island slingers since their earliest childhood. A method that would explain how children were educated from an early age and why, when they reached adulthood, the great armies of their time raffled them off.