“Greetings! Ever heard of Lars Anderson? He is a danish archer who read the historical manuscripts and teaches that modern archers are doing it wrong. He performs incredible feats all learned in middle age. Reminds me of your modus operadi. Check out his youtube channel sometime: larsanderson23”

-Portland Joe

…

I know very little about archery and have only used a bow twice now since my teen years. I first saw Lars in 2016 when a reader sent a link. If you look at the first illustration of combat in the First Boxers, from a 20,000 year old sketch on a Spanish cave, of men at war, all of the figures will remind you of Lars and his archery style. His style seems very similar to the Kalahari Bushmen, a cappoid people, who may have been the race of men depicted on the cave art I referenced.

When the bow first originated, and whether it had separate points of origin is still a hotly debated subject. There is a problem with combat deductions arrived at the end of a combat trajectory. I have had to deal with this.

For instance, modern bare-knuckle boxing is still much less advanced than primitive bare-knuckle boxing of the 1700s and far behind fully developed bare-knuckle boxing of the late 1800s. The reason is that modern bare-knuckle boxing is based on gloved boxing while the Old School was based on actual bare-knuckle fighting. The best bare knuckle boxers are currently MMA men, who at least had experience with small gloves.

Modern boxing experts have insisted on analyzing bare-knuckle boxing according to gloved methods with zero consideration given to the effect of the glove on punching. I arrived at an accurate deduction of bare-knuckle boxing simply by assuming that bare-knuckle boxers knew what they were doing, while the rest of modern historians assumed that bare-knuckle boxers did not know how to punch and that only we, at the pinnacle of Time, know how to do things best. Experience has proven my trust in the ancients to be well-founded.

In stick-fighting, I ignored most instruction, as it was based on blade fighting and just experimented and was able to do well in that arena. I only found one instructor that really understood stick as stick at a level that exceeded my haphazard experimentation.

My guess is, and it is just a guess, is that modern archery is probably based on two things:

-1. Use of the English long Bow, which was an apex weapon system with a specific military use developed at the end of the military archery trajectory to deal with changes wrought by modern means on the battlefield, and

-2. Rifle use

One thing that I did note about Lars, is that he is the most neanderthal looking person I have seen on video, to include Ron Pearlman. Ironically, I think that if Neanderthals had bow and arrow technology they might have held Europe until the Age of Gunpowder.

Thanks, Joe.