I think understand that the concept of a pointy thing on a long stick is universal, hence spears, but how did almost every culture, even isolated ones, think to develop bows and arrows? We see these from Europe to Africa to Asia to the Americas and even the Sentinelese, so what gives?
In: Technology
There’s basically two schools of thought you could go with here. Either inventing certain things is fairly likely, given the mechanics of the human body and the materials that people have access to. Or, inventing things is fairly unlikely, and most technological change happens because of cultural diffusion – that is, the gradual spread of one idea from people to people. Anthropologists debate which is the most likely.
But the bow and arrow is not evidence for either idea as it’s just incredibly old. The oldest likely arrowheads have been found in sites dated to 50,000 years ago. If it was invented only a few times and spread throughout human cultures, it had plenty of time to do so. But it has also had plenty of time to be invented multiple times, as clearly the necessary level of technological development to invent the bow and arrow has existed for tens of thousands of years at least all over the world.
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