Hydrodynamically engineered Indigenous arrows skip on water for waterfowl hunting

Abstract

Across the Northern Hemisphere, Indigenous hunters developed arrows capable of skipping across the water surface to strike waterfowl. Archaeological and ethnographic records reveal remarkably similar projectile designs spanning millennia and geographically distant cultures, suggesting a convergent technological solution. Despite extensive study of water-entry dynamics, the physical principles underlying this behaviour remain poorly understood. Here we show that successful water-skipping arises from a small set of coupled geometric and dynamical parameters that define a bounded operational regime separating rebound, plunging, and overshoot. Using a combination of controlled experiments, hydrodynamic modeling, and historical reconstruction, we demonstrate that reconstructed arrow designs from independent cultures consistently fall within this predicted regime. These results demonstrate that Indigenous technologies were effectively tuned to satisfy the hydrodynamic constraints governing controlled skipping, providing evidence of convergent optimization in human-engineered systems. More broadly, our results suggest that material culture encodes physical knowledge that formal science is only beginning to articulate, and that the archaeological record and Indigenous culture may be an underexplored archive of empirical discovery.