Bwahhahhhahhhaaa, priceless.
You think it’s impossible to kill a modern cow with a 15-20 kilo rock? They are incredibly docile creatures, with two people, one person to hold the front legs and another to aim the rock, pretty bloody easy.
I get the feeling that the people who are so negative have never even visited a farm or a slaughterhouse. Cows have been bred for docility for thousands of years ya know?
You unmitigated buffoon.
Here we’ve got our resident Stanley the caveman, butt naked and armed with a 20kg rock walking up to a cow unrestrained in the open, which just stands there and allows a stranger to get within arms reach and then to swing this weight with sufficient force to break it’s skull, all the while no doubt looking at him with lowing, doleful eyes and not shying away.
Idiot.
You’d have a shit load better chance swinging a 2kg hammer, but of course at this stage of the revival you haven’t made one yet. So that would leave you throwing sharpened sticks and chasing the wounded beast until it dropped, presuming you know sufficient to fashion such a weapon with a point capable of inflicting sufficient damage.
Coming from a family of graziers with property where we measure land in square miles, rather than acres (or likely square yards in your case), run stock in the thousands and we slaughter our own, I reckon there’s a chance I know my onions on this one.
Alright, what would the problem be here? I’ve reduced a much bigger problem to some minor ones to consider. You can try panning with bark if you want. Good luck. If you don’t have experience panning you probably won’t do very well with a metal pan either. Everything you do will be difficult.
BTW: Wood bowls aren’t that difficult. You use a sharp rock and fire to cut through logs and remove most of the bowl interior. You will need fire, but once you have that, a lot of wood carving can be done easily. You use a sharp rock to cut just enough wood chips to keep a fire going. When the fire and chipping have shaped the wood sufficiently you finish it by scraping with rocks. It’s time consuming, but much less work than carving by hand with a sharp rock. Once you make one panning bowl, you could pan for iron sand while the fire slowly does it’s job.
I think there are a lot of real misconceptions in this thread over how easy it would be to re-develop technology.
For one thing, there seems to be this impression that we know far more than our ancestors did, but in fact what we know is different. We have lost uncounted skills, knowledge, best practices and habits that our ancestors had which worked for their time. There were many people who specialized in making products needed to make other products needed to make the obsolete products of the day. Dedicated loom makers with expertise passed down through generations of real-world experience. Saddle makers, candle makers, artisans and crafters of all sorts - all very efficient at working with the materials of the day. Their efficiency allowed their society to cut back on the ratio of thinkers and builders to food gatherers.
It takes along time to build enough GDP that enough of your people can be diverted from the basic process of survival to start working on investments in the future. If this group of people is a little unlucky and can’t beat the clock in getting a basic infrastructure in place for farming before the local supply starts to run out, they’ll wind up subsistance living and not have the time to do much of anything before the generation with all the knowledge dies off.
Also remember that it’s not enough to know how to be a blacksmith. You have to know that, but once you progress to the next level of technology your blacksmithing skills are now useless. These people would have to be constantly learning skills, only to abandon them once they’d obsoleted the stuff they had to learn to build.
Consider this: people in the past weren’t stupid, and technology advanced just about as fast as it could given the limitations of the time. For example, when enough enabling technologies were developed to enable powered flight, it was ‘discovered’ in multiple places at just about the same time. Many important scientific discoveries were co-discovered at about the same time.
So one answer might be that it will take just about as long as it did the first time around, because you can’t get to the end without going through the same stages. Oh, I’m sure you could cut a few centuries off from prior knowledge, but I could be convinced that it would be almost the same order of time as the first go-round.
Also, don’t underestimate just how many people you need to sustain various levels of technology. Complex machines have thousands of parts. Each one of those parts requires many people to make in any kind of quantity. And people needed to build the machines used to make those parts, and the people who have to transport it, and track it. and the people who have to make the tools used, and so on and so on. Very soon you run out of people. There just isn’t enough labor available in a pool that size to reconstruct a modern economy. Hell, 100,000 people couldn’t keep our current one going, even if they were left with all of it.
For that you’ll need several generations of growth at a minimum.
