Study pinpoints when bow and arrow came to North America

People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern regions, while people living farther north initially adopted the bow and arrow as a complement to their existing toolkit, gradually phasing out the atlatl and dart over a thousand years.

That’s according to the latest research from experimental archaeologist Metin Eren’s Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at Kent State University in Ohio, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer a wide range of ancient technologies, from stone tools and ceramics to metal, butchery, and textiles. Eren achieved some notoriety for his 2019 debunking of an Inuit legend, testing rudimentary knives made of frozen feces to see whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon. That paper snagged Eren an Ig Nobel prize.

While such work might be colorful, Eren has always emphasized that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. His lab has conducted studies on the pitches and octaves produced from the percussive aspects of flint-knapping; common injuries suffered by flint-knappers; the butchering efficiency of Clovis points (field work done jointly with the MeatEater hunters and immortalized on YouTube); and ballistics experiments to test a 1970s hypothesis about whether some stone blades once had some sort of wood or bone backing on the flat, dulled edge (as opposed to the sharp cutting edge), which would have increased adhesion.

Most of Eren’s students get the chance to throw point-tipped spears at a hunting target outside on campus, using an attached atlatl or spear-thrower. The atlatl is an ingenious handheld rod-shaped device that employs leverage to launch a dart or spear. Versions have been developed by several different ancient cultures, including Aztec, Maya, Greek, Roman, and Australian Aboriginal designs.

At some point in North America, the atlatl was replaced by the bow and arrow, thanks to the latter’s increased arrow accuracy, distance, velocity, more frequent shots, plus the ability to shoot (and reshoot) from a number of different positions. There were also trade-offs, though: Using a bow costs more to make and maintain, for instance, and it requires both hands to operate, making it difficult to also hold a shield. Its widespread adoption probably occurred because the benefits outweighed the downsides.

It’s challenging to determine when the bow was introduced and how quickly it was adopted because the weapons are made with organic materials that tend not to be preserved, unlike stone, bone, or metal tools. So for this latest study, Eren and his co-authors focused on radiocarbon dating a carefully curated dataset of clearly identifiable weapons found in dry caves and rock shelters (naturally anaerobic environments).

Single origin or independent invention?

Metin Eren demonstrates proper form when throwing a spear with an atlatl.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette

The radiocarbon dating results showed that the bow and arrow emerged in North America roughly 1,400 years ago. However, in the north, that weapon coexisted with the atlatl for several centuries, while the bow proved to be disruptive almost immediately in the south, quickly rendering tools like the atlatl obsolete. For the authors, this is evidence of “a relatively late introduction that occurred nearly simultaneously across a vast area, followed by regionally distinct adoption trajectories.”

In other words, the bow and arrow likely had a single origin that then rapidly diffused through cultural transmission networks, with a few regional differences affecting the rate of replacement. Eren et al. note that there is also evidence from other studies of people in several geotemporal contexts converging on bow-and-arrow technology multiple times since the African Middle Stone Age. So more data is needed to make a definitive finding, and for now, at least, “such testing is beyond current archaeological resolution and analysis,” the authors wrote.