Leonardo's snap lock. The missing link ?

[Raf]

In pursuit of the earliest ( or in this case worse ) snaplock here is a Mongolian version. The trigger release is breathtaking in its elegant simplicity...
Also interesting is the lack of a frizen spring and no evidence that one was ever fitted at least to this gun. Which suggest what I suspected; that early snaplocks may have relied simply on the inertia of a relatively heavy steel creating enough resistance to create a spark. Difficult to argue that something like this could not have been knocked up by any blacksmith sometime in the fifteenth century...