Study pinpoints when bow and arrow came to North America

People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern regions, while people living farther north initially adopted the bow and arrow as a complement to their existing toolkit, gradually phasing out the atlatl and dart over a thousand years.

That’s according to the latest research from experimental archaeologist Metin Eren’s Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at Kent State University in Ohio, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer a wide range of ancient technologies, from stone tools and ceramics to metal, butchery, and textiles. Eren achieved some notoriety for his 2019 debunking of an Inuit legend, testing rudimentary knives made of frozen feces to see whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon. That paper ...