In addition to that, bundling up smaller sticks makes them burn longer, usually. Lots of people have used such bundles throughout history. Repurposes otherwise scrap wood as useful fuel.
https://www.courant.com/ctnow/hc-stick-bundles-20131213-story.html
Not related to the OP, but for anyone watching this guy’s videos, make sure to turn on the “closed caption” feature. It provides a description about many of the things he is doing.
Keep in mind people in ages past wouldn’t need as much firewood as we like to have in a modern first-world home. They didn’t just sit around shivering all day during the winter, they’d be up and about living life outside during the day and wouldn’t need a fire at all for most of the day.
When I worked consulting in Northern Alberta during the winter one of my jobs was to spend about 10 hours per day walking a several-mile trail and chipping through a frozen river every 2 hours to take water samples while a rig drilled under the creek. Even at -25C I’d generate enough body heat to keep warm trudging through the snow and doing a moderate (at most) amount of physical labour. I didn’t worry about getting cold, I’d worry about running out of energy to keep moving (which is when you start to get cold). With adequate food and clothing people don’t need outside heat sources when they are active.
Also as others have mentioned firewood doesn’t have to be the trunks of large trees cut and split; smaller branches breakable by hand burn too. People still gather this type of firewood today:
Yes those photos come from warm parts of the world but they still show how people can gather firewood with minimal or no tools at all.
The fire is mostly for cooking and to keep warm during the transition from your active day to the chilly waking hours of sitting around resting. Once you went to bed you’d be under blankets/furs and possibly cuddled up with other people. Body heat keeps you warm through the night; a fire isn’t necessary or even helpful when you’ve insulated yourself.
My Wife and I call that Chess? Cribbage? or Gin Rummy? We already play about 10-12 games a week.
I think it’s important to know how to entertain yourselves. Knowing that retirement is on the horizon, I am teaching myself guitar. I may learn a song before I’m dead. I’m really, really bad. But it pleases me.
Bought some more oil lamps for when the power goes out. Power doesn’t go out very often though. I’m sure it would get rough after a few days. Reading by lamp/candle light would be rough. I would really miss my Kindle.
That Long Fire is interesting @Stranger_On_A_Train
True. If it’s light, you’re outside finding food, making stuff, etc, pretty much all of the available daylight time.
People who grow up in a society in which doing a great deal of physical work is routine behavior develop a degree of strength which is rare in modern humans. Even those modern humans who spend time in gyms carefully developing defined muscles usually only spend a limited amount of time at it.
I knew a number of farmers, male and female, who grew up farming during the first part of the 20th century, when most of the work now generally done by machine was done by hand. They were often not very large, and didn’t look particularly muscular, at least with their clothes on (I never saw most of them with their shirts off.) When I knew them, they were mostly in their 70’s and 80’s – and were still immensely strong; though they’d occasionally complain that they couldn’t do what they could when they were younger – such as spending all day going up and down ladders, rapidly, carrying on each trip up two bundles of shingles, 100 lbs each. The man who told me this looked like he probably weighed about 120 lbs himself.
I’ve seen a fat middle-aged female farmer (who grew up in the 50’s) throw 60 to 70 lb haybales up into a loft. I do mean throw, up well over her head and some distance. Not once or twice – over and over, without pausing, until the wagon was empty. After which, she moved on to another job.
(I couldn’t do that myself, even when I was middle-aged instead of old; I could move those bales, and do it for quite a while, but I couldn’t throw them like that. I didn’t start young enough. While sedentary people can get stronger at any age if they’re healthy, you have to start putting the muscle on in your teens to really get up to your peak genetic capability.)
More like three times. You’ve also got to haul it.
Flint is a stone 
.
I don’t know the characteristics of flint for axes – maybe it breaks too easily? But using stone tools is also partly a matter of using what stone’s to hand – people did move good stone long distances, but also used a lot of local stuff.
We are the species that tells stories.
People who haven’t had TV or books don’t miss them. And they made music. (Also, I would guess, winter was a good time to make musical instruments; among a lot of other things.)
