Curious as to opinions on which weapon was the most effective for primitive man. In most cases the bow and arrow took the place of the atlatl even though there is a lot of evidence to indicate the atlatl may have been a more effective weapon in a lot of hunting applications. The atlatl has a lot more penetrating power to take down large game and similar effective ranges to the bow and arrow. My guess is the bow and arrow was easier to learn.
A friend of mine competing against several accomplished archers shooting at frizby sized aerial targets at about 25 yards slaughtered them with 9 out of 10 hits.
Economics, an Atl dart is bigger than an arrow and much harder to make. And in war an archer can carry more ammo and discharge it faster with no loss of accuracy. But Atlatls rock!
But a bow is much more difficult to make than an atlatl, than an atlatl dart is over an arrow. Bows are really doggone complicated, whereas an atlatl is a stick with some minor shaping at one end.
Of the two weapons systems, the bow-and-arrow is vastly more difficult to make than the atlatl-and-dart.
On those grounds, the sling-and-stone wins: easy as cake!
It’s kind of hard to use an atlatl when you’re hiding under a fallen tree, or from up in the tree. Launching the dart is a more obvious motion that might be picked up by game also.
Atlatl and dart deliver more KE, but so what? After the megafauna was gone, there was nothing around that couldn’t be routinely taken with a bow and arrow. In most other aspects, bow and arrow is clearly superior, so was adopted almost everywhere and for almost all types of hunting in post-Glacial times. Lots of reasons already given above.
Unless the hunter is in the wide open, he often simply doesn’t have room to swing his mighty atlalt; a bow can be drawn in much tighter corners, from cover, in the brush, kneeling or even lying down on one’s belly etc. (Similarly, a rifle is superior to a bow in this regard, and the next, and the next). Big overhand motions flag the game, leaving the high-KE dart with nothing to hit - a bow is much more stealthy to use. Although fast, the atlatl dart is still quite slow compared to an arrow: with replicas of archaic hunting versions, roughly 100 fps vs. 150 fps. The faster arrow reaches the target quicker, and has a flatter trajectory to succesfully shoot under tree boughs etc.
A man can carry 50 arrows with him, easily. 50 atlatl darts, not so much. Crafting a bunch of quality 2-foot arrows out of local natural materials is no walk in the park, but crafting a bunch of 5-6-foot darts is way harder still. There are many environments where there simply isn’t any dart-quality natural materials available. Very few environments offer no arrow building materials, as the Kalahari bowmen demonstrate.
Shooting bows accurately is hard, but throwing atlatl darts accurately is harder still. Exceptional feats of exceptional individuals under exceptional circumstances, as in the OP, are misleading. As the the steppe tundra and the megafauna was gone and woodland and smaller game prevailed, the bow reigned supreme.
I agree with a lot metnioned above. My firend could easily put himself in the top 10 atlatlists in the world. I saw him kill a rabbit at a measured 62 yards. Not many archers shooting traditional style bows could do that. The bow does have some distinct advantages over the atlatl but at the same time I think a lot of tribes would have been better off keeping the skill set and technology alive as an alternate hunting method mostly for large game.
Typically, the dart was a two-piece affair. A sharpened flint is hafted to a short piece of wood, and that wood is then fitted into a longer shaft. The longer shaft is recyclable, even if the piece with the flint gets destroyed.
I Googled atlatl and found interesting info, including this video about how to make one from a shoe horn. MacGyver’s being rebooted this fall–maybe he’ll use it.
This construction (foreshafts) was very common in arrows, as well. Many North American examples had mainshafts around 20 - 25" long, a very procurable length when seeking out straight sections of reeds, shoots or cleanly-splitting wood for raw materials. The foreshafted atlatl dart needs a mainshaft of similar quality but more than twice as long and much thicker, much harder to produce in large numbers in many locales.
I’ve actually participated in field archery contests where one of the shots is to be made from a prone position. Obviously it is hard, and best done with a short bow and a short draw, but it works. So, defy away.
I think it would be too costly to do that. Family-feeding proficiency with a single primitive projectile weapon takes up lots of resources, best not split to reach mediocrity in two separate skill sets. As there are no known examples of a people hunting large game with an atlatl and a bow (or only the smaller game with a bow), it seems evident no tribe would’ve been better off doing so.
I think you are thinking of footbows, which are used sitting on one’s ass while drawing the bow, attached to one’s feet, often ending up lying almost flat on the ground at full draw. Used to shoot for distance, plus a couple of ethnographical accounts of using similar technique to shoot monkeys high up in trees etc. A really, really niche application, then or now.
Seems suitable for hunting megafauna, or any hunting where you need to maintain a low profile. It’s is another example of the flexibility in use of a bow that an atlatl doesn’t offer.
I don’t know how big a factor this would be, but I think short and composite bows can be shot from horseback, while atlatls may not be practical from horseback.
Horseback riding post-dates the widespread adoption of bow and arrow by thousands of years in Eurasia, and a thousand years even by the contentious chronology on the adoption of bow and arrow in North America.
Lots of things seem suitable but were still not done, hence the paucity of accounts. Holocene hunters have gone after moose, bear and even the African elephant with bows and arrows, without resorting to strapping bows to their feet and sitting down. Hunting dangerous game, it’s best to keep on one’s feet. Anyway, pointing a footbow, and following a target, is slow and cumbersome, compared to conventional technique.
