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Let me suggest a nonsensical idea just for fun: let's found a scientific institute (staffed with volunteers and funded with donations, obviously) purposefully limited to conduct all their tasks (actual science, administrative chores, living) with stone age tools only. Or perhaps also with medieval and whatever they manage to build themselves using such.
It would be very curious to see what modern, educated, exclusively high-IQ (implied from them having managed to graduate in science) humans can achieve in a stone age setting.
Ideas of outcomes possible, experiments conductable and apparata buildable this way are welcome :-)
The primitive technology YouTube channel is pretty much this.
He doesn't use any equipment, materials or tools he hasn't made himself from the earth.
And, after many years of effort, he has managed to make some (not great quality) iron. He has also made bricks, pottery, a fan and buildings.
Do we get lots of servants?
As soon as somebody volunteers to serve this way. Of course there can be a hierarchy of a sort and specialization like in any other institute. Some do more science, some do more chores, depending on what they can and feel like doing.
Obligatory link to Primitive Technology on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
Although, he doesn't recreate past technology - I think he researches what technology could have existed, given the knowledge of our time. Things like his blowers, and his iron smelting processes.
Of course, there's only so much you can do with rocks & sticks, so most of what he makes ends up being pretty similar to historical tools & buildings.
If you watch any of his videos, I recommend turning on captions. He uses them to explain what he's doing, and why.
There was one fellow who smelted copper ore and tin ore, made copper wire and a vinegar battery, and made a working telegraph that could have been built any time since 3000 BC.
To make use of telegraphy, one would need to know how to read & write. The most useful inventions in history:
1. reading & writing
2. paper
3. printing press
4. computers & networking
Note that they're all about preserving and sharing information.
Why 3000 BC?
Isn't it true that if we applied today's knowledge it could also be built millions of years ago?
I can understand it means something like: it could be built with tools and materials they had 3000 BC, but isn't it also true that knowledge was able to create different tools and different materials?
Do you have a link I can read? I’m having trouble finding mentions of this
This channel is so, so important, I can't say enough.
Selections of this channel's content should be included in children's school curricula.
It’s crazy to think that fully one 800th of the world is subscribed to this channel. And that’s only the shbscribers, not the number of people that have actually seen these videos.
also one of the very few big channels on Youtube not filled with sponsored content.
I’ve found myself infected with a desire to have a machine shop. I don’t exactly know what I’d use it for, but there’s something so cool about making your own stuff.
This fellow inherited his grandfather’s machine shop https://youtu.be/hearLttbrLo?si=r2CHxdepmhQ71xJq and used it to make… a pen. https://youtu.be/j27RKTHMLkA?si=f5OPN7ZJ10EBSZa4 And it’s an addiction I didn’t know I had.
The gateway drug that led to all of this was a video about a $200 CNC mill https://youtu.be/K9pjduKSsKs?si=mOJGCF9X6_s7d-J9 which led to a tour of his machine shop https://youtu.be/bHnfvtYHn7k?si=w65ZPfYm_5xpdkcD and a video about making a library. For his apartment. With a ladder that rolls along the shelves. https://youtu.be/DPRQaPVuRxU?si=uyR5xMDWgrYzHqlp
I’ve been making things for… I probably shouldn’t have calculated it, but it turns out to be 23 years now. They’ve all been digital. Somehow it never occurred to me that you can just make things yourself rather than buy it from Amazon. It sounds stupid to write it out like that, but it’s an easy thing to overlook, because you can go your whole life without thinking about it.
There’s also no limit to the stuff you can cobble together. Here’s someone whose channel averages about 30 views per video, who made a vacuum pump out of a refrigerator compressor. https://youtu.be/4Zg0EXvyD-4?si=f6oB8ScuhDd64T6n (His channel also has hundreds of videos with dozens of projects, including making his own friggin’ laser CNC machine from scratch via arduino and time. https://youtu.be/0z-zXQ2INp4?si=Y0Ao6dwr1YpQVqU7 I have no idea how no one has noticed him yet.)
