[OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you "new"

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>> Even writing has its problems. What are you going to write on? Bark? 
>>> Animal hides? How are you going to make paper? Ink? A hunter-gatherer 
>>> tribe may find it not worth the effort, and so the writing will not 
>>> "take".
>>
>> The Maya wrote on treated Birch Bark, which apparently worked great 
>> until Spanish Missionaries burned all their libraries :-)  Sumerians 
>> used fired clay tablets for writing, and treated animal hides were 
>> pretty popular until relatively recently (Vellum, for instance). 
>> Vegetable dyes would make decent ink, if needed.
> 
> It's the "treating" that's the problem. Do you know how to treat animal 
> hides? I sure don't! I saw the process once on TV and it looked rather 
> involved.

I know that hide can be tanned using urine, which I suppose is why 
tanneries were reputed to smell so horrible.  It would have to be 
scraped clean without wrecking it as well, perhaps with a Clam shell? 
Either way, charcoal on cave walls would definitely be easier :-)

> Could you even recognize iron ore?

Or dig it up?  Some of the earliest chapters in the Bible mention Iron 
so I imagine the knowledge has been around for some time, but definitely 
not before agriculture.

> But all you really need to produce is a serviceable hatchet, because a 
> few of those will give your tribe a distinct advantage.

In another MythBusters episode they were asked to try and figure out 
whether there was any practical benefit to arrows with flint tips vs. 
simply being sharpened, and their results were surprisingly ambiguous. 
The flint tipped arrows seemed to penetrate slightly better, but this 
didn't seem offset by the greatly increased labor to make them. 
Clearly, stone-tipped weapons were preferred over normal ones if 
archaeological evidence is any indication, but I'd really like to know 
why.  Stone tools makes complete sense (and therefore hatchets as well), 
but why add a stone tip to something ostensibly disposable like an arrow 
unless it provides a substantial benefit in terms of the likelihood that 
a kill will be successful?