Primitive Technology: making a spear thrower

I love this guy’s videos. I remember thinking it’s funny that he’s working with rocks and mud, but making very high quality videos about it. But there’s actually no disconnect at all: he’s a skilled and thoughtful user of technology, whatever the level.

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We should. It would be no trouble at all.

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I’ve never seen someone make a fire from scratch so fast.

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Never mind that he doesn’t talk at all; I’m sure it does not hurt that he also happens to be a fit dude who seems to have something against wearing shirts.

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Shirts are The Man’s way of keeping us confined.

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Hence the name for the Australian rocket test range.

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I used to use an atlatl to hunt mahi-mahi in Bora Bora; my diet of nothing but couscous was giving me beriberi.

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That particular claim sounds like it needs some serious context to avoid being nonsense. Unless you have specific length limits and material science/fabrication methods in mind, the amount of energy you can get a bow to deliver is limited primarily by the strength of the archer. That’s why some bow designs do have various apply-mechanical-advantage-here draw mechanisms; and why things that are recognizably bows can be scaled up to siege machine sizes.

The atlatl does have the advantage of providing substantially improved speary action at a distance without the need to fabricate suitably elastic materials that don’t fail under load(composite bows don’t exist because the technique is quick, easy, and fun; but because composites were necessary to get better performance); but humans are weak enough that there is only so much room for improvement in how much energy they can put behind a projectile.

(Yes, with the right arrangement of springs and levers and pulleys and other simple machines fun, you could presumably build a device that can store years of human input and then release it all at once, which could be pretty punchy indeed; but that’s a bit of an edge case.)

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Yeah, I’m going to let someone whose ancestors were less likely to have actively exterminated a few tribes, or cheered that activity on, do the reclaiming on ‘spear chucker’. It does roll off the tongue quite pleasingly; but the associations are unpleasant.

It’s too bad we don’t know what paleophysicist to credit for speary action at a distance; but given that these things precede writing by a fair margin, that’s not happening.

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Mistakes indeed.

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This guy? This guy knows. I like this guy.

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I wouldn’t be completely surprised if he opts to make a video on primitive waxing techniques. (That could totally be the Next Big Thing.)

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Who’s ancestors were unlikely to have exterminated other tribes? Such activity is mostly required for any group of people that still exists, with very rare exceptions.

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That taps into one of my issues. I hate to watch a video about how to disassemble some piece of machinery, and most of the video is just the maker talking into the camera.

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Indeed. My car would be a much nicer, better-maintained piece of machinery if 90% of all how-to videos weren’t irritating as fuck.

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Australian Aborigines call/called it “Woomera”.
When Australia was testing rocket technology in the 1940s the location chosen was in the middle of the desert. Appropriately, they named it Woomera.

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I used to be a wilderness therapy guide (hoods in the woods) and got pretty good with a bow drill after a while. But this guy has a far simpler set up - hand drill rather than bow and just a stick rather than a fire board - and seems to invest far less energy in “getting a coal” as we used to say. Elegant is the word that comes to mind when watching him.

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Well some of them did, there were over 200 different languages in pre-invasion Australia. http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/

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