I shot an arrow into the air,
Longfellow, “The Arrow and the Song”
It fell to earth, I knew not where…
Such a simple idea, but such a powerful creation! It turned the tide in battles, created legends, and wiped out cities–maybe even a species. William Tell used one to split an apple on his son’s head to avoid execution. Welsh longbows defeated the French at Agincourt. The Mongols nearly conquered the known world because they could shoot in any direction while on horseback, until the Mamluk archers in Egypt stopped their advance with arrows of their own. Even Taylor Swift sang about it: “I am the archer; I am the prey.”
I started my first A to Z challenge in 2020 with the Olympic-themed “A is for Archery,” so it seems only fitting to start this march into ancient inventions with the Arrow (and Bow!) ‘Tis the A to Z season! As with each post, my approach will cover:
- A core definition of the “thing”
- Where and when it happened first “around the world”
- How it influenced human development
Pointy Things at a Distance
Many animals use inanimate objects to obtain food. Even crows can create compound tools, while chimpanzees routinely sharpen sticks. Certainly early humans must have used pointed sticks for protection and food acquisition. The early homo species, homo habilis (“Handy man”), were defined as tool users because shaped stones were found in their burial sites. Pointed stones last longer than sticks; humans even learned that one type of stone can be better used to hone the point of another. Pointed stones attached to sticks can be thrown or thrust as a weapon. But arrows are more than just a pointed stone on a stick. Arrows buy you distance.
Arrows can be defined, according to paleoanthropologist Laure Metz, as “mechanically propelled projectile” technology. Bows are a distance weapon. Spears require large biceps to throw, and the launcher must be near the target. Such large weapons are effective at bringing down large animals, like a mammoth, immobilizing them by crushing vital organs. But arrows are better for small targets, especially for prey that is quick or agile, like a rabbit or monkey. Arrows are better when stealth is a necessity. Arrows can be shot by humans who don’t have giant biceps: smaller adults, women, or children. Arrows let you sneak.
The technology of the bow–a pliant wood which snaps back into place–augments the shot, allowing clean, precise, and deep wounds. Arrows have low mass, and but high kinetic energy; they are ballistic. According to a team that may have found the earliest examples in South Africa: “A fundamental principle [behind the bow and arrow] … is the indirect transmission of stored energy.” Add from rather far away. There’s a reason that guns replaced swords.
Murky Beginnings
The first arrows–small, chipped stones with points too fine for a spear–have been found in South Africa, in Sibudu cave in the northeast part of the country. The oldest arrows yet found (in 2012) date back to 71,000 ya, though many digs have uncovered treasure troves of arrows, with each discovery eclipsing the age of earlier ones.
How do you determine a bit of stone is an arrow? How do you know it’s not a random bit of stone, a toy, part of a necklace, or some other tool? The question plagues researchers even as they know the date of a site with fair precision and can determined the species from the bones. They can identify whether a bit of stone was shaped or even heated, in some cases, to improve its piercing qualities. Yet, without the bow or the “stick” part of the arrow, going from stone to weapon is difficult.
Researchers in Sri Lanka came up with a way. They identified 48,000-year-old arrowheads of bone and used high-powered microscopes to examine the tips. Those tips showed evidence of fractures consistent with “high-powered impacts.” It was a particularly exciting find because Sri Lanka’s rainforest climate is unlike the savannah or deserts of Africa where the bow and arrow appeared to originate. While it’s possible early African humans wandered across Asia and the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka, it maybe just as likely that earlier species had already migrated to Sri Lanka and then created bows and arrows. In either case, they knew these were used for small projectile weapons.
What they also knew was that the Sri Lankan rainforest was not full of large animals which required spear hunting, but rather monkeys, deer, and squirrels. The bow and arrow was simply better for small and agile game.
Could the first inventor have been a child? Miriam Haidle, an anthropologist who identified arrows at another part of South Africa, thinks so. She argues that the bow is a complex instrument to design. It might make more sense that a child playing with a bend-y piece of branch may have gone from flinging gravel at his sister to tying sinew to the ends for better flinging. Projectile toys are favorites of young males, whether chimps or homo sapiens. Perhaps the child and/or peers and parents started flinging sticks along with bits of rock. Then decided to find the best type of wood, to bend the ends of the bow, and to attach “notches” to one end of the stick and a small pointy stone to the other. Experimentation is one of humanity’s superpowers. If the bow and arrow emerged from experimentation, then it wouldn’t be surprising for it to emerge in Africa and India and Sri Lanka and elsewhere, separated by time and distance.
