Hi Katana,
I'll let the others argue about the short spears. Personally, in a world that holds the Okinawan timbe and the Zulu iklwa, I wouldn't be surprised if these short spears were weapons, used with a shield at close quarters.
Back to the bow question in Africa. Actually, Africa isn't deficient in bows, but its archery technology is vastly underappreciated by the english-speaking world. There's a trilogy of books called The Traditional Bowyer's Bible, and I believe some African bow technology is covered in volume 2 or 3 (all are excellent). Some African bows were pretty impressive. An anecdote suffices: an englishman was on safari in the early 20th century, and brought his fancy english sport bow along to play with. This was a bow optimized for flight distance. One of his African guides had a bow and arrows he'd made himself for hunting. The two had a friendly distance match, and (as I recall) came out tied--they both shot the same distance. I'd say basically, there's a lot we don't know about the real archers in Africa.
Getting back to the original topic of this thread, two things that we all need to remember about spears and arrows: 1) to achieve a good performance, the weapon system (including the user) has to work together well, and when there is a projectile and its thrower (bow or atlatl), these both have to work together. Basically, the bow's got to fit the user, and the arrows have to fit both the bow that's launching them and the target they're penetrating. It's very different from going to a store and buying a bow off a shelf and arrows out of a bin (which is what we tend to think of--weapons being interchangeable). 2) Because of the tuning and optimization that go on, the shaft of the dart is probably more valuable than the tip, especially when the tip is stone. Some Indian tribes used a detachable foreshaft precisely so that if the tip smashed against a rock, the whole arrow could be rebuilt as new, rather than being shortened in repairs. Because of this, it's not surprising to see more points on the collector's market than whole arrows and spears. We'd actually learn a lot more if we could see whole arrows and spears, but I suspect we're not going to get that lucky very often.
F
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