Bow hunting or bowhunting is one of those sports that you either love or you hate – a little like fox hunting in the United Kingdom. Town people abhor it and anybody involved with it and country people see it essential to cull wild animals that could otherwise become a nuisance.
People have been practicing archery for at least four thousand years, but very nearly certainly for a lot longer than that. Sections of composite recurve bows have been discovered dating back to the second millennium BC, but the parts that were found were the non-wooden, composite parts, usually of horn.
Archery is now a very popular sport and hobby all over the planet, but once, long ago, it was even more widespread. Every army had bowmen and men hunted with bows for food. Every country or every region invented its own particular design of bow and therefore, even nowadays, there are many different styles of archery bows. Modern technology has meant that new varieties of archery bows are still being invented.
Archery is as old as Old Nick. The oldest bows to have been found date back to about 2000 BC and bows are almost definitely older than that. Archery is so old that no-one knows where or when the bow and arrow was invented. It has always been used in hunting and warfare. Buddhist monks in the Far East have utilized archery in their martial arts routines for centuries as well.
Archers have played a key role in combat and hunting for thousands of years. Primitive bows were made of a single piece of wood, but composite recurve bows were being made from Greece to China as far back as the second millennium BC.