Bill Skinner wrote on Apr 28
th, 2012 at 8:18pm:
Smooth throw, breaking the wrist but not jerky. Your wrist must roll over or you don't use the length of the atlatl to advantage. I have seen quite a few people that add an extra pop or flick at the end of the throw. They seem to be quite accurate, I just cause the dart to porpoise wildly.
As far as the skinny dart compared to an arrow, the arrow is going a lot faster. If you look at Daltons, at the end of the last Ice Age when they were first used, they were around an inch+ wide at the base. They were used to hunt large animals. At the end of the Archiac, when small game was the norm with the occasional larger animal, the points had shrunk to around 3/8ths of an inch wide. So, the skinny dart will work but not as well as the larger dart for large game and you have to be hunting in a group. And also, Daltons got serrated or barbed so they would leave a better blood trail and make the animal easier to find.
For those of you who are trying to follow this, A Dalton is a lanceolet point that evolved from the points the Paleo peoples were using to hunt the mega fauna. A lot of people say the point was one of the first to be made specifically to go on the end of a dart. There were also knife forms so what a certain point or blade was used for is open to argument.
I'm not sure dart point size equates at all to dart shaft size without looking at some wear pattern evidence. You can put a very wide point on a narrow shaft. In fact, if the shaft is relatively rigid, this is ideal as it creates a large wound channel and minimizes shaft drag in the animal.
Arrows are going a lot faster than atlatl darts, no question about it, but momentum = mass x velocity. So, if the atlatl dart, being 3 times as long as the arrow is 3 times as massive (given identical diameter), the arrow would have to be going 3 times faster than the atlatl dart to maintain higher momentum. I'm not sure that it is. I think it's more likely that what you see is a roughly equivalent momentum for both the atlatl dart and the arrow (though I will note my own laboratory force plate measurements register consistently higher forces with atlatl darts than with a 50 pound bow, and the bows from ethnographic samples are usually lower poundage than that - 30 to 40 or even lower). If you have a roughly equivalent momentum, the atlatl dart will have loads more penetration, because animal flesh obeys the laws of fluid dynamics which state that the force of drag is equal to 1/2 x fluid density x velocity squared x drag coefficient x reference area. If you're shooting a dart with the same diameter and same material as the arrow, as we assumed above, three times more massive, but three times slower, the arrow will experience nine times the drag forces that the dart experiences. So the dart will have much better penetrating power.
So why not use a thin dart? An arrow can kill an elephant. Why can't a thin atlatl dart accomplish the same thing?
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