Guwahati, Sept. 23 -- A researcher from Assam has taken a fresh look at one of the oldest weapons known to humans, the bow, and found that its performance may have had more to do with shape than the material used to make it.

Kishore Dutta of Handique Girls' College studied three different bow designs, the self-bow, Scythian recurve and Japanese Yumi, using computer simulations. Instead of changing the materials, he kept them the same and changed only the geometry of the bows.

The results were strikingly different.

The self-bow produced a smoother and more predictable force, the Scythian recurve stored more energy over a shorter draw, while the Yumi showed a two-stage pattern of energy storage over a longer draw.

The study, published i...