One of my Christmas presents this year was a book called Traditional Archery from Six Continents and an excellent book it is.
It also came at an opportune time as I had been thinking a lot about the development of warfare. At the most basic level the tools of warfare appear to have emerged in a single location in pre-historic times and then moved on from there. The sword is probably the clearest example of an exclusive weapon although its genesis is later than the bow, probably only appearing during the Bronze Age. The sword is not readily useful for anything else except fighting with another human. A spear is a much better hunting implement than a sword. Also, the sword has not swept completely across the world. While the Aztecs did use a club lined with sharpened stones, it was not a development of an existing sword but a refinement of a club. I suspect that the bow and arrow emerged earlier and that they did move across much of the globe.
The bow and arrow are not just weapons of war and we can speculate as to what came first the hunting bow or the fighting bow. There are prehistoric cave paintings of bows and arrows and some possible Upper Paleolithic Age artifacts like arrow heads have been discovered, although debate continues on whether they are arrow or dart heads. The problem with bows and arrows is that they are made primarily of wood and other materials that will not have survived from prehistoric times. The oldest confirmed bows were found at Holmegaard, Denmark and are single staves (long bows) dated to 6000 BC.
Yet bows and arrows have been used by societies across the Eurasian landmass, in the Americas, Asia and Oceania. Bows do not seem to have made much impact in the traditional societies of Micronesia, Polynesia or Australia. I wonder if this shows the flow of migration and trade. If the bow was invented on the Eurasian landmass or in the cradle of civilisation did it move outwards along the routes of human contact whether by trade, warfare or imitation. Is it older than we appreciate in that it accompanied the possible human movement across the Baring Straits land bridge of peoples who would eventually become the American Indians. Earlier than the bronze age, perhaps explaining why the bow was present in the new world but not the sword. Did it flow down through continental Southeast Asia into maritime Southeast Asia but never made it as far as Australia or the the islands of Oceania? Maybe it did in small numbers but the native vegetation did not support easy reproduction of the bow and arrows so it was eventually forgotten.
The variety of bows demonstrate that it has been evolving over time. The Japanese bow with its asymmetrical design hints at an introduction of the technology but then local alteration. Karl F. Friday wrote that the awkward looking design may not be because it was used on horseback but possibly because the bamboo used would be stronger at the base than the top so the grip had to be offset to compensate for that difference.
There are also composite bows, that must have been a development from the single wood bow. Knowledge of how this development occurred is lost to us, what caused ancient peoples to experiment with placing animal parts onto wooden bows to make them stronger. Was it a lack of sufficient wood that made the ancients experiment with alternatives? The composite bow achieved fame with the steppe peoples who had plenty of animals but may have found it harder to source the right timber; we can only speculate.
The bow is a remarkable invention. Long ago, a person realised that by placing a cord between the ends of a curved stick that they could use that device to send a separate stick much further than by hand power alone. Was it a weaker group that had been pushed to the fringe somewhere and needed to find new ways to hunt or did they need to find ways to defend themselves while staying out of spear range of a stronger group. Other people saw the use of this bow and it caught on. New materials were tried and styles developed. This was human ingenuity at its best but we can only speculate now.
While the hand axe is older, the bow was a tool that was not applied directly to the task with human strength, humans applied strength to the tool and the tool amplified that strength. The bow probably accompanied the great migrations that have bedevilled humans and has changed due to that. The bow is no longer a weapon of war although current insurgent groups such as the Free Papua Movement (OPM) are still known to shoot arrows on occasion but we can still appreciate the bow and its associated equipment. There is nothing like the twang of the released bow string followed by the thud of an arrow impacting. While I titled this post the 'The humble bow' I think that it is anything but humble and carries within it interesting information on how socities spread and developed across the globe.