Sometimes that contributes to the lethality of the weapon, keeping a fragment of pointed material inside the body where it can cause additional damage.

Sometimes it simply means the tip is lost.

In either case, the fragments remain in the wound while the delivery system is recovered.

For the Manis mastodon, this meant that thirteen thousand nine hundred years after the event, the fragments of the broken tip were still exactly where they had ended up in the moment of impact — locked inside the rib, distributed through the penetration channel, preserved by the specific conditions of the site and the specific accident of the tip striking bone rather than passing between the ribs or lodging in soft tissue that would not have survived.

But the fragments, as the CT images showed them, were exactly that: fragments.