Southern African Hunting Arrows of Hadzabe, Maasai and other Tribes

My name's Dave and today we're going to take a little bit more of a look into these arrows I posted up on a YouTube video recently asking people if they had any idea what culture these may have been from and as to what the hell they were used for. Now I got a lot of really good feedback from people both on the YouTube comments, on Instagram, on Facebook and personally messaging me as well and some of the ideas from you guys were absolutely great ideas I hadn't even thought of and I have no idea and had no idea what these arrows were used for and as to where they may have come from. Now the one thing I did know and the one thing we can categorically say is that these are hunting arrows. These are not designed for punching through armor and the likes of and yeah we know that these are a hunting arrow. Now I think the most common response that I got from people was saying that these are categorically Hungarian arrows and Mongolian arrows and they're shot from incredibly powerful horse bows and yeah that's what these are. We know that they're not. Now for those of you that are maybe new to the channel I predominantly shoot Asiatic bows, horse bows and the arrows are very very different to this and we have a lot of information and sources out there from places like Mongolia where we can see what a Mongolian arrow looks like, we know how long they are, we know what the fletches look like and the nocks, the materials and the shape of the arrowheads and these these are not Mongolian or Hungarian arrows. We can tell that just from looking at the shape of the arrowheads here. Not only that but these arrows are really really really short. Now I did touch up on it just briefly in the YouTube shot and I know on camera when I hold it like this it looks like a very large arrow and it's very misleading as to how long this is. So just to give you an idea as to how short these arrows actually are, from the back of the arrow socket which is here we're only measuring a 20 inch arrow. They are incredibly short. Now the issue we have with this being a Mongolian or a Hungarian arrow other than the total aesthetics of the arrow and the materials is that if you take a Hungarian bow like this we know that this particular bow is a lot more effective at like 30 inches, 29, 30 inches which is a max draw of this bow which is the same length that we see depictions of like Hungarian and Mongolian archers and the likes of. This just doesn't work. Now I'm not going to clip this to the back of the bowstring because these are incredibly fragile and I don't want it splitting down the arrow but I will just tuck it behind the back of my fingers just so you can get an idea of what I'm referring to. Now from this brace height and the full draw of the arrow is here and that is an incredibly ineffective length of arrow for this bow and for me as an archer like it's just it's not that type of archery it's not from this culture we know that. Now initially, let me just hang this back on here we obviously don't keep them strung up they are just here for demonstration during this video. Now I initially was led to believe and longly led to believe that these were Indian arrows. Now when I say Indian arrows I mean Indian as in India not Native American Indian arrows. We know that these are not now from doing a little bit more research and a little bit more having a little bit more talks with people we now know that these are actually African arrows from tribes like the Hadzabe or the Hadza tribe and probably many other tribes in Africa use arrows very similar to this. Now this makes a lot of sense it would be amazing if we could maybe get some sort of DNA tests off these flections like this that's not going to happen I can't afford that there's no way that I can identify what type of feather these are anymore but from the arrow shaft it's clearly made of bamboo and you can you can you can see the nodes the arrow is not particularly straight it's as straight as they're probably going to get it but what is clever is that these arrow shafts have been selected and they've been cut where there is as as little nodes in the arrow shaft as possible this only has one node and it's slap bang in the middle and this only has two nodes there's one here which is where it's split and there's another node just here and they've all been smoothed down as best as they can people like the Hadza tribe rely on trade in Africa to survive and the only way that they can get arrowheads like this is through trading goods and food and animals with other local tribes and people that don't live so much of a nomadic life so these would fit perfectly within that culture both material wise and design wise now if you look at videos of the African bush hunters they are using both very long bows like the English longbow but they're also using very short d-shaped bows that are only about the size of an ottoman bow maybe even a little bit smaller they measure about 30 inches in length give or take because they don't sit there with a tape measure they just cut them down with knives and make them and they decorate them with things like monkey skin for just purely for decoration now these little bows are quite heavy in draw weight these little bows are quite heavy in draw weight and they're designed to take down things like antelope monkeys and even giraffes now i know a lot of people were speculating that these arrows would have been shot from longbows on the back of a howdah which is a structure on the back of an elephant shooting down the tigers and things now i'm not saying that there's not arrows that are similar to this and that would have been used for that but we know that these are not these are used by bush people that are hunting as a pack or as a group if you like in the thickets and in the bush and the shrubs and they're getting incredibly close to these larger animals and they're popping them out with arrows like this now the other interesting thing is is that the african bush hunters also rely not so much on this arrow flying incredibly far they're not relying on necessarily the whole arrowhead to get stuck inside the animal they're relying on poison now they use a compound or they use this sap that comes from the desert rose plant and they hack through the external root the bulb if you like of this tree and they get down to the sap and they scoop it all out and they strain it through a cloth and they get all that liquid into a pan and they boil that pan for about an hour give or take i guess it depends on the consistency of the sap you've pulled out but they boil it down to the point where you get a gloop like a sticky gloop and they apply it to the back side of the arrowheads here and a little bit behind the back of these of the prongs now this desert rose poison is incredibly poisonous and people like the haz to use it and they say you don't need to get a lot of it into a cup before you're on death's door so they smother the arrowheads inside of this compound into this poison and then they wrap these in leather or they wrap them in bark so when they're walking around with the bows they're not going to accidentally cut themselves or if they do have a cut on the hand from brushing up against a thicket or a brush they're not going to get this poison inside them so that's incredibly interesting and it would also it would also explain why the arrows are so short now if you look at the videos of these bush people shooting bows like this all of them are using a pinch draw they don't use a thumb ring they're not using a couple of might use fingers you know i think that's kind of personal preference amongst the tribes people the arrow is not on the thumb side of the bow which is how we shoot for a thumb draw the arrow is still on over the knuckle which is how the mediterranean arch is over here for those of you that want to give it a name would shoot and they're pinching the arrow so i think this arrow knock now we did initially think that maybe both of these had just split in the same place but i think these are actually designed to be like this because what that means is that you can just you can pinch it in just like that and you can take your knuckle and your thumb and your knuckle covers the side of the arrow that doesn't have a knock and the thumb holds the side that does have the knock now as mentioned i'm not going to pull this because these arrows are very very fragile so i'll just take it off the string to demonstrate with you but these bush people are walking around the thickets they're walking around the african bush they crouch down they're getting incredibly close to the animal that's in it when you see them shoot they are literally just putting like this and it's boom it's gone it's back and it's gone it's as quick as it is like that it's very similar to the native american archers and the bowmen like the comanche when they're walking around and it's just a quick boom and it's done that's all that they need something that size loaded with poison does and is being used still to take down things like monkeys and giraffes so big thank you to everybody that's put in a lot of information and research on these arrows i thoroughly appreciate that i've done a little bit more research myself as well and i think it's probably safe to say these are african arrows they are used for bush hunting from very small bows and they are used for taking out very large items of prey given the size of the arrowhead the size of the arrowhead i believe is just a bonus if all of that sticks in the animal that's going to make a lot of mess inside when it's running around and if it snaps off it's going to destroy their insides doubled up with the fact if that's loaded with poison you know for a fact that you're probably going to be eating well that night if you are indeed an african bush hunter that you need to bring home a nice good meal for your family or for the whole tribe if you shoot something like a giraffe so i'm gonna leave that with you guys thank you very much for all of your information and your responses thoroughly enjoyed it i'm gonna go out shooting this afternoon so you'll see another video up and i'll see you on the next one