Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Bows => Topic started by: bigfish on August 28, 2015, 05:56:06 pm
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there has been much debate over the fact of it being a work in progress or a usable bow but are there any pics. showing possible set/string follow I think this could lean it in favor of being usable as I can not see him sealing a bow that was in the works and also show if it was built in reverse with the d side as the back
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I think I read an article that proved that the bow, if used would snap because it would be way under built for the draw weight that it would be at if drawn, I think they estimated it at something like 150 pounds at 28 inches or something. Which would be too much for a man of Otzi's stature to draw. Also the bows width was too narrow to handle the forces that a bow with such draw weight would be under. Could always be wrong though.
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Just a thought : what if it was a green bow? Perhaps the dimentions were so off because he would just use it and tiller it as beeded as it dried? It could make the bow look so incredibly strong. Just an off hand thought. I know nothing of this subject at all
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It was almost certainly a stave on it's way to becoming a bow.
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I'll just ask him next time I see him ....
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here is an article giving dimensions, comparing to other bows and using computer models to estimate draw weight.
http://www.primitiveways.com/Otzi's_bow.html (http://www.primitiveways.com/Otzi's_bow.html)
I know that its not the same but there is an interesting video on recreating the ascott heath bow just using primitive tools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th6EOlLK0DA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th6EOlLK0DA)
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Thanks, bigfish. Jawge
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Is there any thing showing that it was to be shot in reverse with the d as the back
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His arrows were also not finished.
He had wounds that he died off.
Think of it like this. They guy was mugged and escaped without most of his stuff, maybe one bag. He starts running home over the mnts. He is getting chased. He needs weapons so he starts building a bow. Naturally it is green but needs power so it is over built.
Just my take on it.
DEK
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what bothers me is the "more than a man of his stature could pull"...
i am thoroughly convinced that men in those times were way and far stronger for their size then men are today... these people fought and scraped for everything they had... their lives were nailed to their spines with railroad spikes and every fight or altercation they had was for all the marbles...
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it could be true that men were stronger for their size,, I would not be surprised,, interesting thought for sure
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I do not see how a man of his stature would be able to pull a bow above 60-70 pounds. Men back then we're not lifting weights, they were running and walking to chase and find game and other food,and that builds lean muscle not the mass needed to pull weight. More muscle equals more calories consumed, do you think a man back then would be able to handle the extra caloric need for an extended period of time. Furthermore pulling a bow of such weight on a regular basis is bound to screw something up for a man his size and there are no doctors to tend to his rotator cuff when it's been messed up by pulling a #150 bow. His muscle fibers are the same as ours and I do not think that he would have had the strength to pull this bow. Natural selection would be against such a hulking muscular man as he would likely be slow and an easy target for predators or other humans. Just my train of thought though. And I've been wrong before.
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I've seen some pretty skinny guys pull some awfully heavy bows. just sayin'. Always wanted to say, "just sayin' "
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Well, I'm not part of the Big Gulp generation and I think you guys are selling Otzi a little short, based on your lifestyle. I'm 5' 6" and 62 years old, hunt with a #60 bow and have not a lot of problem pulling a #90 bow to full draw. I think they might have been a lot leaner then the Pot belly boys runn,, oops driving around today.
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Ishi's bows were rather light. Not saying he did not have the strength needed but he was a wild man and made 40# hunting bows. It was enough to get the job done.
Pulling super heavy bows or doing very heavy sort of work changes the bone structure. Basically the muscles must pull harder on the tendons and the tendons must pull on the bones so at the attachment points our bodies build up more bone to handle the strain. I have seen no reports of this on Otzi. You do see it in reports of the men from the Mary Rose.
Another question is why would he need a 150# bow? You can kill a bear with a much lighter bow. I am thinking that the best armor of the time would have been leather and I am not even sure that they had that 5000 year ago.
This does of course not prove that in this emergency he did not build a bow to his maximum capacity for this one time war use.
