Q&A for History of Mankind (12)
Bows & arrows, plus travels through ancient Greece, with Guns, Germs & Steel
Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this little button below:
To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.
This is the twelfth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Before we get to that, let me remind you that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
Today’s featured academic papers refer to ancient archery. As I wrote in the old post “Murderous Tribesmen, from Arabia to Japan,” the oldest extant bows in one piece are from Holmegaard, Denmark (9000 BC) but there's less definite evidence of arrow use in other northern European sites, probably from about 14,000 BC. High-performance wooden bows, to this date, are made following the Holmegaard design. Projectile weapons were used earlier in Europe and other continents, and bows made have been independently invented in Africa around 10,000 BC.
Bows and arrows, however, can be much older: in the 2020 paper “Bows and arrows and complex symbolic displays 48,000 years ago in the South Asian tropics,” published in Science Advances by Michelle C. Langley et al, evidence is presented that high-speed projectiles likely shot from bows may have been used for hunting in the tropical forests of Sri Lanka around 46,000 BC.
Earlier this year, we had yet another paper, “Bow-and-arrow, technology of the first modern humans in Europe 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France,” by Laure Metz et al (Science Advances, 22.2.23) that posits a very early adoption of the technology even in Europe.
I love to write about ideology and culture, and the way those are reflected in literary works and other artifacts. Still, it’s worth staying on top of the latest on ancient military technology because, as we recently saw in France and we see every day in the Ukraine, violence is a fact of life, and it was even more so in older times.
Take the paper “Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe,” published in January in PNAS. There, Linda Fibiger at al look at the way increasing competition and inequality fostered the emergence of larger-scale human conflict and warfare in a particular corner of the planet. Much of what they say, however, applies elsewhere too.
As always, let me remind you that you can find all posts divided by chronology and theme in the How to Read a History of Mankind guide:
Now for the questions sent by paying subscribers:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A History of Mankind to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.