Dr. Bret Devereaux

Their average is six foot four.

I mean, that's huge.

So he's given them jumbos because, of course, the length of your arrow is determined by the length of your jaw, is determined by the length of your arms.

And so if these guys are just physically huge, they have physically huge arrows.

Bows of steel, no.

At least not being pulled by people.

Bow draw weights, if people know, get pretty high.

Hunting bow draw weights, if people hunt with bows, often tend to be in the 50 to 60 pound pole range.

If you've bought a sporting bow, not for hunting, for target shooting, those are often 30 or 40 pound poles.

War bows start at 80 and go up.

Wow, that's a lot.

Because somebody's trying to kill you, you want as much power as you can get, and also these are societies that haven't yet invented the compound bow with all the cams and pulleys to make things easier.

A modern compound bow with a 60-pound pull can actually put out a lot more energy than...

a medieval bow can but but yeah so the the amount of of strength you need pulling it back you need to put 80 pounds of force to get it back and that's the bottom end for most at least afro-eurasian war bows my understanding is that pre-contact war bows in the new world are somewhat lighter long bows go up from that 100 120 and the sort of the upper end in 130 140 150

Step bows are similarly high.

Now, step bows are smaller, but they are composite.

They use multiple materials glued together to enable them to pack more power into a smaller package so that you can fire them from horseback.

But you can reach 150, 160-pound pull on a bow without using metal.

Where we do get metal bows used is that there are steel crossbows.

where now the poundage here can be like eye-popping 400, 500-pound pull, but you don't necessarily get the wildly more power that's implied by that because the power of a bow is determined by two things.