“It’s human nature to resist change.”
Yeah, but every now and again there’s a maverick.
It could have happened that way, but I hate to think people took that long to invent the bow.
I think the Atlatl and darts worked quite well for a delivery device so there was no real need to improve these much. What they did do was concentrate efforts into improving methods of knapping lithics and the quality of lithics for the points.
The earliest bows found are dated to around 18,000 years ago. But they spread pretty slow. In fact they didn’t come to the Americas in the arctic until around 200 Ad. But even then when the Spanish went to conquer South America in the 1500’s the South American indigenous were still using the atlatl and darts.