The History of the Bow and Arrow

Podcast Transcript

One of the most important inventions in human history was the bow and arrow.

A bow and arrow is a rather simple device, but it was a revolutionary advancement in humanity’s ability to hunt and fight.

Unlike many early human inventions, the bow and arrow have had an extremely long lifespan. For thousands of years it remained virtually unchanged. That was until the last 100 years when this age old device changed dramatically.

Learn more about the history of the bow and arrow and how it changed the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

There are many inventions and discoveries that I’ve covered on this podcast. Almost everything has been invented in about the last 10000 years.

Even the wheel, which seems like an incredibly simple device, can only be traced back about 5500 years as far as its use as a transportation device.

However, as far as we know, the bow and arrow goes back further than almost any other human invention that we have evidence for.

A bow is a very simple device. A traditional bow consists of a long piece of wood that can bend. It must be able to bend, but not too much, and not break.

Each end of the bow is connected by a string which would usually be made out of animal sinew or some sort of plant fiber.

When the bowstring is drawn back, it stores potential energy which is transferred to the arrow upon release, converting it into kinetic energy, propelling it forward with force.

The bow and arrow was not the first projectile technology. Humans probably first began by throwing stones and later developed the spear.

The spear was also a revolutionary tool and was probably invented several hundred thousand years before the bow and arrow. The earliest evidence we have of spears goes back 400,000 to 500,000 years.

There is evidence of chimpanzee using simple spears which indicate that humans, or human ancestors, may have been using spears much much earlier.

While early spears were probably simply thrown, most early modern humans didn’t throw spears like a javelin. They used a spear thrower known as an atlatl.

An atlatl is a simple tool that serves as a lever to enhance the velocity and distance of a thrown spear or dart. It consists of a shaft with a handle on one end and a hook or socket on the other that grips the projectile.

By extending the length of the thrower’s arm, the atlatl enables the user to throw a spear with greater force and accuracy than could be achieved by the arm alone. This ancient hunting weapon was widely used across various cultures before the advent of the bow and arrow.

The bow and arrow represented a significant upgrade over the spear and atlatl for several key reasons, particularly in terms of range, rate of fire, and versatility.

The bow’s can store more energy in its elastic limbs than the human arm or the atlatl can in their throwing motion. This allowed arrows to fly further than spears. Additionally, arrows can be crafted to fly with better aerodynamics than spears, making them more accurate over longer distances.

Archers can load and fire arrows much more quickly than an atlatl user can load and launch spears. This rapid rate of fire makes bows particularly effective in sustained combat and hunting scenarios, allowing archers to release multiple arrows in the time it takes to prepare and throw a single spear with an atlatl.

Arrows are lighter and more compact than spears, making them easier to carry in larger numbers. A quiver can hold many arrows, providing a warrior or hunter with ample ammunition, whereas carrying multiple spears or darts is more cumbersome.

The earliest known evidence of arrows dates back bout 70,000 years. Items which are assumed to be bone arrowheads were found in the Sibudu Cave in South Africa.

One of the problems with bows and arrows and the archeological record is that most of what makes up a bow and arrow were organic, and organic material doesn’t preserve well. The only thing we can really find are the hard arrow heads which were made out of bone or stone.

It is also interesting to note that the dating of the arroheads found in South Africa date back to approximately the same time as the human diaspara out of African which resulted in modern humans.

The earliest non-African evidence of arrows was found in Sri Lanka which date back about 48,000 years.

The next major finds are dated about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago in Europe. This period is extremely important in human history as it roughly marks the end of the last ice age and the development of human settlements and civilization.

It is believed that by this time, bow and arrows were in use on every continent except Australia.

During this period, give or take a few thousand years, images of bows and arrows began appearing in cave paintings.

What isn’t know is if the bow and arrow was a technology passed down by early humans for tens of thousands of years, or if it was independently discovered around the world like agriculture.

As more people moved towards sedentary agriculture, bows and arrows became used more for warfare instead of hunting.

While there were small changes to the design of bows and arrows, for the most part, there was little change in the basic design of bows and arrows for thousands of years.

One of the first major changes to the bow took place around 2000 BC in Central Asia. It was here we find the first evidence of the composite bow.

A composite bow is a traditional bow made from multiple materials, typically wood, horn, and sinew, laminated together to utilize the distinct mechanical properties of each. The central wooden frame provides structure; the horn on the belly, the side facing the archer, compresses, while the sinew on the back, the side facing away from the archer, stretches when the bow is drawn. This combination allows the bow to store a greater amount of energy more efficiently than a bow made from a single material.

