isnt it so weird how native americans and europeans both invented bows and arrows

[Hank Hell]

two entirely seperate people invented the same thing its like if you put two different people in two locked rooms and each of them eventually coming up with the same thing its crazy. sure, their asian ancestors might've brought it across the land bridge but its still two seperate people with no contact inventing the same thing isnt that just crazy

[SpicyPepperoni]

There was a word for stuff like that uhhh, global understanding? probably not close, it happens often, partly why people say we're all connecting.

[crypt]

Man bow n’ arrows are hard to use. I took an archery class and my aim was never consistent. Shoutout to the people who actually know how to use it.

[Violeta]

nope, because how basic they are.

[Drab]

https://quatr.us/africa/invented-bow-arrow.htm

Bows were already invented before people came to the Americas.

[Nine-ball]

It's actually not that crazy. As Drab suggests with his evidence, and assuming the "Out of Africa" theory is correct, a lot of things were invented before the human race spread all over the world. The bow and arrow would be one.

Regardless, people demonstrably invented the same things seperately well afterwards, like the wheel. The oldest known wheel was discovered in modern Slovenia, dating back to around 5000 BC, but there are wheels dating back to 1000 BC in Mesoamerican culture, despite no known contact with the East for tens of thousands of years.

The funny thing about everybody inventing the wheel is that some people never managed to pair it with the axle. An axle requires a degree of engineering skill to make it functional, and some cultures simply never came in contact with the tools to make one. Stone-age implements are generally not sufficient, unless a great deal of skill is used. Imagine lathing a log into a cylinder and then binding it with stone-carved hinges.

As a result, several isolated cultures had the wheel, invented seperately, but were never able to make great use of it despite the obvious utility. An opposing modern argument, that they didn't use the wheel because they didn't have draft animals, is PC nonsense, imho. Do you need a draft animal for a wheelbarrow or the ubiqutous East Asian hand cart? Obviously, the problem was the lack of tools spreading, just as it was when chariots dominated the old world. Not everybody had them at once, and they were expensive commodities because of the engineeering skill required to produce them. Isolated cultures simply never had great pressure put upon them by such inventions to come up with their own versions at all.

A good lens and exmaple for today might be the structural arch. A lot of modern humans have no idea how it operates, mostly because they aren't required to. A relatively late development in human history, the benefits are obvious. An arch leans on itself in a curve, and so requires fewer materials to create very strong structures that stand for thousands of years, even if they're only made of stone.

Yet the arch wasn't invented until the rise of the Etruscans, and never really exploited until the Middle Romans. That's a big gap, millenia, between cultures that were relatively close. Again, the problem was the engineering skill needed to produce them at all. Engineering is a complex skill and thus necessarily spreads more slowly. Sometimes not at all. Just as in engineering precision tools. Maybe, if the Etruscans hadn't been wiped out, we would have seen more arches across the world in less time, but they charged their chariots into destruction and died. Not that I judge them for that, the Old World was a harsh place.

But simple inventions, post-diasproa, or in the event that Out of Africa is incorrect, always, come relatively naturally to humans, even if we learn a lot of things by imitation. Different techniques for cooking and curing meat, using animal fat as grease, banging stuff around until something interesting happens, these are just a few of the qualities we share as a species, and you can see them in any child. You can see the admiration when any human you know comes up with something new, and feel the pride when you do.

What's lacking is advanced skill and precision, something a lot of isolated cultures never chanced upon. And why would they? There was no pressure other than survival against the elements. But when somebody runs over you with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chariot, there is suddenly a lot of reason to learn exactly how that thing works, so you can make your own and run over them. Thus accounting for differences in human development.

[Killiberke]

Concept of multiple discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

[Alpha]

Even today people will come up with the same ideas for stories, games, or even mathematical and scientific discoveries, independently of each other. But as for bow and arrow, that is one of the first tools our ancestors developed, along with the knife, the spear, etc.

[java.lang.NullPointerException]

Chinese started settling down and farming around the same time as other people.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Bows and arrows were invented at stone age, long before american natives.

[SnusHead]

Originally posted by Carpel (Daily Workout):

nope, because how basic they are.

[HypersleepyNaputunia]

The tribes who were the first to colonize america probably were already following game with bows across the land bridge

[psychotron666]

What I always wondered was how native Americans had things like a bow and arrow, but not a wheel. Was the wheel invented after bow and arrow, and somehow the native Americans missed out?

[Plaid]

That was a nice read, Nine-ball

[HypersleepyNaputunia]

"Although large-scale use of wheels did not occur in the Americas prior to European contact, numerous small wheeled artifacts, identified as children's toys, have been found in Mexican archeological sites, some dating to about 1500 BC.[12] It is thought that the primary obstacle to large-scale development of the wheel in the Americas was the absence of domesticated large animals which could be used to pull wheeled carriages" wiki

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by Naputune:

"Although large-scale use of wheels did not occur in the Americas prior to European contact, numerous small wheeled artifacts, identified as children's toys, have been found in Mexican archeological sites, some dating to about 1500 BC.[12] It is thought that the primary obstacle to large-scale development of the wheel in the Americas was the absence of domesticated large animals which could be used to pull wheeled carriages" wiki

Still doesn't make much sense, because north American natives used dogs pulling two sticks that they held things on. A wheel would have been more efficient and less taxing on their dogs.

I mean I understand why the Inuit never had wheels with snow, but all the north American ones don't really have a reason to not be using a wheel.

And south American natives like the Mayans were by far the most advanced, with an estimated population of 2 million in their prime. Which on a side note is why I wonder many natives today claim north American natives had a nation and population of 100 million, when Mayans were the most advanced able to feed the most amount of people with mass farming etc, and there's archeological evidence of so, but no archeological evidence that shows North Americans natives even having close to that population, or a "nation" of any kind. We have more evidence to show they were warring factions with small populations because they didn't have the infrastructure to feed mass populations like the Mayans.