All of this culminated into an intersection of everything I’ve been interested in recently: 3D resin-printed molds for plastic injection molding. https://youtu.be/wMRSPXt48CI?si=5IeQnSi89byrr0Il You can make practically anything you can think of, and they don’t feel cheap. Not to punch down on normal 3D printers; some people love them, but a larger contingent dismiss most of what they can make as cheap toys. They’re not wrong.
It’s interesting tracing a line from the Stone Age tools to these. The people back then were smart and industrious. If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
If you really want to start from the beginning, get “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap” by David Gingery.
Quoting the description from Amazon (link below)…
“[It] is a progressive series of seven projects. Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry, you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it is not long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts.”
That’s what Harbor Freight is great for if you’re in the States. They have little milling machines and lots of cheap tools that work well for one-off stuff, at least.
Was lucky to take an engineering machining class in college and got to use a lathe and mill, am more of a welder now. The definition of a “tool” is pretty loose but lots of small things can be made with just a cheap stick welder and grinder.
Cheers
If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
That confused me because in Spanish, the same word is used for a potter's wheel. Anyway that would be more recent too. But I think that there's a long prehistoric period, between stone tools and stone buildings, that we know very little because they used wood, more than anything else.
I have a lot of respect for our far ancestors thanks to this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_la_Quadra-Salcedo
He made some awesome documentaries in the 70's showing stone age tribes in the Amazonia and their incredible techniques to make a blowgun, arrows or a hut.
It seems there's much interest here for CNC, did you see this post?
Tools are quite exciting.
You start by acquiring of basic hand operated ones, then there is a whole set of tools for construction that you can probably use for garden furniture carpentry, then come the tools that you can use to create furniture proper.
I believe material wise it is a similar journey. From soft construction wood to hardwoods, that require different tools and techniques...
Metal processing is a challenge of it's own. One set of tolling while you do aluminium grade of metals and then tooling becomes more or less cost prohibitive.
Consider the workshop space. It is a lot of tools for this journey...
It is sort of same as software development. You do spend a lot of time to prepare infrastructure to craft repeatable parts that will stick together and align on a certain angle, etc.
The feeling when it works is magical. Fighting your tool to get things done (it is time for upgrade :)) is dreadful...
I remember an old Amateur Scientist article from Scientific American way back which showed how to build a gas liquifier with a refrigerator compressor. I tried to build a couple of the AS projects, but my fab skills as a kid were sorely lacking.
You might also enjoy watching "How to Make Everything" and "Blondiehacks"
Edit: Clickspring is fantastic too, his Antikythera mechanism project is just phenomenal.
I’m on the same boat, currently working on making my own multi tools. I reckon it can be a rabbit hole as I see all that’s involved in knife making and blacksmithing.
I think there's really a modern disconnect for a lot of people (myself included, a lot of the time) between needing/wanting "a thing" and the idea that you don't always need to buy that thing as a product from someone else. That creating, modifying, or even repairing something yourself to serve whatever purpose is really not that far out of an idea. My partner and I have been infected by the same desire and have been starting to acquire various tools and machines over the years, and even now I find myself still defaulting to searching for something on amazon when I run into a problem/"a thing" that I want without even considering if I could DIY it myself. Obviously its not always better or even cheaper to DIY something, especially considering tool and material accessibility and cost, but I think at large a lot of folks don't even consider it an option. It is one of those things that when you first realize you don't _have_ to buy the thing off of amazon, it feels incredibly obvious and that you should've known that from the start, but I really thing it is a somewhat uncommon idea nowadays. (There's probably a conversation you could have about the millions of reasons why that's the case re: modern consumerism, less emphasis on "blue collar" skills and the general perspective that they're "lesser" skills/pathways than their "white collar" counterparts, etc. But that's a whole nother topic :) )
I do think there's some resurgence here with a lot of the modern "maker" movement, which is awesome! But at least in the content bubble I live in, it seems there's still _a bit_ of a disconnect between the newer, more digital "3D Printing, Code, Electronics etc." spaces and the more analog "Wood, Metal, Paint, Clay, etc." spaces. (I think this gap is slowly closing, though!)
