While recently touring around I was doing some background reading on a west coast Native American tribe. I was very surprised to learn that this tribe adopted the use of the bow and arrow pretty late, probably not before AD 1300. I had always thought that the bow and arrow was technology that was ubiquitous to all Native Americans and that they had possessed it since their arrival on the continent. Certainly, growing up and reading about Nephi's steel bow and the ferociousness of Lamanite culture, I had clearly pictured the bow and arrow as elemental to Book of Mormon history. And as evidence suggest, this is also how the writer(s) of the Book of Mormon thought of Indians and their bows and arrows.

Alas, like so much of what is described in the Book of Mormon about pre-Colombian culture, the use of the bow and arrow doesn't fit the time and/or place, especially in North America.

While interpretations vary and the final version is yet to be written, archaeology indicates that the bow and arrow didn't make it to eastern North America until sometime after AD 300. Bow and arrow technology spread across California between AD 250 and 1200, first appearing in the intermountain deserts of the Great Basin and later spreading to the coast.

The adoption of this powerful new technology appears to have acted as a catalyst for social change across the continent, perhaps even contributing to the collapse of the great societies like the Hopewell.

The history of humans in the Western Hemisphere is marvelously long, complex, and compelling. (I am very curious to know if the bow and arrow in the Americas is a case of parallelism or diffusion - was it invented here, or brought here from somewhere else? And if it was brought here, did the path it take follow the routes established by the first migrants from Asia?) It is clear from the evidence left behind by the people who populated this continent, however, that the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with their history.

http://anthropology.ua.edu/reprints/977.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21358

Interesting isn't it. I do know that the bow and arrow are in the archaeological record much earlier in the arctic, and then spread southward throughout the Americas.

There has always been a lot of interaction between the circum-polar cultures, so I'm pretty sure the technology was spread among them. Whether the prehistoric circum-polar cultures developed the technology, or adopted it, I have no idea.

A very complex history with ties to Asia.

http://www.academia.edu/4453673/The_Bow_and_Arrow_in_Northern_North_America

That is what makes me wonder if the spread of the bow out of the Arctic took the same route as has been proposed for the (much) earlier migration from Asia down through an ice-free corridor in the middle of the continent or down the Pacific coast.

Richard actually "schooled" me on when bow and arrow technology arrived in this hemisphere; I'd mistakenly referred to a piece by a Native American who claimed they'd "always had them," and clearly they hadn't.

I'm doing a lot research on many of these "tangential issues," as well as winding up in other forums that provide a "useful outlet" for my road rage.

Honest, Richard, I invited another "archaeologist"* on YouTube to debate you after he claimed that Clovis Points were used as arrowheads...

I took the ol' poiice interceptor through the car wash to get rid of the evidence after I grazed him and ran over his foot; we'll have to see if he does a "zombie impersonation."

*Well, he claimed to be an archaeologist on YouTube, but I'm having my doubts... He was also part of the "Solutrean Silliness" crowd, but I told him even Stanford himself wouldn't support that nonsense about Clovis-points-as-arrowheads crap...

Here you go, Richard: I've been sitting on this one for a couple of years now and trying to determine the implications. Another board friend sent me more on the same subject. Be careful drinking that water...

http://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2050-7445-1-24

Meanwhile Waters and Stafford are trying to make some C-14 claims about "Clovis artifacts" they insist are "pre-Clovis."

SLC
Recalling a conversation between Will Bagley and Jesus Smith where JS complained about "too much politics in academia" (he has PhD in physics) and Will hollered, "It's all politics."

Yep. The reservoir affect has some serious implications. Also in the spotlight now is that C14 dates on bone are coming under serious suspicion. It's starting to look like all the previously accepted "bone" dates may need to be looked at again, and maybe just thrown out.

young Mormon ziller used to wonder how that dum-ass managed to break a steal bow ~

...or why dum-ass Nephi would make one out of steel in the first place. :)

Somewhat related response... We recently returned from a trip to Ireland. We visited the archaeology museum at Trinity College in Dublin. I took pictures of an interesting (to me) of an exhibit of ancient mining tools in Ireland. These were dated back to 1500 BC. No mining tools to my knowledge have been found in ancient America. Metallurgy and the required mining to have metals mentioned in the Book of Mormon is a significant anachronism as well.

Metal had so completely replaced stone as a tool material in Europe that when later generations found stone weapon points they called them "Fairy Darts" or "Thunderstones" and were thought to have magical origins and applications. No memory persisted on how to make stone tools or how to use them.

I can't think of any instance where a culture, once having the use of metal, gave it up in preference of stone.

I'm not an expert but I am involved a lot with making primitive and traditional bows. I think as said above that bows were used in the northern regions (Canada) a lot earlier, but probably not much before ~ 500 BC. In comparison there are examples of bows found in Europe that are over 5000 years old. I believe there is some evidence for bows as early as 500 BC in the western US, but I don't think that is widely accepted. It's clear native Americans were not using Nephite bows ever. Bows of steel existed in ancient times but probably did not arise in India and the middle east until well after Lehi supposedly sailed to America. If you want to read a hilarious argument that the phrase stolen from the King James Bible " bow of fine steel" found in the book of mormon actually means a "strongly recurved bow" google for Bill Hamblin and Bow of Fine Steel.

And yes you can make really powerful bows from spring steel. Crossbows prods made of steel dating from the late 1200s have been found, and steel cross bows were used extensively later. Really powerful bows used by in the middle east at the time of Lehi were probably composite bows made of horn.