Douglas
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Wether he could pull a heavy bow or not it simply would not be needed. Heavy have one purpose and one purpose alone - to kill other humans that have some sort of armour/protection. His stave was almost certainly a roughed out bow. As mentioned above the Indians bows weren't heavy this we know from all the pieces in museums, they had a similar lifestyle ipso factso they would have had similar weight bows. It's just common sense really ;)
In fact go and live in the woods as a hunter gatherer and then tell me you made a 100# + bow to shoot your food just for the hell of it....... >:D
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I think y'all are forgetting about is "stand off range" if I'm living in a violent world, I'd want a weapon that I could kill with from a greater range than my enemies. Your chances of surviving an encounter improve greatly if the bad guys can't touch you. So a heavier war bow can cast an arrow further than a lighter hunting bow. Just a thought.
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The evidence points toward an unfinished bow no doubt. However the need for a large draw weight bow might not always be to shoot through armor or send arrows arching 300 yards toward advancing hoards.
Forgive me if I'm wrong about the timeline here, but 5300 years ago means mammoths were still around. I seriously doubt a 40-50# bow would even get through the woolly part. Thick matted hair slows and arrow almost as fast as a high density foam target. Reaching the vitals on a creature that big would require burring the arrow to the fletchings at the very least. Just some food for thought.
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Mammoths died off roughly 12,000 years ago and the small strongholds of remnant animals were extinguished roughly 8000 years ago.
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close.. they say there were pockets of them around 7000yrs ago... http://www.livescience.com/9771-mammoths-alive-thought.html
but who knows...
we will never know for sure... about the bow... how strong he was or why/what he was doing...
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Wikkipedia claims mammoths(not species specific) were around up to 4500 years ago, but then again that's wikkipedia. I should have cross referenced.
The point was simply that the bow you need depends on what you're hunting.
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I have read Native bows for some tribes were 70 plus(in on of Jim Hamms books),, not all native bows were on the lighter side,,I am sure it varied from archer to archer,, the bows in the museums are not exactly representative of all bows used,, they are just a small hint of what was used in the past,,at least that is what my archeologist friend tells me,, what ever reason he carried the bow he was planning to use it for something :):)
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I imagine that even in Neolithic times there were macho jocks that just had to pull a heavier bow than the next guy.
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Why do we think he was drawing 28"?
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The Cherokee(and probably others) had 100# war bows but that is just what they were, war bows. Their day to day bows for hunting and regular defense were probably from 40# to 60#.(just a guess)
What was Outzi up to when he was attacked.? Was he on regular travel, going from point A to point B, was he on a hunting trip or was he trolling for marauders? In any of these casers I would think he'd be carrying his everyday bow, one he was used to shooting on a regular basis. For hunting or self defense he would have a bow he normally use. Why was he carrying partially completed arrows and bow blank? Had he lost or broke his regular stuff? I believe he was 6 hours or less from home when he died, at least by his stomach content. Would that have been enough time for him to get where he was and collect and work of the bow(to be) and arrows? Did he bring these things with him from home to work on along his journey? I guess we will never really know.
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maybe he was taking them to trade for a good bow,,
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A green bow is half the power of a dry one and that would put his bow at a respectable 75 lbs! I think it was an emergency bow. I would bet that the one fancy two part arrow was one he grabbed as they fired them at him. Perhaps it even hit him in his pack of something and that is why he had it. I wish someone would make a movie of his last days. It could be really fun to watch.
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not a very happy ending :)
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You could paint him as the hero!
He hid there waiting for the onrushing horde, firing arrow after arrow into them while his wife, 6 kids and uncle disappeared up the pass. Then he too made a break for it but just as he cut the rope over the chasm an arrow pierced him. He kept running but never made over the pass. To this day his family celebrates his sacrifice.
A beer to heros!
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or... he was in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong hour and wearing the wrong color furs and became an innocent victim of a trot-by bowing...
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Hahaha, trot by bowing! Real problem in those neolithic woodlands.
