Done this. Not with a bow, but with a sling.
People do it all the time with just an axe and a knife, in Africa. You can do as well with stone tools.
People throughout the Third World still process their subsistence crops by hand - mortar and pestle & grindstone.
Grain crops are always planted this way, anyway. All you have to do is save some seed
And you’ve done all this by hand with no tools?
For the Naysayers… I’ll clarify the OP even more. Lets say our Community is in the Stirling Ranges region of Western Australia. This region is pretty much the perfect storm in every way and would in reality be one of the best places in the world to survive any kind of civilization destroying collapse for whatever reason.
• very rich in fauna and flora
• Has been a national park since 1913 so surface deposits haven’t been extracted
• has both coal and iron ore
• is surrounded by small mining communities that would have plenty of trained geologists
• is far enough from Perth (337 km) not to be overun by mobs, but close enough that it would be feasible to go scouting there on horseback to find survivors with useful skills
• is isolated by thousands of kms of desert and sea from other major population centers
• fertile soil, plenty of rivers and a coastline nearby with abundant fishing
So lets say the scenario plays out like this, all the personnel from the perth navy and army base group together, take all the academics they can find from Murdoch and UWA universities, and march together down to the stirling ranges to start their community.
Thats about a 10 day walk, or maybe 5 days on horseback, easily accomplished by young fit people and they can assist the more frail academics. You can follow the coastline the whole way so seafood and fresh water is available for foraging, and they will find plenty of cattle, pigs and chickens along the way from the farmland they pass through.
Once there they have all the basics covered, (there’s always SCA types in academia), disciplined leadership, trained geologists, re-enacters etc. After a few months the other survivors in Perth would have died off and they are literally 5000 km from any other populations that might be a threat.
We also have a culture in Australia of “bush mechanics”, who are renowned for re-use and jury rigging contraptions. Having no tools would slow them down, but with stone, bone, reeds and gut, they’d be in business before long. Lots of the population in that area are “bushies” that are already semi self sufficent and there’s local aboriginal populations that would also know useful bush tucker and hunting techniques.
Thats off the top of my head, I suspect, that other areas like the Atherton tablelands and various areas in the South Island of New Zealand would also be contenders but I don’t know if they are as rich in mineral deposits as WA is.
Okay what type of shelter would you like? I can think of several that are easy to make without any tools, and many more that are simple to make with nothing more than some hammer stones to help us along. One person alone can accomplish this though it takes time. Many working together can knock these out fast. I’m not going to bother taking about found adaptation like using caves or emergency shelters here.
No tools needed:
Adobe/ Mud and reed dwellings. Mix the two together and stack in bundles, coiling up a giant basket of sorts. Add additional clay/ mud onto the outside for strength, and insulation. Roof with found branches and palm leaves. People have been doing this one for centuries, and given a reasonably dry climate and yearly touch ups this will last for decades.
Rammed earth dwellings: Stack up dense earth by hand and tamp it with a stick. Continue until you have solid walls 3 to four feet in height. Roof as above and dig out the remaining depth to 6 feet and tamp the floor.
Stacked wood/ wooden frame dwellings: Collect large fallen branches, driftwood and deadwood. Using a hammer stone or another solid stick knock off extra branches and set them aside. Construct a round or teepee like frame and lash them with natural cordage like vines, agave fibers, reed fibers or palm fibers. For additional strength set those structural beams into the ground. Gather additional brushwood branches, bark and mosses to fill in your frame.
Simple tool dwellings: Using stone age tools like flint axes, bone knives etc:
All of the above with additional refinements like wooden peg roofing, etc.
Log cabins and simple tongue and groove woodworking
modern style fencing, flooring, and roofing materials.
Bugger missed the edit again.
You also could construct mud brick, or stacked stone dwellings given the resources. Both require no tools and can be extremely sturdy. Combining them with other techniques like the found wood roof beams and palm thatch can produce serious large homes for many, many people.
In the mild and dry Australian climate you don’t need a shelter for 9 months of the year. I’ve slept outside in summer many times. Eg no tent, just a blanket on the ground, in my clothes. On top of the blanket, not with it over me. So bare grass would be fine.
If the original event happened in Southern Hemisphere summer (50 / 50 chance hey)… then they have 6-8 months to construct shelters before it’s a problem. Even in winter, with some skins from Kangaroo’s or sheep and a fire you would be fine sleeping under the stars.
No. I had tools (knives, axe, shovel) But I have also made the tools (stone knapping, iron bladesmithing, boneworking)
Since when do you have clothes?
Which brings up another point: folks with fair skin are going to be in severe trouble from sunburn until there are clothes around, especially if they’re going on a 10-mile hike every day.
As for MrDibble, I’ll just register my severe skepticism again and leave it at that.
