Matt and Aaron
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2 Jun
Matt and Aaron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Sorry.
Yeah.
So myself and some of my closest colleagues, a guy named Briggs Buchanan at University of Tulsa and Rob Walker at Missouri and Marcus Hamilton down in Texas.
We wanted to know when the bow and arrow was adopted in prehistoric North America.
And this is the question that a lot of archaeologists have struggled with for a pretty long time.
And it's a tricky question because usually, like, the components of a bow and arrow don't preserve, right, because it's wood and sinew and stuff.
So for a really long time, archaeologists have been using stone points to try to figure out the weapon that that stone point went on to.
But that's really problematic because you can have little tiny points on arrows, atlatl darts.
You can even have tiny points on spears, like thrusting spears.
And you can have large points on all of those different weapon systems.
So you can't use the stone point to figure out the rest of the weapon.
And so Dave Meltzer, who's been on the podcast several times, he said to me a couple of years ago, he's like, why don't you figure this out?
So I start to think about it.
And there's a statistical technique called optimal linear estimation that
And we don't need to get into the details of that technique because it's pretty boring.
But, you know, if you like hit a baseball and if you only have like 30% of that baseball's trajectory and you know the velocity of the baseball, you can make a pretty good prediction of where that baseball is going to land.
Kind of what optimal linear estimation does, except we can do it with data and radiocarbon dates.
And so what my colleagues and I did was we actually went through the literature and we actually have something like 50 preserved components of bows and arrows from really dry caves and bows and arrows that like melt out of the ice and stuff like that.
And we have 86 preserved components from the atlatl or spear thrower and dart also from dry caves and just random occurrences where these things preserved.
And because we can date those wooden components, we have radiocarbon dates on all 136 of those rare archaeological specimens.
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