O.K., in the first sentence of the OP I am admitting that all I know about the bow and arrow I learned from movies! Inevitably, whenever anyone asks a question in GQ based on information founded on movies someone will supply the obnoxious reply, “Gee, hate to tell you this but movies aren’t real!” Now that OP usually knows that movies aren’t real, but comes to GQ to glean a finer understanding of just what a movie might have gotten right and what it might have gotten wrong. In the interest of fighting my own ignorance, I come to GQ to set me straight but I don’t need to be told that movies aren’t real. Thanks!
In movies I see early civilizations from western Europe to far east Asia, and down through Africa, and in the Americas all using the bow and arrow. Now, the period “early” varies from culture to culture and depending on the story being told, but what I want to know is:
A) Was the bow and arrow invented just once and then borrowed from culture to culture?
A-i) If so, who invented it first?
Or
B) Did the bow and arrow develop independently on each different continent?
I’m not intentionally trying to be stupid… :rolleyes: but how is one useful without the other? I can see arrows being used as tiny, inefficient spears but an archery bow? I’m aware of things such as bow drills so am I just mistaken in treating them as a different invention than archery bows.
That was my thought when I first read the OP. I think that what he’s trying to say is "Was the bow-and-arrow set (hereafter referred to as “set”) invented on only one continent, and then imported to others, or did the native Americans develop the set independently of the Europeans and/or Asians?
To answer the OP, I believe it was the Egyptians who first came up with the idea for an effective warfare bow and arrow, about 5000 years ago to fight off the ancient Persians.
Of course, the bow and arrow would have been used for hunting in pre-history, as the first stone arrowheads were discovered in Africa before 25000 BC.
Fire-hardened arrow points, flint tipped arrows, and feathered arrow shafts appeared between 25000 to 18000 BC.
Since the new world and the old world had no means of knowing each other existed, let alone swap ideas for bows, the idea had to develop independently. The bow of the Eskimos, for example, was constructed out of spruce tree and sinew, was used for hunting, as well as, warfare. The arrows that they used were either one of two things, driftwood or splintered mammoth bones and held together with feathers.
Um, what if the set were invented previous to the migration to the New World (yes, I’m assuming the land bridge theory is accurate)? The land bridge theory puts that migration at 12 000 to 20 000 years ago IIRC, so if the set had been invented for hunting 25 000 years ago, it could have been brought along.
Yes, the idea of pointing it at other humans you don’t like probably arose separately.
I knew it was only a matter of time before I got corrected on some point.
In any case, since the land bridge ceased to be the bow and arrow would have to develop seperately, is what I…meant to say. And 25 000 years is a long time, allowing for diferent characteristics and such to arise on each continent.
I suspect that it was invented several times, independently. Probably lost independently a few times, too. I have nothing to back this up with, but it seems likely that most inventions are not once-only things. I also suspect that fire, stone-working, and iron-smelting (amongother skills) were discovered several times over.
First, the Old and New Worlds have not been separated since the land bridge went away. The Inuits on both sides of the Bering Sea have been going back and forth for millennia. They are closely related families. (The cold war cut them off for a while, but now they’re back visiting old cousins.) An ancient Greek bronze bowl fragment was found in N. Canada. Trade, tech., etc. flowed across a relatively short gap.
Now for my rambling speculation!
Look at comparable tech. Clearly spears go back to very ancient people before breaking out of Africa. However, until about 8K+ years ago the spear point tech was quite low. Different people came up with different radical improvements. Enough to consider the improved spears a very different class of weapon. Spear throwers also go back very far. So it is not hard to guess that bow and arrows also go back to Africa. But, they probably weren’t in the same class as to what was developed independently much later all over the inhabited world.
It does seem that blow guns have been independently invented on different continents though. Mainly in jungle environs for some reason. So it may be possible that some group that hadn’t kept bow and arrow tech re-invented it later when their local environs changed enough to require their need again. How one could establish particular instances of any of this seems impossible.
Really? I would love to see a cite on this.
As for the OP: it seems pretty clear to me that such a simple and obvious invention as the bow and arrow, like fire, would have been discovered very early in human history, while we were all still in Africa. Whether it happened once there and spread quickly, or was independently invented there several times, we’ll probably never know. But as peoples migrated around the world it would have been carried with them, rather than having to be reinvented.
We can say with fair confidence that the bow was not invented prior to the African exodus. We know that because of the complete absence of arrowheads that early in human history, and more importantly because the bow was never invented in Australia. Had the bow been part of the human toolkit at the time that the last wave reached Australia some 60, 000 years ago we can assume it would have come with, along with other common tools such as spears, canoes and clubs.
It seems likely that the bow was invented well after the first wave of humans emigrated form Africa, and thus was never carried by those first settlers.
There are some who believe the bow was used as a musical instrument before it was used as a weapon, but, if this is the case, the arrow probably developed from the stick that was used to hit the bowstring.
I’m not seeing how a functional arrow would have worked in paleolithic times. How do you make a point? Once you start knapping flint (and hence enter the Neolithic Age), you can make flint arrowheads or use a flint knife to whittle a wooden point, but neither of those is available in the paleolithic.
As for blowguns, aren’t they also typically made of bamboo, which prefers warmer climates?
Well, looking at the Upper Paleolithic tools found here[sub]warning: this site will likely want to load the Hebrew language pack in your browser - displays fine if you cancel it[/sub] I see no reason bows and fire-hardened arrows, or even bone-headed arrows, couldn’t have been made. Without size gauge, it’s hard to be certain, but if the points the second from bottom, on the far left, are in scale with the rest of the tools, there is no reason they couldn’t actually be arrow points. Although they probably are dart points, IMHO.
I just lent my copy of Guns, Germs and Steel to my Dad, and I don’t remember what he said about the invention of bows specifically. However, I do remember he mentioned that the Australian Aborigines had it and lost it, and vaguely recall reading that several of the Indonesian islanders had lost and regained it over time.
And I’d like to know more about that Greek bowl too. I’m usually pretty up on anything interesting like that in the Great White North…details, details! This touches on my pet theory, give!
