Archery

Archery is the sport, activity, or skill of shooting arrows with a bow and arrows from a target. The term is derived from the Latin arcus, which means bow. Archery has traditionally been used for hunting and military purposes. In current times, it is mostly used as a competitive sport and as a kind of leisure. Someone who practises archery is often referred to as an archer or a bowman, and someone who is enthusiastic about or an adept at archery is frequently referred to as a toxophilite or a marksperson.

Sibudu Cave in South Africa, where the remnants of bone and stone arrowheads reaching back about 72,000-60,000 years have been discovered, is the place where the earliest known evidence of arrows was discovered. The bow seems to have emerged or resurfaced later in Eurasia, at the time of the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic, based on indirect archaeological evidence. The oldest known certain remnants of a bow and arrow from Europe are potential pieces from Germany discovered at Mannheim-Vogelstang and Stellmoor, both of which date to 17,500-18,000 years ago. Azilian points discovered in Switzerland's Grotte du Bichon, near the bones of a bear and a hunter, as well as flint bits found in the animal's third vertebra, indicating that arrows were used 13,500 years ago, according to the researchers. Some of the earliest evidence of its usage in Europe comes from the Stellmoor site, which is located in the Ahrensburg valley north of Hamburg, Germany, and dates back to the late Paleolithic period, about 10,000–9000 BC. The arrows were constructed of pine and consisted of a main shaft and a fore shaft that was 15–20 centimetres (5+7/8–7+7/8 in) in length and had a flint tip on it. Early bows are not known to have existed in any significant numbers; prior pointed shafts are known to have existed, but they may have been fired by spear throwers rather than bows. The Holmegrd marsh in Denmark is home to the world's oldest bows, according to archaeological evidence. The discovery of obsidian bladelets implanted in a skeleton's head and inside the thoracic cavity of another body at the site of Nataruk in Turkana County, Kenya, suggests that stone-tipped arrows were used as weapons around 10,000 years ago. As a primary way of throwing shafted projectiles, bows ultimately displaced spears on every continent except Antarctica, while spearthrowers continued to be used with the bow in certain regions of North and South America, especially Mexico and among the Inuit.

Archers have been a part of Egyptian and nearby Nubian culture from their respective predynastic and pre-Kerma emergences, according to historians. From the Natufian civilization (c. 10,800–8,300 BC) forward, items that might have been arrow-shaft straighteners have been discovered across the Levant. It is possible that the Khiamian and PPN A shouldered Khiam-points are arrowheads.