Re: Injection molding, you might be interested in a few videos from Evan Monsma's youtube channel [1] where he makes an incredibly cheap injection molding machine out of a drill press[2], and explores super inexpensive mold making materials like steel epoxy putty[3] (also highly recommend checking his channel out in general, it's recently been becoming one of my favorite smaller channels!) [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/EvanMonsma [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovD-FPOVlo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwbxNOAg3Pc
Happy Making!
> who made a vacuum pump out of a refrigerator compressor
Lex Luthor made an atomic pile out of a sand pile.
I'm off topic, but can you imagine that in the future there could be an electronic device and through advanced studies on material, atoms and quantum, they could recreate all the information that said device once had? I imagine they could study the Internet of the past even if the backups were lost.
If an archeologist from the far future finds these, they'll be utterly confused
The archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a room in the Ur temple complex containing items which were far older than the ~530 BCE expected. They were organized and labeled in three different languages, leading Woolley to conclude they were an archeological museum now referred to as Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna%27s_museum
They’ll just a have a big discussion on whether the big war actually happened in 2020 or 2050.
I don't think so, for the future it would be easy to recreate what the situation was, I could determine that they are tools recreated by scientists from the past.
Who first decided to melt the rocks and get the iron?
The moment men learned to make fire, be sure there was some guy there that put everything to the fire to see what happened.
How do I know? I would have been that guy.
Somebody watching lava flows, slag, and wondering if they can recreate that heat.
Metal work also started with softer easier to melt metals from much purer near surface veins and worked outwards toward harder less pure more deeply buried metals.
The temperature required to melt iron ore is quite a bit more than anything you can get out of a conventional fire.
Reminded of the 2013 Ignoble award[0] where someone ate a shrew to determine what remains would be available for study.
ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE: Brian Crandall [USA] and Peter Stahl [CANADA, USA], for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.
Title made me think "isn't 'try them out' usually one of the first steps?"
Actual content: They tested damage patterns on the tools to find what the tools were used on.
I live near an experimental archaeological centre with roots going back to the 60's. I read a book by one of the founders, where he relates making his first flint axe at approximately age 16 and being so excited he went straight to the garden and cut down a tree - without asking for permission first... thankfully he had very supportive parents.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of the scientific method
Would have been better had they gotten machinists or rural people that otherwise work with their hands to do this. A bunch of scientists playing make believe chopping wood and scraping bone doesn’t convince me much. We would have been just as specialized back then as we are now. And don’t we have 30,000 year old jewelry with intricate carvings? Why the amazement at “wow, this pointy stone chops wood, man?”
Your first couple sentences really confuse me. The scientists playing make believe are playing make believe with years of knowledge and experience studying stone age tools. They are seeking to accurately make believe how the tools are made and used by investigating tools in various states of assembly and wear. Machinists would be playing make believe with a bias toward modern manufacture, materials, and design, and rural people would be playing make believe without any tool making experience because they just buy axes from the hardware store instead of knapping stone and wrapping string. Their input would absolutely be useful, especially with regards to situational use, and I think more fields need cross-participation for this reason, but these scientists aren't less qualified than anyone else for studying prehistoric tools
> We would have been just as specialized back then as we are now.
Can you please cite some evidence for this? My understanding is that specialization into trades was an outcome of the agricultural revolution, which happened quite a bit later than 30,000 BC.
Knowing how to make stone tools is a standard part of an archaeologists's job description. Not sure you can call doing their job "make believe".
Don't we have small populations around the globe that still do this? Wouldnt it have neen easier to observe them?
Experimental archaeology is at least 50 year old, but they're presenting that like it's brand new.
There's got to be some miscommunication between the researchers and the journalists as to the contribution. I know anthropology undergraduates who years ago had whole courses where they had to make and use their own stone tools.
Are Chomsticks considered primitive tech?