I don’t buy that the bows were asymmetrical because the Japanese were short. These bows are the longest in the world, and I think the Japanese were only three or four inches shorter than English at the time. If Japanese were a little taller, would they use symmetrical bows? Does this minor height difference explain just how asymmetrical their bows are?
Different materials and different purposes make much more sense as the explanation for the asymmetry.
Peter Heather claims [in The Fall of the Roman Empire] that Hunnic bows were assymetrical, because that allowed longer bows and more powerful fire from horseback.
For what it’s worth, here’s an example of back quivers from South India, circa 7th century CE; those are two quivers on each of the warriors’ backs…
https://picasaweb.google.com/116994544255945660308/TheLordOfTheMountain#5703825979871941378
I think this gets into a problem shared by both the narration of the Anderson video and the GeekDad screed, which is that they both treat archery as though it is homogeneous and there is one history, when, instead, archery is found in many cultures, independently developed, with different paths.
The very first point that McQuarrie takes up is the multiplicity of noon-forgotten methods from around the world:
“He uses forgotten historical methods…” No, they were not forgotten. They just weren’t European. Archery is one of the oldest human activities, found in virtually every culture on Earth, and dating back tens of thousands of years. There are wide variations in equipment and shooting techniques around the world, and Andersen’s “discoveries” are well-known to anyone who has ever studied Asian and Eastern European archery, such as Mongolian, Tibetan or Hungarian styles. The famous Native American archer Ishi was known for shooting in a style very similar to Andersen’s, putting the arrow on the outside of the bow in the style of the Yahi People of the Pacific Northwest. My friend Patricia Gonsalves (archery consultant for Arrow and owner of Lykopis Archery in Vancouver, BC) is currently making a documentary about precisely these allegedly “forgotten” techniques as they are currently being practiced around the world.
Yes, Jim notes that, but also ignores it when he goes on about modern archery theory of back tension and why Lars is a big nothing for not specifically mentioning it when talking about hands.
This is just another instance in where Jim takes legitimate teaching moment, and throws it away because he’s not consistent.
Interesting, though bows used on horseback had to be short.
Not if they’re asymmetrical. I believe the long, asymmetrical Japanese bows were used on horseback.
When shooting from a sitting or kneeling position, the Japanese longbow is held at an angle that’s nearly sideways. It takes up a huge amount of space.
Digression… something people who don’t arch usually don’t understand, because it’s not at all obvious: long arrows don’t fly straight. Although short crossbow bolts don’t flex much - they can be made of iron in fact - longer shafts have a property called “spine” which is measured and graded and stamped on the side of modern commercially produced arrows. The spine is the amount of flexibility vs stiffness.
When the bowstring is released, force is applied to the end of the arrow shaft through the nock. If it’s an iron crossbow quarrel, the amount that the shaft flexes outwards is neglible and can be ignored. If the shaft has totally inappropriate spine, it explodes into a shower of splinters (or, if it’s aluminum, it collapses like an accordion, a bizarre event I have personally experienced). If it’s slightly under-spined, it will veer off target in the direction of the bow, and if it’s over-spined, it will veer slightly less in the other direction. But in a normal shot with an appropriately matched arrow and bow, the arrow does two things: it leaps upwards and it bends into a curve sideways. Then as the arrow moves away from the bow, the curve reflexes in the opposite direction and the arrow travels through a sine-wave like path in the horizontal plane while rising in the vertical plane for some distance. The distance that the arrow “wriggles sideways” through the air before the fletching’s aerodynamic drag straightens out its path is determined only by the bow, the arrow, the rest, the fletching, and the release, so it’s a reasonably well known reasonably fixed value, but the amount that the arrow rises from the rest is dependent on the angle of each shot relative to the plane of gravity. If you shoot down from a roof or tree stand at a deer, the arrow “jumps up” significantly more than if you shoot straight at him from ground level. This means you have to aim at a different spot depending on the difference in height to your target!
