This opens up whole new possibilities for using quartz, though. Using a hardened steel spike in this way leverages the whole weight/momentum of a much larger stone to apply force to a tiny area of steel, and doesn’t rely on creating and maintaining an edge on the quartz. Looks like a much more effective technique.
National Geographic “Origins”, “Spark of Civilization”, another swing, another miss
I stayed up the other night (despite being very tired) to watch the premier episode of National Geograpic’s new series “Origins”, entitled “Spark of Civilization”, which promised to enlighten us as to the importance and origins of our use of fire as a species, a subject I find fascinating.
Early lessons on the Prehistory of Civilization and Survivalism from Gobekli Tepe
If true, this is huge.
This isn’t just “stones and bones”, folks, this is about understanding ourselves, who we are, and how we got where we are today from nothing. Every insight we gain into the progress of early man or proto-humans from being as helpless as any other animal (more so, apparently) to our current level of interconnected technologies adds to our “blueprint” of how it is done, should it ever need to be done again- whether it is just an individual caught without the support of technology, or entire peoples recovering from disaster, or human colonies having to deal with reduced availability of technology in starting the process over somewhere else, knowing how we boot-strapped ourselves as a species from no-tech to high-tech is knowing how to do it again if we have to- hopefully without taking tens of thousands of years, or longer, this time.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
We are cyborgs. More than a metaphor in this case, I think. Objectively, any species that has evolved a dependency on its own artifacts to the degree where it cannot thrive in the very environment in which it evolved without