Besides being an excellent name for a band, what do you think the likelihood that it actually happened, and would work?
I’m sorry, are we supposed to know what that is?
There is a link in the OP.
If you don’t know, I provided a convenient link to a google search for many links about the story.
The link in the OP is a Google search result page … and I find only one credible link there …
The tale is certainly plausible, so given 10,000 years we can say it is nearly certain to have happened at least once … it may be impossible to tell how common the practice was if metal became widespread before written language …
But that is the question–is it plausible that a handful of human feces can be hand-shaped into a knife sharp enough to butcher an animal?
According to the story, the guy used the knife to butcher a dog. I would guess (IANAShitExpert) that a knife made of Inuit doo-doo is essentially an icicle. Would an icicle have the tensile strength to hold its shape whilst sawing raw dogskin?
Regards,
Shodan
Better to make links a bit longer than two letters. Some of us are reading on phones.
Better still would be to just summarize the concept yourself or provide a quote summarizing it. But a nearly invisible link to a Google search?
Come on, man.
Closest I can get to a citation in under ten minutes is the Mythbusters busting the myth of an ice bullet … ice is too brittle … I’m not sure if there’s anything in poop that would make it a better knife-fashioning material over ice itself …
Let me re-phrase:
The tale is certainly possible, so given 10,000 years we can say it is nearly certain to have happened at least once …
This is very doubtful. While indeed you could form a knife of say ice and have it sharp enuf to make the initial incision, there’s no way it would maintain it’s edge. The dog would be warm, the knife would melt. Ice is pretty soft unless it’s REALLY cold, and even than, not so much:
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec02/lec2.htm
“At 0°C, ice has a hardness of 1.5 on the Mohs scale; at -70°C the hardness is 6 (Nesje and Dahl 2000). However, temperature below -30°C is rarely achieved in glaciers. Next ice is subject to pressure melting In other words, ice can be melted at temperatures below 0°C by application of pressure-”
perfect… bawahahahaa
There could have been some form of pykrete effect going on, but (as a connoisseur of the Mythbusters) I would suspect that if the dog was warm enough to be butchered, then the knife would dull so quickly as to be useless after a single stroke, and if it was cold enough for that to not happen, then the meat probably would be too hard to carve up.
If we replace “butcher” with “poked a hole through the belly really quickly and then tore apart the rest of the way with my hands and a lot of effort”, I might buy it. But I don’t expect that you’d get more out of the knife than that.
Ultimately, you’d need to go all Mythbusters if you really want an answer.
This sentence makes me miss dude_robert.
Some vegetarians fibrous shit at cold enough temps might be strong enough to stab someone with, possibly hold an edge briefly for some crude skinning.
It’s absolutely possible. In the early 1900s, arctic explorer Peter Freuchen used such a tool to free himself from ice after surviving an avalanche. He himself cited that he learned to make a shit-knife from previous observations of the natives making all manner of cutting and chopping tools out of their feces.
I am advising all my left-of-center politically active friends to study the concept of the shitknife, and to consider what form (metaphorically) theirs might take, because the day is coming when they will have no other tools to work with.
Why make shit knives when you could just use a regular icicle?
Perhaps it works like pykrete ?:dubious: