I’ve already been taught how to gather in my locality - my city is lousy with foraging experiences. Coastal foraging courses, fynbos foraging courses, mushrooming courses - I’ve done them all. Going back in time to where the coast and land hasn’t been as denuded will only help that.
Of course, there were already people here, so they’d have to be befriended. Possibly trading pottery with them would be a good route to that.
And there’s the dangers of wild animals that would need to be accounted for, obviously. Not going to get very far with my saw if I’m bitten by a puffadder or eaten by a lion.
My list was about the steps just to produce the expected product, of course all the subsistence and survival stuff has to happen at the same time - food, shelter, clothing, safety. That should take up like 90% of anyone’s time. That’s why my timeline is 5 years - it assumes just a couple hours a day on average dedicated to work on the toolmaking project.
I’ve seen a video of a guy quickly putting together a primitive working lathe in the woods, and using a bent sapling as the “spring” to make the shaft return. Amazing what bsome of those pioneed types turned out.
Pole lathes were the common form of lathe even for professionals, for a very long time. For greenwood workers (bodgers), that would mean up until the middle decades of the 20th century. For other uses, they remained in use up until the High Middle Ages (bow lathes remained the tool of choice for precision and small stuff like beads and chess pieces)
Absolutely. My timeline was based on the same somebody else providing me with cordage and leather. Probably the same somebodies who are doing the food and shelter.
Also pertinent: cordage scales in many interesting ways - quite possibly discovered/derived from accidental tangles of grasses or vines, then easily experimented with needing virtually no other tools except nimble fingers - once the usefulness of string is discovered, working on up to leather ropes, steel cables or carbon-fiber beanstalks is just a matter of oneup-man-ship.
If those evaluations include all the work necessary, then it’s considerably less than that of most modern cubicle folk, who after their paid workday is over still have to do all the work of running their households.
I’ve been listening to the Robert Fagels translation of *The Odyssey, and it tells how Odysseus killed a stag and quickly braided together vines to make a rope to drag it back to the ship. Making string and rope was a standard skill back then, even for those at the top of the social heap.
To be fair, grapevine is a really, really easy material to work with. Put me naked and tool-less in a temperate forest with wild grapes, and I could come out with a functional and even artistic basket in a couple of hours.
I watched a YouTube video a couple months ago whose premise is that the simpler (seemingly simpler anyway) the object, the more complicated its manufacturing and supply chain is. It mentioned the difficulty of the toaster project too. A classic example is that to make the cheapest most basic disposable plastic spoon, you must first build an oil refinery.
I don’t think the premise is universal, but it applies to many things, like the pencil too. Complicated things like computers or cell phones are equally dependent on huge supply chains and embodied knowledge and processes. You could send 1,000 or 10,000 or even a million of the smartest people in the world back to the 1700s and they’re still not going to be able to make an iPhone. Nearly every component is already dependent on computers and highly advanced clean-room production processes that would all need to be spun up from scratch. That’s no small feat.
Well, you have to find a way to mine the ore containing the metals that you need, and then you have to find a way to heat that ore to thousands of degrees so you can access and separate the metal, etc. I don’t see how you could do that over a campfire.
By making your campfire very large, and enclosing it almost entirely in bricks (that you made using a cooler campfire), and fueling it with charcoal instead of raw wood (that you also made using an enclosed campfire).
Agree w your (ETA: @jjakucyk three posts up) overall points completely. But I’ll take issue with the vid producers’ BSey POV.
That premise is real clickbaity.
If they change it to read
the simpler (seemingly simpler anyway) the object, the more disproportionately complicated its manufacturing and supply chain is.
Then suddenly it’s factually accurate, and not clickbait “one weird trick”.
The real truth in the modern world is that every consumer thing depends on a vast interlocking dense network of an industrial base we take mostly for granted. Once you’ve built the entire base necessary to manufacture and distribute disposable plastic forks, you’re about 99% of the way to manufacturing and distributing 2026-era high end automobiles too.
