There were at least four phases of bow and arrow usage in Northern America. At this time, the population started to go down after 6000 BC. They occurred at 12000, 4500, 2400, and around 1300 years ago. The value of the adoption of the bow and arrow in Northern America may be understood only in terms of their use by Russian explorers who arrived in the Aleutian Islands during the eighteenth century.
The Aleuts were known to have used both the atlatl and dart and the bow and arrow at that time. This is significant for two distinct and crucial reasons. The bow and arrow in the Aleutian Islands were used almost exclusively in combat, making it one of the few instances when both technologies were utilized simultaneously.
Second, the bow and arrow were used nearly exclusively in battle throughout history. The atlatl was an important innovation because the bow and arrow are ineffective for hunting sea mammals. A kayak is unsuitable for launching an arrow due to the fact that it is too unstable and requires both hands to be on a paddle. It’s as simple as stabilizing the kayak with a paddle on one side and throwing an atlatl dart with the opposite hand to use an atlatl. The Aleut used the bow and arrow on Alaska’s Peninsula to hunt caribou.
However, there are no terrestrial mammals in Alaska’s 1,400 kilometers along with the Aleutian Islands, where humans and bows were used exclusively for interspecies conflicts. The most noteworthy occurrence in the history of the bow and arrow is not its early use but rather the Asian War Complex 1300 years ago, when recurve and backed bows for the first time entered the region, forever changing regional and hemispheric political dynamics.