This isn’t the pit, take it elsewhere.
The thing you’re missing in my scenario is that all the people who think trying to kill a cow with a rock is too ridiculous to even try are dead within the first few weeks.
Meanwhile the people that will do whatever it takes (and my post did say that would be my last resort if I couldn’t make any cutting tools after two weeks or so). In actual fact of course you’d restrain the animal using vines, of which there are plenty in Australia strong enough. And yes a cow will let a stranger walk up to it if you’re patient.
Personally I own 50 acres in the Huon Valley in Tasmania… no cows on there yet but I have plenty of “bushie” and perma-culture type friends on the neighboring properties who do have small livestock holdings.
Pfft. Maybe for* Europeans*…took West Africans no time at all.
Why? We could cut off more than centuries - we could cut off millennia. The “March of History” is a myth - as long as you know where you’re going, and take care not to repeat others’ mistakes, you can get there. Ancient Greece could have had a Steam Age if they didn’t prefer being a slaveholding culture instead, for instance. Hero’s Engine and the Antikythera Mechanism show this was possible.
Absolutely, the biggest single change is the rise of rationality, the scientific method and the free sharing of knowledge and skills.
Our hunter gatherer ancestors used to think every single rock, plant and animal had a spirit that had to be placated. Then in the middle ages trades were carefully controlled by the guild system and could only be passed down to the few. Alchemists would make important chemical discoveries and it would die with them because it was written in their own code to stop anyone else stealing their ideas.
I’m not hunter gatherer, but I’m trained in scientific method and trial and error don’t believe I have to do things a certain way because otherwise my ancestors will strike me dead. That’s kind of an advantage.
Wow, lots of assumptions about the nature of human nature in this thread as well.
And in this brave new world, if I was an accomplished blacksmith who was relatively well compensated for my labor, would I be teaching classes in how to smith to all interested parties so they could potentially compete with me, or would I seek to control these skills and knowledge and look to pass them down to my children?
Well as a master blacksmith you are likely to earn more and have a life with much less back breaking labour by taking many apprentices and charging for training than you would by just running a family only shop.
Unless there are lots of towns for all these budding smiths to populate they will likely be setting up shop next door in my vicinity. If I train them in volume I am creating my own competition in a geographically constrained and resource limited economic space. If I train all comers I am very effectively cutting my own throat unless I can somehow coerce or convince them to stay with me as workers and enlarge my shop.
The notion that a savvy tradesman or craftsman is not going to be making a fairly precise calculation about how much competition his town or settlement can handle, and still allow him or her a comfortable income is not in line with the way people behave in resource limited scenarios. If the main thing I can give my kids to ensure their survival is a skill set that enables them to make a good living I’m likely to want to control distribution of that skill set as much as possible.
Your logic seems flawed to me. As the level of tech recovers the population would be rapidly expanding recovering from it’s low level that might be as low as 1 percent of current or less. There would be ample vacant arable land so those apprentices would go off to settlements that lacked ones where they would be treated extremely well.
Are we really going to insult each other over this? Knock it off. Attack the arguments, but don’t call other posters names.
Whereas I get the feeling that the people who are so upbeat are forgetting what it’s like to embark on a new project.
When I built raised beds for my garden last year, it was the first time since I was seven that I’d built something out of wood. I had plans for it, step-by-step instructions, all the right tools. The guy at Lowe’s cut the wood to my specifications. I had a full belly and clothes and a house to go into to take a break.
And it still took me forever, because of things like wood that slightly warped, and nails that popped out of the wood because they were slightly too small.
Sure, burning a bowl out of a log is easy–in theory. But what if that log turns out to have rot right at the point where you planned to make the bowl? What if, as you’re trying to chip it out, you crack it? What if you burn your eye when you chip away a coal you thought was dead and it flies into your face?
The optimists seem to be assuming that everything goes perfectly every step of the way when they embark on this new project (and no, MrDibble, you haven’t done any of these things naked and hungry without tools in the face of an apocalypse; these projects are new to you). I’m assuming that there are a lot of mistakes, a lot of tensions running high, a lot of tiny fiddly details that none of us can imagine because we haven’t done these things before. Making useable stone tools and passable shelters and reinventing agriculture in the first year will be completely awesome. Beyond that seems unlikely to me.