Said another way, completed consumer products, be they great or small, are the tippiest tip tip of the ginourmous overall spear of a 21st century technological economy.
And having all that within a reasonable walking distance of each other.
Iron ore, wood good for making charcoal, clay for making bricks, an easy food supply, weather that won’t kill you your first year, the list goes on.
I think people seriously overestimate how much they’ll be getting done on this project. We’re looking at 10,000 years ago. Even in the most advanced places on Earth, we’re just entering the neolithic era. You won’t find merchants delivering products from hundreds or thousands of miles away. You have to go and find everything yourself. Sure, you might know how to find ore, or how to find clay, or how to find wood, or how to find food, or how to find a dozen other things we’ll need, but do you know all of those? Miss one key component, and you could spend the rest of your life looking for it.
Right. The original processes for doing all this might well have taken multiple lifetimes and the effort of multiple people. Is the time traveler able to convince others in the village to assist in this project, even though the end goal seems a fantasy?
Even if there’s a village of friendly people there to help, you can’t even talk to them. How long will it take to learn enough of their language to even ask for help with things they already know about? And then to teach them enough of our language to explain things like “iron ore” and “mining” and “Walking way the fuck over there to get something that literally no one they’ve ever met has even heard of before”. You’d be lucky if you got to the point of just being “That idiot who can’t even talk right, but we feed him and keep him alive because he’s funny.”
Yes, there are a thousand things that will occupy the time traveler, and learning the language is just one. (They will also need to learn where to shit, what to eat and what not to eat, how to make clothing, how to build a fire, how to build a shelter, a bed, etc.)
And others are overestimating how hard it is. Clay and wood are available pretty much anywhere the weather won’t kill you. The knowledge of how to do it is the part that took generations, with a bit of research before the trip you have “the shoulders of giants to stand on”.
The hardest part of the project will be not dying of disease/accidents/predators during the years it would take. I’ve been assuming that this is a multiple person expedition with some able to dedicate themselves to metal working while others work on food, shelter, etc. Solo would be much harder.
And as a note, even 10,000 years ago there were widespread trade networks in things like good stone for tool making.
Are you aware just how ubiquitous some kind of iron ore is? At least in the places that have all the other stuff people need? Iron ore is never going to be the limiting factor. Nor is clay. Unless one were fool enough to time travel back to a desert, a coral atoll, the Antarctic or some other desolate spot. And why would you do that?
Tool stone would actually be the limiter. And I know where the tool stone is in my locale.
The answer is quite simply “Yes, I do”.
I know what the local iron ores and clays and tool stones look like and where some easy-to-access deposits of all 3 are, within 30 minutes walk of my current location. I know what indigenous plants in my environment are good for what uses - food, wood, fibre, even medicine. I know how to forage and gather food here, I know how to process that local stone to make very basic tools [1]. I know how to start fire. I also know what plants and animals are likely to be dangerous, where the clean water is, what the weather and seasons are like. I also know what the indigenes of the time are probably going to be like, enough to at least get along with them[2] .
The reason I know all of that is I’ve been professionally trained in some of that (geology and archaeology), and I took the trouble to learn the rest. Over many decades, starting with Scouts as a kid and then adult ed. courses and hobbies.
I’m under no illusions that anyone could do it here. Nor that it would work for me in a different environment. And it would greatly help if I were 20 years younger (but still knowing what I do now!). But even in my current physical form, I’m pretty sure I’d cope.
I’ve assumed solo. But that you can choose where to jump back to, and also that you’re decidedly NOT naked. And obviously things like disease and injury and death are variables that could ruin everything, but are essentially outside the problem context.
Plus, of course, even if any given person doesn’t know all that they need to know to survive and start the first couple of rungs of the tech ladder, they can learn that before the trip. All of that knowledge is available in this day, and it’s pretty accessible.
You might want to start with someone who has flint-knapping as a hobby, because that’s something that, while it’s really easy to learn to do, it takes a lot of practice to do it well. But knowing what the local edible foods are, for instance, could be taught in a couple of days.