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Appreciation post: a hobby shop owner in Tucson showed me why flint knapping proves early humans were way smarter than we give them credit for
I took a flint knapping class at a little shop off Speedway in Tucson back in March, mostly as a birthday gift to myself, and it wrecked my whole view of early humans. The owner, a guy named Dale who has been knapping for 28 years, handed me a chunk of obsidian and said most people quit in the first 20 minutes because their hands just can't do it. It took me 2 hours and 14 failed points before I got one crude arrowhead, and Dale told me an experienced knapper would have been done in under 10 minutes with the same rock. This is why I roll my eyes when people call stone tools primitive, because getting the right angle and force means you are basically doing geometry and physics in your head while holding a razor sharp rock. There are sites in Texas where the debitage shows the same technique passed down for thousands of years, which means teaching and planning, not just banging rocks together. Anyone else take a hands on class like this and have it totally flip how they think about a site or artifact?
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robert6591mo ago
Man, this hits home for me. I did a similar class at a place in Vermont like six years ago and had almost the exact same experience. The guy running it said something I still think about, which was that the hard part isn't hitting the rock, it's knowing where NOT to hit it. Took me forever to get one decent point and my hands were torn up for a week. People who call it primitive have clearly never tried it, because there's nothing simple about reading a stone and working with what it gives you.
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