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There are at least 24 mostly complete bows, and many more fragments, that have survived from prehistory. These bows were found across the geographic area of several modern countries including: England, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and the

Netherlands. The oldest discovered bows were fragments found in Stellmoor in Germany and dated to c. 8,000 BC. Sadly these fragments were destroyed during World War II.197

The oldest surviving bows were from Holmegaard on the island of Zealand, Denmark. They have been dated to between c. 6,000 BC and c. 2,000 BC. Very few surviving prehistoric bows have dates more specific than 'neolithic'. The oldest prehistoric English bow has been dated to c.2690 BC while the youngest prehistoric English bow has been dated to 1320 BC. All of these dates are best estimations in an accurate 100-year window, due to the limitations on the precision of carbon dating. The two Dutch bows have been dated to c.1550 BC and c.2020 BC. Very few of these bows have survived in their entirety, but many have survived as half or as more than half of the original bow which is enough to estimate the size the complete bow originally was with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Smaller fragments have survived in even greater numbers but will not be covered in detail in this work as they cannot be used to get an accurate idea of the properties of the complete bow they came from.198

Almost all of the prehistoric bows were made from yew. There were two other

197 _{Ragnar Insulander, “The Bow from Stellmoor – The Oldest in the World?”, Journal of the Society of}

Archer-Antiquaries 42 (1999). p. 78.

198 _{J.G.D. Clarke, “Neolithic Bows from Somerset, England, and the Prehistory of Archery in North-}

73 kinds of wood present, one fragment of pine from Sweden and five elm bows, three from Denmark and one each from Germany and the Netherlands. Even thousands of years ago humans seemed to know that yew was a good wood for bows. Both of the elm bows had very wide limbs and were carved into the diamond shape. One of the English yew bows, known as the Meare Heath bow, had a nearly identical diamond shape to the elm bows but remained quite wide almost all the way to its nocks. Two other yew bows were also made in the diamond shape, but were not quite as wide as the Meare Heath bow, which was over ten millimetres wider than both of them. The yew bows did not have a

discernible division between heartwood and sapwood. This could be because they did not have a sapwood layer or it could be that over time the distinction faded away. For now it is probably best to assume that there was no sapwood layer, since there is no evidence of one, but it is worth keeping in mind that it may have existed and just not be visible now.199

Most of the prehistoric bow lengths used in the following analysis are estimates. Since bows are approximately symmetrical a bow’s original length can be accurately estimated so long as around half of the bow has survived. Most bows were a couple of inches longer on the upper limb than the lower limb. In the case of most prehistoric bows, it was largely impossible to determine which limb was the upper.In Graph 6 the minimum estimated length has been used. A more generous estimate of these lengths could easily add between 50-100 mm to most of these lengths. The median length of the prehistoric bows was 1600 mm. The minimum length was an elm bow from the

Netherlands that dates to c.4900 BC and is currently 1000 mm long. It represents an extreme outlier. The longest bow was 1905 mm long. This bow, while it was comparable in length to the Mary Rose bows, was definitely not like a precursor bow. This is the Meare Heath bow which had the widest limbs of any of the surviving prehistoric bows despite being made of yew. There does not appear to have been any correlation between the age of a bow and its length, however, the data pool for this was quite small, limited to the five bows that can be accurately dated. One thing to keep in mind when discussing lengths of prehistoric bows is that the average height of a person was different in different time periods and geographical areas. For example, J.G.D. Clarke gave the

199 _{Paul Comstock, “Ancient European Bows” in The Traditional Bowyer's Bible, ed. Jim Hamm, 4 vols.}

(Fort Worth, 1992). pp. 2:86-96.

J.G.D. Clarke, “Neolithic Bows from Somerset, England, and the Prehistory of Archery in North-western Europe”, pp. 89-95.

J.N. Lanting, B.W. Kooi, W. A. Casparie and R. van Hinte, “Bows from the Netherlands”, Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries 42 (1999). pp. 7-8.

74 average height of a man in neolithic England as approximately 1.7 metres (1700 mm) while the average height of a man in neolithic Switzerland was closer to 1.6 metres (1600 mm).200 _{The dead from the Battle of Towton (1461) were similar in height to the}

prehistoric English, but the Swiss were significantly shorter.201 _{This should be kept in}

mind when examining the comparative bow lengths as the height of the archer certainly had a role in determining the how long a bow could have been while still remaining a practical weapon. As a result, some of these shorter prehistoric bows could have been more the result of limitations on the height of the archers using them, rather than a failure

to create a ‘proper’ longbow.202