You do realize that simple clothing is also very easy to improvise don’t you? we don’t need fancy looms, cloth, sewing machines, etc to produce simple garments to shade and protect us. That type of thing is made when you have more time. In tropical regions, there are loads a huge leaves that can be woven into an oversize shade hat at minimum. In temperate climates barkcloth and fishskin are easiest to procure without other tools or human help. Won’t be comfortable, but it will do the job until you can get skins. Sunburns, while painful tend to work themselves out after a week or two on all but the fairest. Considering the scenario, skin cancer is the least of my worries at that point.
Well, that’s not a problem…
Thing is, all those registering their skepticism - have any of you actually *tried *doing these things?
It’s not the clothes that’s the roadblock. It’s making steel that’s a roadblock. You won’t have tin, aluminum, or zinc to make bronze from. You can’t make a steam engine out of copper, wood, and rocks. You can’t make reasonable quantities of steel as easily as Mr. Dibble believes. There’s a huge difference between making a single knife and a single shovel. There’s a huge difference between making a single shovel and 1000 shovels. There’s a huge difference between making a 1000 shovels and a single steam engine. There’s a huge difference between making a single steam engine and making a few miles of rail. It would be a waste of time to concentrate on making steam engines instead of waterwheels and windmills.
The question is: Have you ever tried to make a single steel or iron object starting with nothing but your bare hands? You have to find a piece of relatively pure iron, or some ore. Maybe you’ll find some black sand in a river bed. You’ll have to sort that. Maybe you could pan it. You’ll have to make a pan out of wood shaped from rocks. Then it will take a long time to seperate a high enough concentration of iron. Then you will need a lot of coal or charcoal and bellows to forge it. Then you will have to beat it with rocks to get workable iron. Then you will have something good enough for a poor utensil, but not good enough to make other utensils from. It won’t be long before you’ve used up your readily available supply of iron, and you won’t have made enough tools to start digging for more.
And were you making those tools by hand?
And even the first step - making a pan out of wood - is going to be a major job.
Anyone who doubts this should go out and try it. Go find a rock and then find a tree. Now cut down the tree with the rock. If that’s too hard, find a log that’s already fallen down. Now cut off a piece of that log with your rock. You want a chunk of wood that’s approximately bowl sized. Get back to me when you’ve managed to separate that piece of wood from the log using a stone and your bare hands.
Yes, no and no.
Of course not. I’ve never needed to. But I have all the skills to make the tools to make the tools, as it were. And I’m not the only one.
I’d prefer laterite or bog iron, both are rich enough to smelt as-is without weaning first.
Why? There are other sources of materials in nature besides rocks and wood. I might be in an area that has abalone. Or coconuts or gourds.
Bloomeries don’t need that high-grade an ore. They work with bog iron and ferricrete. And hand sorting is OK for that level of ore processing.
While walking along the ocean is there readily available food for 100,000 people?
I think the food is a much bigger sticking point than some people seem to… partly it’s because I’ve read a fair number of post-apocalyptic novels, and in any of them that seem well-researched, it’s an incredibly difficult and backbreaking task for the survivors to plant and bring in their first harvest, and that’s having full access to machine-made horse-drawn plows, etc. If it’s that hard in a situation where you’ve suddenly lost electricity (or what have you), it must be infinitely harder when you literally have nothing.
I can’t claim to be enough of an expert to really say “here’s how many hours a day it takes an average person with good skills to gather enough food to live on, in various different climates, with various different types of natural food sources available, etc.”, but 100,000 people carrying nothing, many of whom at least don’t have the appropriate skills, walking through the wilderness and not starving to death seems unlikely to me. I think a small band of really expert SCA-types, who somehow have a large area alone to themselves to hunt/fish/etc., are going to be way more likely to fairly quickly build up to stability than a much much larger group.
This is also made harder than it might otherwise seem by the suddenness of it. Again, in post-apocalyptic books there’s usually the “well, our canned food will only last us for 3 weeks, we have to institute strict rationing and start figuring out how to hunt NOW” type of moment. In this case, we don’t have that 3 week window. We wake up one morning and (in addition to having to deal with the psychological shock, etc.) have no food or fresh water for breakfast.
I don’t claim to have any of the skills required, but if you’re just talking about something you can use to pan sand, couldn’t you just use a dull rock to split off a sharp piece of flint or whatever, and use that to strip off a roundish piece of bark about one foot square from a tree or log with thick bark?
Step out of your front door. Now go find a large piece of flint. Now split it into a sharp blade. Now trim a piece of bark and make a pan. Now find a creek and pan for iron.
Have you ever looked for flint before? Do you know what it looks like? Do you know where to find it?
Knapping flint is difficult. I read an article by some archaeologists who’d done it. And they had tools and experts to teach them.
Do you know of a nearby creek that has iron in it? Have you ever panned for metal?