Fletching matters too. A normal modern plastic angled 3-vane fletch causes the arrow to spin and makes the path go ballistic as it drops out of the rise (and historically the same effect could be achieved with straight fletching, because a bird’s feathers have different bernoulli numbers on the top and bottom) but weirder fletching (like flu-flu for example, or planing fletches, or 4-vane designs) will do weirder things. Historically you’d get different flight effects from goose primaries than you’d get from raven secondaries, or whatever - feathers vary by species, by individual feather type (primary, secondary, etc.) by age, and by individual bird.
Anyway, all this was a very long-winded way of saying that arrow flight dynamics are very complex and you can’t just turn the bow one way or another without practicing extensively first. Your aiming point has to shift, and if you are using a floating draw point you might very well shift that also, relying on your intuition and full-body neural patterning (enter Zen archery).
So among the reasons arrows didn’t get reused on the battlefield as much as you’d expect, and didn’t get mass produced as much as you’d expect, are issues of fletching and spine vs draw length vs bow draw weight. I have a long draw, due to my orangutan-like arms; I can pull a 36" arrow with a floating draw point or a 34" arrow to the lip. (Most sport combat limits arrow length to 28" which freakin’ cripples me as an archer, which is the major reason I don’t do it any more.) Real-life medieval european archers had excellent reasons to carefully hand-craft their own arrows - and believe me, the bullshit arrows that Mythbusters made from Wal-mart dowels were completely unlike real medieval arrows (and their so-called busting of the Robin Hood “myth” actually proved the exact opposite of what they stupidly claimed it did). The mass-production of arrows by the English was more exception than rule, and AFAIK only happened in time of war, and every good archer probably had a few “special” arrows to hand, perhaps painted black 
even when they went to war.
Anyway, because Zen archery relies on becoming mentally and spiritually unified with one’s environment, to the point where archer, arrow and target are one, it’s possible for a gifted archer to pick up an arrow, intuit the spine and fletching compensations with a single glance or by the feel of the arrow as it is whisked to the string, and shoot a moving target at any angle. The computational capabilities of the hominid neural network are truly astounding. But it took the incredibly bad Japanese longbow to make this observable… Samurai are said to have shot those things accurately from horseback! In contrast, most horse cultures used very short bows, so that the lower limb could clear the animal when tracking a target without tilting the bow. Zen archers just turn most of the conscious mind off and use their whole body as a computing engine…
…oh, dammit, I’m monologuing again. Sorry! Fascinating subject, really.
Fascinating indeed! Thank you so much for the mini-seminar. 
That was great stuff.
Maybe the Japanese did, but not the Mongols, Huns etc… It is really difficult to shoot a long bow from horseback which was the main advantage of the Mongol recurved composite bow.
Mongol, Magyar and Hunnish composite bows are amazing. I’ve handled a few, and seen them used in competition, but never fired one. They are tremendously powerful, with very flat trajectories, and very small form factor. Far better suited to a horseman’s use than any other bow, as you say, and on the ground only the yew-wood longbow is arguably any better.
Nowadays you can buy them online. I found this and this with Google.
Peter Heather’s argument was that the Huns used assymetric bows to be able to fire medium-to-long bows from horseback. I don’t recall what evidence he cited to say that the Huns used assymetric bows, and I know that the bows themselves are usually lost, leaving only arrowheads and ear laths.
On the ground, a composite longbow would be better - or at least, would have more power for a given draw weight than either a composite shortbow or a self longbow.
Look, could we please get back to the inarticulate rage, without these on-topic well-cited discussions?
You’re making the rest of us look bad.
I’ve seen this in the heritage/history side a lot; something the speaker (or writer or performer) is not familiar with is immediately a “forgotten ancient technique held by secret masters” or some such mystic bullshit. Especially when it comes to oriental stuff like Yoga or Buddhism, or any of the various monuments around the world.
They may have been forgotten (or never learnt) by a few people who thought they knew everything, but not by those who use them every day…
Hmm, I’d have thought that either the shaft would break very often upon impact, or that the fletching would become unusable even otherwise after a single shot anyway…
Hmm, typically Indian longbows were (and still are, among the tribals who use them) about 6 ft long bamboo stalks split down the middle with a bit of shaping. Stories of their having pretty ridiculous draw-strengths abound…
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