I’ve slept, outside, in the winter, in a shelter I made myself that day in a couple of hours, with no fire at all, just my own body heat. It wasn’t as cozy as my own bed at home, but I was at no risk of hypothermia or frostbite. The shelter was basically a tube just barely big enough to fit my sleeping bag and me in it, and made from a fallen log propped on a stump with pine branches, mud, and snow piled up against it.
Flint, especially nodules that are good for splitting for tool use, is not available in all locations. Another hard stone, while still not universal, is still workable, even if you don’t have access to high quality flint. There is remarkable evidence of early flint trading, which a quick review on ye olde wiki has the basics of.
During the Stone Age, access to flint was so important for survival that people would travel or trade to obtain flint. Flint Ridge in Ohio was an important source of flint and Native Americans extracted the flint from hundreds of quarries along the ridge. This “Ohio Flint” was traded across the eastern United States and has been found as far west as the Rocky Mountains and south around the Gulf of Mexico.[5]
It’s similar to the old saw of why have a quarry for non-precious stone for building, not all stone has the same properties. Flint is uniquely suited (okay, obsidian as well) for making sharp blades, but depending on treatment, can be quite brittle as well. And the skill to knap a quality blade for different applications is amazing. Just like with a metal tool, you want a different style of edge for a knife, a spear, an axe, and for sub-specialties of the above.
Absolutely. I myself, though far from farmer-superpower level, had the advantage of being made to do a lot of construction, digging, woodchopping, and just general toting and hauling in my childhood and teens. Nearly half a century later I’m still reaping the residual benefits of that early physical strengthening.
That was my thought. The whole point of flint was that, struck at the right angle with another rock, it would flake off in such a manner as to make a very sharp knife-like edge. that characteristic suggests it’s not well suited for hammering things (or being hammered as a chisel or wedge). rather, it scrapes and slices very well. Find a suitable chunk of some less fragile stone to hammer or chop wood with.
Polished stone (including polished flint!) became the preferred material for the chopping kind of woodworking, specifically, even in societies that used knapped flint/chert/obsidian blades for other tools like knives and arrowheads. There are mechanical reasons for this relating to stress and brittleness.
In Middle Stone Age South Africa, this led to heat-treated quartzite and silcrete being the ubiquitous stones used.
I think that makes a lot of difference, modern sleeping bags are little insulating shelters all by themselves.
I’m curious… why are dung fires bad for you? Is it the pathogens? Doesn’t the heat kill them? Is it something else?
Pretty much spot on. Where it was available, fine grained hard igneous stone was used for axes, and often good material would be traded hundreds or even thousands of km either as blanks or finished product. Polishing by abrading the stone takes a long time, but you end up with a tool that lasts. When the impact edge is properly angled the energy from chopping is dissipated in a way that doesn’t take chips off the edge.
We know from work done with traditional stone tool users in Australia that they understood the mechanics well, and had clear preferences between good and so-so axes relating to their ergonomics, handling and effectiveness.
The same people also know when not to bother and just pick up a natural chunk of stone with the right sort of edge and just bash the bejesus out of a stending tree until it submits to their will.
Biomass fires tend to produce a lot of particulate matter that embeds in alveoli and inhibits lung function, and mammalian feces in particular has a lot of contaminants that produce irritant gases. This is bad enough in open air (waste disposal burn pits, sugar cane burning, et cetera) but is especially problematic when used for cooking and heating in poorly ventilated dwellings.
Stranger
Well, he was in Scouting before you were, probably. About 1939 to about 1946.
Note that cutting trees is not the only way to burn wood. simply collecting sticks and breaking them up is a pretty standard way to get fuel for fire
Google: collecting firewood images collecting firewood images - Google Search
and see how non-industrialized societies gather wood
Good news! After a two year hiatus, he published a new video last week!
One thing to note is that you don’t need to constantly chop down big trees for wood. Coppicing is known to have been practiced in the Neolithic. That process produces smaller-diameter timber, ideal for firewood.
True, but my sleeping bag wasn’t one of those high-tech modern ones; it was just the standard cheap blanket-lined-with-another-blanket, folded over and with a zipper on the side.