* Because atlatls had fallen out of use in Europe for literally thousands of years, any words we might have had for the devices disappeared before our earliest attested recorded language vanished. So our English word comes from Nahuatl.

I don't know if roboticists have tried to duplicate human throwing motions with robots from first principles; maybe I'll go and look into that. But it's probably heinously complex and the least urgent because we've figured out so many better ways to launch projectiles.