Download History of Bow and Arrow

History of Bow and Arrow
Almost 300,000 - 30,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic age, the only few weapons known to early
man were those that they crudely craved out of stone. It was during this period of the stone age that
men made triangular arrow heads out of stone, fragments of which were unearthed in places where the
Mousterian culture thrived, that is the current day modern European as well west Asian regions such as
Persia. Pointy arrow heads that are possibly 60,000 years old, were also found in African areas like
Egypt. Projectile bone arrowheads were discovered in the South African Sibudu Cave, which are nothing
less than 61,000 years old. Used primarily for hunting animals and for self defense purposes, earliest
arrow tips were apparently hardened by burning them. The arrow shafts were made from timber.
Slowly, the need for aerodynamic stabilization, feathers, called fletches, were glued to the opposite
terminus of the split shafts, so as to ensure greater accuracy of the arrows, with regards to flying in a
straight line. The incorporation of fletches, derived from French flèche, dates back to about 16,000 BC.
The oldest remnants of bows are those unearthed at the German Stellmoor ones and date back possibly
to about 8,000 BC, as per the archaeological association. However, their actual dates could never be
determined as they were completely spiflicated in Hamsburg in the World War II, before carbon 14
dating saw the light of day. The next oldest sample of the bow are definitely the Danish Holmegaard
ones made of elm wood. These convex bellied and pointy-tipped bows are as old as 6,000 BC.
Around 1200BC, the cross bow was developed both in the Roman and the oriental world at the same
time. Just before that, an archaic race of the Hittites started the practice of mounted archery, wherein
arrows were shot when the chariot was in motion with the archer on its lap. This technique received
further boosting when races like those of the Huns, Mongols and other native tribes of the Eurasian
steppes adopted mounted archery along with the use of special composite bows. These specially curved
bows made of several strips of timber were fastened at the edges with narrow patches of animal horn
and frontally held together by sinews of beasts. The use of these arrows spread faster than fire among
Egyptians, Koreans, Japanese among others. The Scynthians went on to improvise a little more and
actually invented arrowheads shaped like clover leaves, which they shot from atop the horseback.
By 450BC, the Chinese were churning out hordes of bronze crossbows, the deadliest of all the bow
inventions till then. As per the records of Greek historian Siculus, Grecians had used crossbows in their
battle with the Motya circa 397 BC. Ancient Greeks however, had been using wooden crossbows called
'gastraphetes', much before 400 BC. Thus, the ones described by Siculus were believed to be modern
reinventions of the older version. The specialty of the crossbow lay in the fact, that it had a mechanical
propeller on which the bow was fixed, with a trigger that, when pressed, released the arrow, most
accurately. It can be called the ancestor of the modern day rifles in many ways. North Americans, who
learnt the art of making bows and arrows only around 500 AD, began to create shorter composite
arrows only in the 16th century, after acquiring horses from their Spanish conquistadors. Cross bows
summoned in a new era of warfare and were heavily used during the middle ages. However, given their
weight, crossbows fell out of fashion after the 13th century, with the Welsh improvisation of the swifter
and lighter longbow. Read more on 'Native Americans'.
Even though the longbow became famous during the 100 Year War that took place between 1337 to
1453, by the English, the oldest fragment of a partially finished longbow made of yew wood, is the one
found with the naturally mummified Ötzi the Iceman, uncovered on September, 1991. Dating back to
3,300 BC, the longbow found with the iceman, along with 2 broken flint-topped arrows and a quiver full
of unfinished ones, was 72 inches long, in the Ötztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the Austrian and Italian
border. The English also revolutionized arrows by designing razor-sharp sleek dagger-like arrows called
'bodkins', during this war. They kept using the longbow for a long time, even after the revolutionary
gunpowder was launched in in the 9th century. In fact it was only in 1346 at the battle of Crécy that the
English embraced gunpowder for the first time and that could possibly mark the decline of the use of
bows and arrows. The last improvement of the crossbow was done by the Chinese who used repeating
crossbows, which shot out arrows one after the other, as displayed during the First Sino-Japanese War
between the Meiji Japan and the Chinese Qing Dynasty, that was held from 1894 to 1895.
It was the war in Europe between 1618 and 1648, known as the 'Thirty Year War', that rang the death
knell for bows and arrows as weapons of war. However, even though bows and arrows may have ceased
to be used as warfare weapons, the popularity of archery as a sport is living on. After archery became an
official sport in 1583, during a competition in Finsbury, England, which saw the participation of almost
3000 people, it was accepted as an Olympic sport during the second Olympic games organized in Paris in
the year 1900.