Quote
I must disagree.

Our oldest weapon is almost certainly the club or mace, as we could just pick up a likely-feeling piece of branch and hit things with it. But for the vast majority of human history, our manufactured weapon of choice has been a spear. The knife was first developed to skin and butcher the animals we killed by the spear, and then by the atlatl, or bow.

When you took a small blade onto the battlefield with the intent of fighting with it, you carried it as a fallback option. For example in the Roman army, a pugio was standard equipment. A dagger is very different than a knife in that it has a very fine point, and sharpened on both edges. It's optimized to stab. It's also banned in most places in the USA. A knife can be used as a weapon, but it's not designed to be a weapon from the ground up: your average combat knife sees more time opening containers and jamming things one way or another than it sees blood. The honor of "purpose weapon" falls to the dagger. And even a dagger is a very limited weapon next to a sword, which largely replaced it, or any of the polearms which remained popular until after gunpowder started taking over.

Even in World War 1, with the rise of trench-fighting, soldiers needed a melee weapon... But if you look at most "trench knives", they aren't knives at all, they are daggers and stilettoes.

*shrug*


Yep the oldest weapon is most likely a rock held and used as a club.
Through out history the design and size of knives has been influenced buy the fighting. The Spartan Hoplites for example used a short sword with a blade length around 10-13" about the size of a modern Bowie. The blade was designed for both cut and trust. Why? well standing in a shield wall with your shield pressed up against your enemy's and with people pressed up against you both behind and to each side the long sword is useless...

When the fighting shifted from ground based to horse based a longer weapon was needed. But the short knife took the form of the dagger with it's long slender double sided blade which was called the "Misericorde" or dagger of mercy. It's commonly seen on knights. The knights plate armor is resistant to the sword but the dagger can be wedged between the plates or driven through the eye slots. I recently ran across a reference that the Japanese may have used tanto's a great deal in close quarter armored foot combat on the field for this very same purpose.

WWI started out with the soldiers wearing stocking hats into battle. Some obsurvent doctor noticed that most of the wounds were from shrapnel to the head as a result of the air burst artillery rounds. Helmets were designed and soon issued which oddly enough closely resembled the war hats worn in the middle ages buy men-at-arms. I read some where that in Europe medieval war hats were studied when designing there helmets.

I suspect that the stiletto type blades were a carry over from the middle ages. To bad they completely over looked the Bowie knife which is a far better design. What can you say....

On a side note NASA went over and studied some of Henry the VIIIs armor like the one pictured below when they were designing space suite.

[Linked Image from i5.photobucket.com]

To the soldier everything is a tool for war which may be used for some other task.