Bow vs. atlatl: New research dates arrival of warfare upgrade in North America

The retreat of snowfields and glaciers across North America has revealed stunning ancient artifacts, such as an 11,500-year-old atlatl dart recovered in the Beartooth Mountains in 2007.

In the Southwest, dry caves and rock shelters have been sources of intact artifacts that otherwise would have decayed, from bows and arrows to nets made of plant fibers used to capture game like bighorn sheep.

By dating 136 preserved organic weapons, researchers have now estimated the bow and arrow arrived in North America about 1,400 years ago, or roughly A.D. 600 to 700. The study also contends the new technology quickly replaced the atlatl – a lever used to toss a dart – in the Southwest, whereas northern residents hung onto the atlatl longer than previously believed.

For comparison, it was around A.D. 500 that the Anasazi, or ancestral Puebloans, settled into their farming settlements in the Southwest.

The research, titled “Rapid adoption of bow technology across western North America 1,400 years ago,” was published in the March 2026 issue of PNAS Nexus.

Briggs Buchanan, a professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Tulsa, was the article’s lead author. Other contributors include Marcus Hamilton, Metin Eren and Robert Walker.

Ice patch discovery

It was Craig Lee who discovered the Beartooth atlatl dart, highlighting Paleoindian use of high elevations that scientists had previously discounted.

The professor of sociology and anthropology at Montana State University has long chased retreating snowlines in search of similar artifacts before they disintegrate.

“As noted by the article authors, countless others have endeavored to differentiate bow and arrow technology from atlatl technology based on projectile point morphometrics,” he wrote in an email.

For example, a larger stone point would have been used for a spear as opposed to a smaller one attached to an arrow. Early inhabitants used different styles of points, starting with Clovis, which is probably the most famous.

“For arrows, it’s generally assumed that nocked ends would articulate with a bow string whereas darts are assumed to have dimpled ends which would articulate with the ‘hook’ on the end of an atlatl,” Lee said.

Because of the new study’s use of radiocarbon dating of the artifacts, rather than dates based on the style of projectile points used in the past, Lee called the study “more robust.”

Wyoming native and professor emeritus Larry Todd, of Colorado State University, agreed.

“By directly dating the wooden darts and arrows themselves, the authors avoid the guesswork inherent in relying on stone points or site layers,” he said. “The result is a much clearer picture of when the bow replaced the atlatl and a foundation for even more precise dating of other existing collections, as new discoveries are made.”

New tech

Imagine the technological leap that occurred, for hunting as well as for warfare, when the bow and arrow arrived in North America.

“Generally, relative to atlatl technology, bow technology confers several advantages in projectile delivery, including increased arrow accuracy, distance, and velocity; increased shots per unit time; reduced spatial requirements to make a shot; increased stealth; and the ability to reload and shoot from a variety of positions (e.g. from horseback or a tree, or kneeling, crouching, or lying down),” the researchers wrote.

They also theorize that although the new technology spread from the Northern Plains to the Southwest fairly quickly, northern tribes didn’t immediately abandon the atlatl, whereas southern people shifted all at once.

“In the south, across a vast area from northern Mexico to California and the Southwest, the bow rapidly and almost completely replaces the atlatl, a case of technological disruption in which an innovation decisively renders an older system obsolete,” the researchers wrote. “In the north, in contrast, the bow and atlatl coexisted for more than a millennium.”

Lee said he found it interesting, from a human behavior perspective, the study’s conclusion that there was a “wholesale adoption of bow and arrow technology in the Southwest.”

The authors contend the replacement was “dramatically abrupt, suggesting that once exposed to the new bow technology, the performance improvements over the existing atlatl technology were immediate and obvious to users (even if users are not fully aware of how the technology worked).”

Altitude and latitude

Lee said he was glad the study acknowledged earlier dates for bow and arrow technology in North America.

“The current article authors interpret those as isolated or short-lived events, and in this regard, I think the ice patch record is especially relevant,” he wrote. “In the Greater Yellowstone Area, we identified a willow shaft fragment with a possible ‘arrow nock’ dating to roughly 4,000 radiocarbon years ago – far earlier than the main adoption horizon.”

