I know how to make rope, among other things, as an eagle scout, and I have some experience with atatl so, probably dying of fever at 14.
I think excel would be good software for managing hunter rotations, supplies and stone inventory.
Yelling yabadabadoo and sliding down that dinosaur
Just by knowing how to wash my hands, medicine. Up until 20th century.
Wash the wound with soapy water, apply cloth that has been boiled. Yeah that should have a better survival rate than most of human history.
Soap is animal fat and what in a survival situation?
Leach wood ashes with water to make lye. Soap is easy
What if there’s no leech wood?
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It always bugs me how cavemen wheels aren’t ever depicted with a matching axle. That’s the hard and novel part! I’m glad this guy found an alternative for it.
With enough grease any old stick can be an axle for a while, the wheel is the hard part.
At the very least, novel applies. Lots of things roll, but what in nature has an axle? I’d also like to clarify that they probably didn’t use stone in real life, because that would be dumb. I suppose if we’re insisting it’s monolithic stone that’s true just because of the raw time it would take. And oh boy, they better be careful not to crack it.
If you have a proper axle, you have a lathe and turning a solid wheel for a cart shouldn’t be too hard. Failing that, or failing the idea to try turning, it has to be freehand, but plenty of people could do that (more so than today, probably, since every moment we spend in a classroom or office is a moment they would be working with their hands).
If it has to be a wheel that’s strong and light like for a chariot, it gets harder and you’ll need actual wheelwright skills, but just a cart should be able to run an a solid wheel. If you’re going for a chariot you probably want a reasonably well-fit axle as well, although my knowledge of chariot driving is too limited to be super sure.
I would argue axels came first, and the wheel is a derivative. See the likely methods accepted by (non ancient alien) archeologists for paleolithic to bronze age wonders made from stone; they used logs on the ground as rollers, essentially an axel, it wouldn’t take much of a leap to carve out the majority of those logs to lighten the load, creating a fixed wheel axel, which just needs a semipermanent but smooth rolling attach point to a vehicle or tool to be even more useful.
When I say axle (that is the correct spelling for this, according to a quick search, FYI), I mean it has a stationary bearing in which it turns. So what you’re calling a “semipermanent but smooth rolling attached point”. A roller is a completely different simple machine with no sliding surfaces.
Either making elaborate traps and contraptions out of sticks and stones.
Or brain surgery.
You’d be the shaman putting holes into heads to cure headaches
Hey, maybe you’ll be the most successful neolithic brain surgeon and only kill half your patients
Dying
I came here to write Dying, but 7 other people had already done that.
Yeah I typed my comment then scrolled and realized I’m extremely unoriginal:)
Cavemen would have just rolled their eyes when people died back then. Like, pffft, everybody does that.
Digging holes with a shovel. I’m good at that.
Whittling. Drawing.
Meditation.
shovel
We said stone age.
We had shovels in the stone age.
Depends what you mean by shovel. Little wooden scoops/spades might have been a thing, although hands will work nearly as well on soft substances. For bigger jobs the digging stick was the tool of choice, and then baskets to move the rubble or economic load (ocher, tubers) out.
I’m guessing multi-piece wooden shovels, if they were ever commonly used, had to wait for some level of civilisation. That’s a very difficult thing to make with no proper tools, and not trivial even with. Ditto for bone, and nothing else available in nature is strong and rigid enough under bending.
