Archery requires flawless hand-eye coordination and a steady hand. In this situation, a steady hand does not come from not drinking alcohol, but by being so strong that the archer is not straining to draw the string and hold it when taking aim.
Rapid fire archery necessitates fast reflexes. You could say that these qualities are required for other reasons in general life and that may be true, but archery is the one sport that requires them all.
Shooting a gun accurately takes some of these skills as well, but it does not need great strength and rapid fire is merely a question of pulling the trigger or even holding it back. It is true that when guns were developed, archers looked down on riflemen, because they did not require the same degree of training to be decent shots.
This is one of the main factors why guns took over from bows. It took 10-15 years to train a long bowman, but just a few weeks to train a rifleman. It was obligatory in England and Wales for all men and boys to train with their longbows at the village butts on a Sunday where they were supervised and taught by the local sheriff's militia.
The long bowman was a respected figure, because everyone knew the dedication and skill it took to be an accurate archer. This was not merely true in Great Britain, but in every country in the world (except Australia) as far as we know.
Evidence of archery, but not the longbow, has been found everywhere from Europe to Asia and some of it goes back 12,000 years, which is a long time for a bit of wood to last, particularly when a broken bow would often have been a household item which could be used on the fire as fuel.
Before the invention of the bow, huntsmen and warriors used the atlatl (or woomera, in Aborigine Australian), which is a long, grooved stick used to launch a one-metre long dart at almost 100 mph. There is evidence that the atlatl was being used by Homo heidelbergensis 400,000 years ago in modern day Germany.
The longbow and the flat bow were most frequently used in northern Europe where most soldiers walked into battle as only knights (nobility) had horses. On the other hand, in most other countries, where a lot of the fighting was carried out from horseback or from chariots, a shorter bow was used as it was less unwieldy and easier to move across the horse's neck to fire left and right.
The longbow and the flat bow were about six feet in length and had a typical draw weight of over 60 lbs but up to 100 lbs, which would send a three-foot arrow up to 1,000 yards.
The shorter bows were recurve bows and although lighter to draw, it took a significant amount of skill to hit a target whilst travelling at speed on the back of a horse or bouncy chariot.
There are two ways of aiming any bow: by sight and by intuition. In sight shooting, the archer aims down the arrow and lines it up with the target allowing for distance, wind, movement etc, but in intuitive shooting, the archer only concentrates on the target. Intuitive shooting may come after lots of sight shooting practice.
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