Along with other evidence of early bow and arrow use in Alaska and the Yukon, Lee said “it’s possible that the alpine ice record contains evidence of brief pulses” of the technology’s “transmission along the Rocky Mountain corridor. One could even argue that alongside a latitudinal gradient, there may also be an altitudinal dimension to toolkit diversity.”

Dating more artifacts in existing collections could expand that knowledge, he added.

What rock art says

In another link to when the bow and arrow arrived in this region, in 2024 archaeologist Larry Loendorf recounted the dating of a pictograph site south of Great Falls. The rock art shows a shield-bearing warrior with what looks like an atlatl. Next to the figure was another human who had been shot in the back. The dead person was holding a bow.

In sampling the paint, the archaeologist got a date of A.D. 300, the oldest shield-bearing warrior ever recorded in the region.

“If you know anything about archaeology in this part of the world, you will know that that’s very, very old for a bow and arrow,” Loendorf said. “It’s almost the very time that the bow and arrow was introduced to this part of the world.”

“So interestingly enough, what we sort of put together here is a battle between the resident Pelican Lake people and the nomadic bow and arrow users,” Loendorf said. “And the resident Pelican Lake people won the battle, is what the story is telling us here, because they put an arrow in the back of the guy with the bow. So the introduction of the bow and arrow wasn’t all fun and games.”

Climate specific?

In the north, atlatl use continued for another 1,000 years after bow and arrows first appeared, the research article stated, longer than previously believed. The overlap makes sense, the researchers concluded, because in northern environments, with the varied weather and temperature fluctuations, more options to take down game are needed.

“Northern foragers typically maintain a wider range of tools than their tropical counterparts,” Buchanan and his colleagues wrote, adding that “failure in a single subsistence strategy carries greater consequences for survival” in cold weather environments.

Lee agreed, noting that “maintaining more diverse toolkits” is a “hedge against risk.”

A 2013 study regarding the arrival of the bow and arrow in North America noted that when Russians landed in the Aleutian Islands in the 1700s, natives were still using atlatls for hunting because they could be used one-handed from a kayak. The bow and arrow, on the other hand, were used mainly for warfare.

Evolution vs. best tool

Although the progression from spear throwing to atlatl to bow seems like an evolutionary adaptation from one technology to the next best one, scientists have dated what they believe to be arrow tips in a cave in southeast Africa to 60,000 years ago.

Atlatls arrive on the archaeological scene much later, about 25,000 years ago based on artifacts found in France. They arrived in the Americas around 13,000 years ago, as the first migrants from Asia crossed the Bering Land Bridge or boated along its coast.

Buchanan and his research colleagues nod to this “context dependent” adoption of new tools, noting that “technological evolution is not solely a matter of invention, innovation, and diffusion, but adoption dynamics are shaped by additional factors such as the ecological risk regimes in which societies and their technologies operate.”

One of Lee’s colleagues noted that Buchanan and his fellow researchers conveniently neglected to mention that Aztecs continued to use atlatls long after introduction of the bow and arrow. Spanish invader Hernan Cortes and his army encountered armor-piercing atlatl darts when they invaded Mesoamerica in 1519.

Atlatl is also the Nahuatl word for spear thrower, Lee said. Nahuatl is an indigenous Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico.

Athapaskan innovators

Looking farther north, scholars generally agree that the bow and arrow was introduced to the Americas by Athapaskans.

Around A.D. 1,000 some of them migrated from western Canada to the Southwest, centuries after the introduction of the bow and arrow, possibly due to environmental changes in their homelands.

Tribes such as the Navajo, Kiowa-Apache and Mescalero are Athapaskan descendants who, prior to Euro-American invasion, had settled in parts of what are now Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, to name a few southwest states.

Athapaskans migrated from the Mackenzie Basin of Canada – the nation’s largest watershed that stretches across portions of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

The Athapaskan migration coincides with the first Viking explorations of North America as well as the Pueblos’ abandonment of Chaco Canyon in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.