Arrowheads from an Uzbek cave push archery back 80,000 years
In Obi-Rakhmat Grotto in Uzbekistan, researchers found tiny stone points about 80,000 years old. They are too small for spears and too big for blowgun darts, yet just right for arrows, and they show the kind of fractures that come from striking a target. That makes the bow one of humanity's oldest machines.
A bow is really a pair of springs. When an archer draws the string, the two limbs bend backward like cantilevers, storing elastic energy; on release that energy flows through the string into the arrow. Archers call a bow's shooting range its cast. The trade has its own vocabulary: bowyers make bows, fletchers make arrows and arrowsmiths forge the metal heads. Bows are usually stored unstrung so they do not lose their spring over time.
Evidence accumulates across continents. Likely arrowheads from Sibudu Cave in South Africa date to between about 72,000 and 60,000 years ago; tiny points from Mandrin Cave in France, around 54,000 years old, may belong to some of the first modern humans to leave Africa; and bone points from Fa Hien Cave in Sri Lanka, about 48,000 years old, were probably used to hunt monkeys and squirrels. The oldest complete bows are elm bows from Holmegaard in Denmark, dated to around 9,000 BCE, and modern makers still copy their design.
After the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, bows spread to nearly every inhabited region except Australasia and most of Oceania. Why Australia never developed them has long been debated; one recent idea is that common Australian woods are simply unsuitable for bows made from a single piece.
In warfare the bow reigned until guns spread in the 16th century, though not everyone admired it; the Greek poet Archilochus scorned fighting with bows and slings. Nubian archers were so famous that Egyptians called their land Ta-Seti, the Land of the Bow. Persian kings appeared on coins holding bows, the longbow served as England's main ranged weapon from William the Conqueror's reign to the end of the Middle Ages, and Mongol armies swept the steppe with short bows.
Source: Bow and arrow
