Posted on 03/28/2026 6:34:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The bow and arrow were first used in western North America some 1,400 years ago, according to a statement released by PNAS Nexus. Briggs Buchanan of the University of Tulsa and his colleagues radiocarbon dated 136 weapons made of organic materials, which were recovered from glacial ice patches, dry caves, and rock shelters where they had been preserved. The researchers determined that the bow appeared in a single place, then spread rapidly across North America through cultural transmission networks. In northern British Columbia and Alberta, people adopted the bow and arrow, but continued to use the atlatl to throw darts for more than 1,000 years. In contrast, people to the south -- in California, the Southwest, and northern Mexico -- rapidly replaced the use of the atlatl with the bow and arrow. Buchanan and his team members think that people living to the north may have found some advantages to throwing darts with the atlatl during the colder months or while hunting certain prey. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PNAS Nexus. To read about a rock art panel in central Montana that depicts an archer, go to "A Very Close Encounter."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
There were wheeled Aztec, Mayan or Olmec(i forget which culture!) children’s toys.
Why have wheeled vehicles when you have nothing other then people to pull them. No large domestic animals in the Americas.
Probably related to music. Mouthbows, berimbaus, umakhweyana. There’s a bunch that come close enough that somebody mucking about could easily go “hey wait a minute” and start down a weapon path.
And a horse.
Previous to the arrival of Columbus, North America was occupied by stone aged tribes of indigenous people... They had no metallurgy, no wheels, no horses... They subsisted on the animals they caught and hunted. Ownership and the concept of owning anything was a foreign concept to them.
Some indigenous tribes in southern north America and in South America had developed to the stage where they did practice some rudimentary form of agriculture. Indigenous tribes in upper North America had not achieved that level of advancement... And they were exclusively hunter gathers... No wheels.
Not disagreeing.
The Asian migrants to America from the West would have imported the use of the bow and arrow thousands of years ago.
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my understanding is that there were several pulses of migration from west asia. The earliest may go back as far as 30,000 bc.
another pulse of migration may have come around 12,00-14,000 bc.
Neither of these migrations would have had the bow arrow. they were all atlatl hunters.
My understanding is that a new group came to the Americas in several waves starting around 200 AD. Most canadian tribes date from this group—as well as a significant number of American tribes. This group also pushed down into Mexico and formed the basis of central american civilizations there.
These people brought the bow and arrow with them. Likely the bow and arrow being superior technology to the atlatl in combat—would have overwhelmed the locals.
People in the Americas started to use bow and arrows around 5,000 years ago, according to a new study.
https://www.futurity.org/archery-americas-3019432/
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