Is it that fripping hard to teach flint-knapping?

[Norseman]

Greetings there, I'm glad that this strange spirit box will let me speak to people from all corners of the forest. I have a pet peeve and that is young people who just won't learn flint-knapping. Indeed many of them outright disdain flint tools altogether! It's all copper or better yet bronze these days.

The thing is that these kids just don't realise how much trouble they're setting themselves up for. Have you ever seen one of them handle an axe? When you use a flint axe you learn how to treat your tool carefully and make every stroke count. With a bronze axe the young people just chop away, no thought for preserving their tool, they just wave it around! Then the moment the inevitable happens and it loses its edge, they start bawling and have to go to the smith to have it restored.

That's another thing, with stone tools every man can fix them himself. With bronze you need a "smith" to make the tools and to fix them when they break. Instead of being independent and able to stand on their own two feet, they have to constantly hand meat and pelts over to the smith just to get their axe to work! This they call progress!

Now they will probably start whining about how bronze is more "convenient." Hah! Convenient my mammoth sized arse! Let us take arrowheads, and compare bronze to flint. With flint I can make my own arrow heads. With bronze I need the smith to do it for me. With flint it doesn't matter if I lose a dozen. With bronze you have to go down on your hands and knees to search for lost arrows. So while we flint arrowhead men are eating our catch in the cave, the bronze arrowhead fellows are on their hands and knees in the rain. Some convenience!

Despite this young people are oh so keen on bronze. Which I think is a great shame. The way that they waste their bronze I wonder how long the supplies will last. Then when they are all out how will they cope? Sure you may laugh at my concerns, but how many green copper stones have you found the last couple of years? Once they were plentiful all over the place, but now there's not a single one to be seen.

For that matter what if you're stranded away from people? It happened to me once, my leather canoe sank in a storm and I lost all my tools. Not a problem, I found some suitable stones on the beach and soon I had made my next hunting kit. But what if it happened to a modern youngster? Would he fashion a smith out of furs and elderberries? Or run ten miles up and down the beach to look for copper? No, he'd be utterly screwed that's what!

All in all the dangers of relying on bronze and the bad habits it engenders are such that I hope people will see reason and stop using it. When that happens I'll be there with my pile of flint, willing to teach you young'uns how to knap.

[Simon_Jester]

[conquers Norseman's tribe with his charioteers]

Bow before our technological superiority!

[Norseman]

This was written as my reply to people who whine about how old skills are growing irrelevant. I'm pretty sure we had a flintknapping man make the exact same argument I did.

[LaCroix]

It's all your fault! I tell you, it's hard these days to come by useful stones - and at horrible prices! Your generation had no sense of stock preservation, knapping away with all they had, not caring about their environment, even when peak flint set in.

Finally, the invisible hand of trade and barter took hold of the problem, but now, have to take pains and use these more expensive copper and bronze tools, instead of knapping our own tools, like our self-reliant proud ancestors did, when men were still men!

[Simon_Jester]

This was written as my reply to people who whine about how old skills are growing irrelevant.

Who, exactly?

Also, how do you define an 'obsolete' skill rigorously? Which skills are obsolete, which skills are merely currently unnecessary if you have the money, and which skills have arbitrarily become unpopular due to circumstances?

[haard]

To quote Linus, do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

[Zixinus]

Does some insane knapper out there seriously think that stone tools are useful to anybody as anything else than novelty items or for emergency use?

[Imperial Overlord]

I can tell you've never knapped arrowheads. You definitely want to retrieve those suckers if at all possible.

[The Yosemite Bear]

definatly a pain in the ass thing to do right, (lives in a national park with American Indians nearby, so actually has some minor experience in arrowhead crafting)

[LaCroix]

I can tell you've never knapped arrowheads. You definitely want to retrieve those suckers if at all possible.

This.
And also, there simply isn't any kind of manual craftmanship that has more different possibilities (or should I call it probabilities) of injuring yourself.

[phred]

Flint, pffft. I use pipestone. It may take a bit longer, I don't know, but it's a whole lot easier to work with.

[Imperial Overlord]

And also, there simply isn't any kind of manual craftmanship that has more different possibilities (or should I call it probabilities) of injuring yourself.

The injuries are pretty minor, when they do occur. The real issue is the time it takes and the failed attempts, although you can of course convert a bungled larger tool into a smaller one (spearhead to arrowhead, for example).

[LaCroix]

And also, there simply isn't any kind of manual craftmanship that has more different possibilities (or should I call it probabilities) of injuring yourself.

The injuries are pretty minor, when they do occur. The real issue is the time it takes and the failed attempts, although you can of course convert a bungled larger tool into a smaller one (spearhead to arrowhead, for example).

Well, a friend of mine nearly took his eye out when the splinters flew. (Do I need to say that he wasn't allowed to knap without googles and lots of safety distance to other living things after that stunt?)

[StarSword]

This thread kinda typifies something I've always said about technology. All you do when you upgrade (or downgrade) is swap one set of problems for another. An engineer is a guy who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

[Faqa]

This thread kinda typifies something I've always said about technology. All you do when you upgrade (or downgrade) is swap one set of problems for another. An engineer is a guy who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

The sheer irony of this being a post on an Internet discussion board cannot be understated.

[madd0ct0r]

This thread kinda typifies something I've always said about technology. All you do when you upgrade (or downgrade) is swap one set of problems for another. An engineer is a guy who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

Nah, an engineer is somebody who looks at the world and goes 'there's got to be a better way of doing this.'

Incidentally, at university it was a house rule not to allow more then 3 engineers at one party. too much incidental damage.

[StarSword]

This thread kinda typifies something I've always said about technology. All you do when you upgrade (or downgrade) is swap one set of problems for another. An engineer is a guy who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

The sheer irony of this being a post on an Internet discussion board cannot be understated.

No, it can't.

I think the engineer line came out of the Pretty Good Joke Book, actually.

[MrDakka]

This thread kinda typifies something I've always said about technology. All you do when you upgrade (or downgrade) is swap one set of problems for another. An engineer is a guy who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

Now that's job security