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There are a couple good, very exhaustive discussions on Otzi's bow and yew bows in general over on PP:
---http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/17432#.Ve9zsO9RFgk
---http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/14119/202lb-yew-warbow?page=9#.Ve9z8e9RFgl
Basically, Otzi's "bow" looks like it was made entirely of yew heartwood and has unusual grain orientation: it either has a decrowned back or, flipped the other way, does not follow a ring on the back. There are also no knocks: just pointed tips. The surface is not smoothed and shows many tools marks. Reproductions made with yew and using the same dimensions yield bows in the 160# range at 28" draw. Otzi was 5'-3" (63") tall and the "bow" is 1.82 meters long (71.65").
You decide if it was a bow or not. I think it's a goat-herders' stick, but that's me. >:D
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Maybe it was a walking/ herding stick, that's an interesting thought there.
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He did clearly have arrows.
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The layout of the equipment on the site where Otzi was found is spread out somewhat. The quiver was not found next to the body. Neither was the "bow", "backpack frame", or the axe. In the small picture below, I think the quiver is in the upper left and labeled "D". I need to find a blown up version if that picture.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AQY
You decide if all the equipment was actually his or not.
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I can't tell the scale of that photo but if that is the body and it is to scale and he was on a glacier which moves and he was there for 5000 years then I don't think that the things have moved all that much. Also animals like birds might have moved stuff if it smelled good also.
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from that layout alone, i would guess there was more than one assailant.
while he was wounded, they hurriedly picked through his things from a safe distance (possibly where they were thrown during the altercation) only taking what they wanted (his finished bow and arrows and the pack covering).
assailant 1: "go get the axe!"
assailant 2: "hell no, he's still moving!"
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It's fun to speculate but the truth could be anywhere between he accidentally shot himself in the back and a bunch of stone age guys sitting around a campfire trying to come up with ways of screwing with archaeologists heads. They must have called it the stone age for a reason. >:D >:D
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There's a lot of speculation surrounding the whole Otzi discovery and no "central" authority on all the data. I've purchased books and spent hundreds of hours chasing data and I can't even be sure of even the simplest of details. The whole situation is frustrating from a researcher's point of view. Even the recreation of Otzi himself may be wrong because the actual body does not show signs of grey hair on his head or face. (The wax statue has grey hair).
Anyways, the site is within a natural "bowl" that is surrounded by boulders and was locked in by ice as the glacier flowed over the top of the depression. It has been determined that none of the items moved very far, if at all, from their original positions. The intact nature of the body is an obvious fact that supports the lack of movement within the site.
(edit) If I remember correctly, I think the quiver was at least 12 feet from the body... but I'm not sure. In any case, you can use the length of the body as a scale in that small picture.
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There's a lot of speculation surrounding the whole Otzi discovery and no "central" authority on all the data. I've purchased books and spent hundreds of hours chasing data and I can't even be sure of even the simplest of details.
I know as much as I do because of my minimal research that I did because I want to make a replica of his arrows.
Would you be so kind as to share your arrow info with me? I too have been frustrated by this.
I would really like to know what sort of woods were used; latin names.
Woolly snowball is one wood (that is a translation of the german common name). I found a stick of it, I think and it has the amazing property of bending when wet like wire and staying in that shape as it dries (mostly). My piecse is about 5 feet long and arrow straight without heat straightening like I do with other woods. The other is stated as dog wood but there are 60 species of that and no one seems to know which one.
Thanks!
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if the bow was in progress, we all know a 100 pound bow does not take much tillering to get to a usable weight,,,
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Magickcrow, I would try using Viburnum opulus (common name guelder-rose) for the Otzi arrows. For the dogwood, I would try Cornus mas (Cornelian cherry, European cornel).
I don't think I have specific data on the species that Otzi used but the above examples are native to Europe and were used in prehistory for tools and weapons.
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A guy on youtube named Shawn Woods has a great video series on building an otzi arrow.