Am I in the dead zone or something?
I don’t know about Mr. Dibble’s training, though he seems quite knowledgeable and I can’t fault anything he’s posted yet; I received my survival training from the USAF. After that I augmented my skills with a few private courses. All of these basic tasks can be accomplished by a single human without tools given time. In a group it’s much, much easier.
Want to kill one of those cattle? Here is how you do it.
If you have a domesticated herd that is used to human contact, lasso or heard as many as possible near your campsite and tie them up with vine. If they are only semi used to contact, arm yourselves with simple spears made from sharpened bamboo, or fire hardened wood. You can sharpen your branch by breaking it using leverage and taking any stone with an edge and shaving it down to a point. Harden it in your fire. Gather a few friends, corner a single cow by gently herding it up against a natural barrier, and stab the hell out of it. No tentative motions, you all move on the count of three and drive your spears as deep as you can muster. Then back off and wait, following your animal until it falls. Clean kill can be accomplished by crushing the skull with a large rock once the prey item is immobile. Other options include simply stampeding it off a cliff, or lassoing it with some vine and tying the animal to a handy tree for an easier kill. It takes numbers, you have to work together.
A single dairy or meat cow will provide loads of food for a moderately sized group and can feed a small one for a long time provided you take the time to smoke and dry the excess meat. Bones and hide will provide nice tool making materials for knives, awls, fish hooks and other goods.
I’ve done some of them (like the grass hut and the stone knapping) near-naked (as in, in a loincloth) and a little hungry (because I missed lunch) , but never in the face of the apocalypse, no.
If people are traveling that’s fine, but in a live or die resource poor scenario tradespeople often tend to cluster to existing settlements vs dispersing. If they were forced to move elsewhere your idea could work.
back to the, the your’e alone with a cow, kill the cow or starve… having had a few hours to think about it this is what I’d do…
Leave the cow alone, find a wet gully, There will be big thick vines in the wet gully, cut some of them with rocks, or just twist them until they break,. Also while I’m there, search for “yabbies”, fresh water cray fresh that can be easily caught with bare hands. Know this from personal experience. Also, gather some nice big fern fronds from the wet gully that I can weave into a hat to guard me from sunburn.
Now head back to that cow, use the vines and a stick to make a garrote, twist it round it’s neck and turn the stick until it dies of strangulation or it’s neck is snapped or both. Much safer option. Then proceed as above making use of hide, meat, bones etc.
Anyway, all of this is the boring part, I think it’s safe to assume that enough intelligent resourceful people can survive to the point of making iron knives, albeit in small quantities, but then the interesting part is what happens from there to the recovery of other tech. Can we please move on?, 98 percent of people die because they can’t be bothered to try and kill a cow… ok cool, but I want to talk about what happens after that to the other 2 percent.
You run into the Battlestar Galactica problem. Bill, Laura, Zeke.
Bill, he’s military through and through. He thinks that the only chance for humanity’s survival is to cut the deadweight: most civvies are on their own, and the few that are accepted into society are accepted as slaves. Military rule is key for Bill, and he’ll crush any dissent ruthlessly.
Zeke, he’s democratic through and through. Humanity can only survive and move forward if leaders are elected democratically and if everyone is a full citizen with equal rights. He’s eloquent and well-liked and versed in nonviolent resistance and he loathes Bill personally, undercutting Bill at every chance though well-organized actions that lead to folks’ questioning authority.
Laura, she’s a passionate visionary. Those aliens? They’re the hand of God, punishing humanity for its hubris. The only reasonable conclusion from their actions is that humanity is given a second chance at the garden of Eden, which may be obtained only by forsaking all–ALL–technology, starting with clothing. Her followers are willing to die and willing to lie low if necessary to prevent more technology.
How does this group of 100,000 people deal with these three leaders? Who chooses the direction of the society, and how? How is it dealt with when people disagree?