Bow and Arrow Presages First Arms Race

June 18, 2008— -- Nobody knows exactly when this happened, but probably about 2,000 years ago a clever hunter somewhere in North America figured out that if he had a better way to throw a small spear he would improve his chances of eating dinner that night.

He may have taken the bow he used to spin a wooden shaft and make a fire and discovered he could also use the bow to launch the shaft. Thus came the bow and arrow, a new "weapons delivery system" -- and the drive to build a better version was on.

No doubt he soon learned he could use his new weapon to vanquish his technologically challenged enemies, who were still in the spear-and-dart phase, and quite possibly the world's first arms race began.

No one knows how close that scenario is to the real facts, since experts can't even agree on when the bow and arrow was invented, but anthropologists at the University of Missouri-Columbia think they have pretty well nailed down at least part of the story: Soon after the new weapons system was invented, everybody wanted to build a better one.

"We keep tinkering with something, trying to make it better, and I think that's exactly what folks were doing prehistorically," said R. Lee Lyman, chair of the department of anthropology. Lyman and two Mizzou colleagues, Todd VanPool and Michael J. O'Brien, examined more than 1,000 projectile points at three different locations in North America to see how that technology evolved.

In a paper scheduled for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the researchers say their expectations were fulfilled. Bow and arrow technology spread like wildfire across the continent, and with each hunter trying to improve on the critical arrow point, the poor designs fell away and the arrowhead became pretty much standardized.

For one thing, it got a lot smaller than the hefty projectile points used on the spears that were either thrown or launched with an atlatl, a device used to increase the velocity and range of a spear.

All of this might just seem like common sense, but in fact it is hotly debated among experts. The archaeological record is quite murky. The main evidence comes from the points themselves, since wood used for the bow as well as the arrow does not preserve well. And it's difficult to find a precise date for the points, since they don't carry the "date they were minted," as Lyman put it.