Wiping Out those Pesky Neanderthals in Europe
Not every type of early human had access to bow and arrow technology. Homo neanderthalis was a variation of early human that populated much of Europe, somewhere between 200 and 500,000 ya. The Neanderthals did not appear to use bow and arrows. In fact, a 40,000 ya Neanderthal skeleton from Iraq was discovered with a small, let’s call it “arrow-shaped” hold in his rib. That discovery alludes to a chain of events that would explain where the Neanderthals “went,” since their DNA disappeared around 40,000 ya.
Bow and arrow experts argue that it was newfangled stealth projectile weaponry that took out the Neanderthals. Early modern humans, migrating north from Africa and Asia, saw those cozy little caves in Scandinavia. If only the cavemen weren’t in them! Soon enough, early modern humans notched another new invention: genocide.
Another Way to Throw
There is still disagreement about whether the migratingearly humans took the bow and arrow technology with them across Asia, then over and around the Bering Strait into the Americas. Or, did they reinvent the projectile weapon once they managed to land in Oregon? It certainly seems that if they were enterprising enough to navigate up and around the Northern Pacific Ocean to land in America, they might have been able to invent flinging technology.
They also had a second way to fling. MesoAmerican hungers made extensive use of the atlatl, an alternate to the bow which fitted a spear, arrow, or dart for hurling. By the time the Europeans showed up in the Late Middle Ages, the atlatl was used for everything from large javelins to small darts, sometimes with fitted “fletched” ends like those of arrows. The bow was not the only option for small missile technology. The atlatl, too, went through multiple incarnations and variations as humans played around with the best way to throw.
One research paper evaluated the relative merits of the atlatl+ spear vs. bow + arrow in Central America (Mexico) where the atlatl earned its Aztec name. Like the spear v. arrow debate, they found that spears were better for big game and arrows better for small game. Yet across much of the territory, where humans would build the Olmec, Mayan, Incan, and Aztec civilizations, there was far less big game than in Asia or Africa. Ultimately, the bow and arrow was used more often, becoming the weapon of choice more often than not.
The Premier Weapon of Armies and Goddesses
The idea of the bow and arrow as the early weapon of choice happened in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well. The archers were dominant in one civilization after another. For example, in the early Egyptian kingdoms, @3000 BCE, the archers were the elite of the army. Researchers have found bow and arrows buried with royalty as well as soldiers, with some weapons still intact. The arrow technology is not that different from today, with knowledge of recurve and compound bows each having a place. Arrows were not necessarily poisoned as they are in some African cultures today. The archers were deadly enough on their own.
By the time of the early ancients, stone arrow tips had been replaced by metal, thought it was only needed for the tips, unlike a sword which was a metal hog. Egyptian archers were known to launch large-scale attacks, even behind barriers, or under platforms that could besiege a fortress. Egyptian armies were able to conquer, enslave, and dominate nearby territories, such as Nubia and northwestern Africa, much of it with bow and arrow as the premier weapon.
Archery brought Egypt so much success that they linked the weapon with the goddess Neith, whom they called “Mistress of the Bow” and “Ruler of Arrows.” She was often drawn with crossed bow and arrows in one hand and the ankh, the symbol for life and immortality in the other: life contrasting with death. Like the later Greek goddess Athena, she was connected both to war and weaving, perhaps previewing a later idea of the tapestry of life, controlled by female gods.
While it may remain hard to be sure whether a chipped bit of stone in a burial site is an arrow, it’s clear that arrows were created and used by civilizations around the world for thousands of years. They helped modern humans wipe out the Neanderthals just as they helped later armies overtake rivals in Egypt, Assyria, and France.
So I would tell Taylor Swift that I certainly would always choose archer over prey. And, while Longfellow’s random arrow was launched who knows where, the deadly nature of this millenia-old weapon requires that the archer always aim carefully.
