Bow and arrow
Humans used bows and arrows for hunting and aggression long before recorded history, and the practice was common to many prehistoric cultures.
They were important weapons of war from ancient history until the early modern period, when they were rendered increasingly obsolete by the development of the more powerful and accurate firearms.
An arrow is a projectile with a pointed tip and a long shaft with stabilizer fins (fletching) towards the back, with a narrow notch (nock) at the very end to contact the bowstring.
This flexes the two limbs of the bow rearwards, which perform the function of a pair of cantilever springs to store elastic energy.
The oldest known evidence of the bow and arrow comes from South African sites such as Sibudu Cave, where likely arrowheads have been found, dating from approximately 72,000–60,000 years ago.
[6][7][8][9][10][11] The earliest probable arrowheads found outside of Africa were discovered in 2020 in Fa Hien Cave, Sri Lanka.
"Bow-and-arrow hunting at the Sri Lankan site likely focused on monkeys and smaller animals, such as squirrels, Langley says.
[15][16] After the end of the last glacial period, some 12,000 years ago, the use of the bow seems to have spread to every inhabited region except for Australasia and most of Oceania.
[17] The reason for the absence of locally-made bow and arrow technology from the Australian continent, when it was widely and commonly used elsewhere, has long been debated.
It has recently been hypothesised that it is because the mechanical and physical properties of common Australian woods make them unsuitable for selfbows.
[19] At the site of Nataruk in Turkana County, Kenya, obsidian bladelets found embedded in a skull and within the thoracic cavity of another skeleton, suggest the use of stone-tipped arrows as weapons about 10,000 years ago.
[24][25] Beginning with the reign of William the Conqueror, the longbow was England's principal weapon of war until the end of the Middle Ages.
In the Canadian Arctic, bows were made until the end of the 20th century for hunting caribou, for instance at Igloolik.
[31] Sir Ashton Lever, an antiquarian and collector, formed the Toxophilite Society in London in 1781, under the patronage of George IV, then Prince of Wales.
[32][33][34][35] The basic elements of a modern bow are a pair of curved elastic limbs, traditionally made from wood, joined by a riser.
However self bows such as the English longbow are made of a single piece of wood comprising both limbs and the grip.
[5] In bows drawn and held by hand, the maximum draw weight is determined by the strength of the archer.
[37] The maximum distance the string could be displaced and thus the longest arrow that could be loosed from it, a bow's draw length, is determined by the size of the archer.
[40] Modern construction materials for bows include laminated wood, fiberglass, metals,[41] and carbon fiber components.
Carbon shafts have the advantage that they do not bend or warp, but they can often be too light weight to shoot from some bows and are expensive.
[43] Arrow sizes vary greatly across cultures and range from very short ones that require the use of special equipment to be shot to ones in use in the Amazon River jungles that are 2.6 m (8.5 feet) long.
Modern fibres such as Dacron or Kevlar are now used in commercial bowstring construction, as well as steel wires in some compound bows.