Composite bow technology spread to civilizations that had contact with the steppe nomads, including China and Persia, but also evidence of use in Egypt, Greece, and Assyria.

With the advent of the Iron Age around 1,200 BC you saw the introduction of iron tipped arrows. These arrow heads gave arrows more penetrating power, allowing them to more easily pass through leather and bronze armor.

Another major innovation was the creation of the crossbow. Crossbows are horizontally held with stronger limbs and a drawstring, which can be locked in place and released with a trigger.

First developed in China around the year 600 BC, it had several improvements on the bow.

It could hold more energy in its limbs, which allowed for greater penetrating power. The string could be locked after the limbs were pulled back, meaning that the wielder didn’t have to hold the stress of the bowstring. It was also very simple to use, which meant that less training was required to operate it.

The downside was that the rate of fire of a crossbow was much less than that of a trained archer using a bow.

Crossbows were extremely popular in China and later other parts of Asia for centuries. There were some limited references to crossbows in Greece and Rome, but they were never widely used.

Crossbows didn’t appear again in Europe until about the year 1000. Here, they found a similar use to what they had in ancient China. They allowed for unskilled operators and had great penetrating power.

The Middle Ages saw the rise in the use of the longbow. I’ve previously done an entire episode on the longbow, but suffice it to say the longbow was basically a much larger bow which had much heavier draw weights.

Longbows first appeared about 2500 to 2000 years ago, but they never really became a strategic weapon until the Middle Ages in England.

Like the crossbow, the longbow was very powerful. It could send an arrow at much greater distances, and it had better penetrating power. Unlike the crossbow, it was more accurate and could fire faster.

The downside was that it required a highly skilled archer to use a longbow properly.

England was able to exploit longbows by creating an entire culture around the longbow and archery. Every village in England had to engage in archey practice so there could be a population of trained longbow archers available.

Bows and arrows began to fall out of favor with the advent of firearms in the 16th century.

Firearms gained prominence over bows and arrows primarily due to their greater lethality, ease of use, and effectiveness in a variety of conditions.

Firearms can deliver more powerful and penetrating shots, increasing their lethality even against armored targets. They also require less physical strength and skill to operate effectively, enabling quicker training of forces.

They are more reliable across different environmental conditions, as moisture and temperature changes less significantly affect their performance compared to bows, whose strings and wooden components can be sensitive to weather.

Together, these advantages led to firearms replacing bows as the dominant ranged weapon in both military and hunting applications by the end of the 16th century.

Despite the rise of firearms, bows and arrows never went away completely. There were still limited used in warfare and in hunting in places like Japan and North America.

Eventually, as firearms caught on in even these places, archery became an activity primarily for sport.

In 1900, archery had its debut at the Summer Olympics in Paris, and in 1904 women’s archey and team archery were both introduced.

The 20th century saw many advances in material sciences applied to bows and arrows.

Fiberglass bows were introduced as were hollow aluminum arrows.

The primary advantage of fiberglass is its durability and resistance to environmental factors such as humidity and temperature fluctuations, which can adversely affect traditional wood bows. Fiberglass is also impervious to warping and cracking, maintaining its integrity and performance over time without requiring extensive maintenance.

Aluminum arrow shafts were both light and strong compared to wood and could be manufactured to be almost perfectly straight.

Hunters also began to use high-performance arrowheads that were literal razor blades.

Perhaps the greatest 20th century innovation in bows, and one of the biggest innovations in the history of the bow, took place in the 1960s.

An American inventor named Holless Wilbur Allen introduced a system of pulleys and cables, known as cams, at the ends of the bow limbs. This became known as the compound bow.

These cams allow for a feature known as “let-off,” where the peak draw weight decreases significantly at full draw, making it easier for the archer to aim with greater control and less physical strain.

This mechanical advantage allows archers to hold a drawn bow for longer periods without tiring, improving accuracy. Additionally, the design of the compound bow makes it more energy-efficient than traditional recurve bows, translating to higher arrow speeds and flatter trajectories for improved accuracy at longer distances.

Today, compound bows are the most popular type of bow for hunting and recreational use, but they still are not allowed in Olympic competitions. However, there is talk of adding a compound bow event to the archery competition in 2028 in Los Angeles or in 2032 in Brisbane.

When you see a modern archery competition it can look like an incredibly technical affair. Modern bows have sights, including sometimes laser sights, stabalizer bars, and a host of other small additions all attached to a bow made out of highly advanced materials.

Yet, for all the advancements in bows and arrows, they are fundamentally just modern versions of the same tool developed over 70,000 years ago by our ancestors in Africa.