How To Make Stone Tools In A Survival Situation | Basic Instincts | WIRED

And right there in less than a second, I have created a tool that allows me to overcome all of my physical limitations. My name is Bill Schindler. I'm an experimental archeologist and primitive technologist and a professor of archeology and anthropology at Washington College. If you're in the wilderness and you have nothing, the most important thing that you need is a sharp, durable edge. Humans are one of the weakest species on the planet. Our nails are almost useless. Our teeth are almost useless. We're not that strong. We can't run very fast. We can't dig into the ground. We need tools to overcome these physical limitations and interact with our environment. And without those tools, we will die. The production of stone tools can vary from the simplest, most basic tool that can be made in less than a second to something that takes hours or days to make and is incredibly complex. The process is actually quite simple. Remember, our Australopithecine ancestors with brains the size of my fist figured out how to do this on their own and you can do it yourself as well. So, here's my piece of flint or here's my rock that I'm gonna strike. I'm gonna find an edge that hopefully is less than 90 degrees and ideally around 70 degrees where you see with my finger. I'm gonna take a hammer stone. The mass of the hammer stone is usually less than the mass of the size of the rock I'm trying to hit. And I'm gonna hold it in my hand away from my body. These flakes coming off are razor sharp. Strike the rock. Right there in less than a second, I have made a tool that's sharper and more durable than anything that I have on my body. Even something like carving this piece of wood, everything that I'm doing right now is something that I can't do with any other part of my body. I can use this sharp edge to carve with, to scrape with, to slice, butcher. I can even use it as a wedge and to split the stick in half. This is the only tool that I need to make an entire fire kit to make fire. This is the only tool that I need to butcher an entire animal. This is incredibly powerful and this is what made us human. When you're looking for the right kind of rock to make a stone tool from, there are four properties you're looking for. The rock needs to be homogenous. In other words, whatever the structure is on the inside, you want it to be the same throughout. You're sending shock waves into this rock and you don't want them to be interrupted. It needs to be brittle. In other words, when you strike it, it needs to fracture with a crack. You don't want it to crumble. You also need it to be elastic. When you strike this rock, the flake that you're creating actually bends off and then snaps back. And finally, it needs to be isotropic. And by isotropic, I mean that the same rules apply no matter what direction I hit this rock. A piece of slate is not isotropic. Slate is perfect for shingles because if I strike it in one direction, it cleaves off into sheets. If I strike it in the other direction, it's gonna crumble. This rock, this piece of flint, if I strike it from this direction or this direction or this direction, the same rules apply. You need to remember that it is a predictable process. This predictable process is best illustrated right here with this piece of glass. This is a Hertzian cone. If you look at the angle, it's almost 136 degrees. What's important is if I did the same thing every single time and I created this by taking this piece of plate glass and dropping a BB on it, the same exact cone with the same exact angle would pop out every single time. And if that's the case, then I can start to control certain things. So if I tip this piece of glass so that the BB hitting it wasn't hitting it at 90 degrees, the cone would have a different shape. If I tipped it the other way, it would have a different shape back in the other direction. So what does that have to do with making stone tools? Well, instead of hitting it in the middle of this glass, what if I moved it to the edge and the piece that popped out was half of a cone? And that's exactly what happened here. This flake that came out of this rock is a part of that Hertzian cone. And I can control that shape and that size by tilting that rock and hitting it with different things. What does this look like in real life? And what are you looking for and how do you strike these rocks in order to create these very basic tools? Well, again, you have to find the right kind of rock. Rocks like flint, for example, or quartzites or obsidians, those are ideal rocks to use to make stone tools. If I took this rock, for example, this flake came off of this parent one here. Instead of just using the sharp edge on it, I can envision on the inside of this rock, a finished knife, something just like this. And I can strategically attack this rock, change angles, change what I hit it with to remove all the parts that I don't want. So a finished blade like this would be produced from the inside. I'm gonna use this rock very quickly and show you what it looks like to create this unifacial tool into something we call a bifacial tool. In other words, I'm gonna control two faces of this rock at the same time. One of the things you'll notice is that I'm flipping this rock over, I'm looking for angles, I'm looking for certain types of morphology on the surfaces that I'm gonna follow, and I'm starting to get a general outline of what I'm looking for here. It's a very basic hand axe. The technology I used to just create that flake is a technology that's almost three and a half million years old. The technology that I'm using here now to create this hand axe is two million years old. In addition to striking the rock with all sorts of things, I can also modify the shape of the rock by pushing pieces off. And this is what you do when you really find work for resharpening, creating notches and arrowheads, adjusting angles. So in order to do that, I can use a variety of materials. I can use a piece of wood. I can use an antler. You can increase leverage by taking pieces of antler and strapping them to pieces of wood. And this is how it works. If I want to adjust the shape or the sharpness of something small, like this unfinished arrowhead, I can put it in my hand, take the tip, put it exactly where I want it to be, and push flakes off. This is an extremely predictable process because I can put the tip of this antler exactly where I want it to be. I can line up the angle of the force that I want to initiate and then press the force off. This is really the beginning of it all. Once you've created your stone tool, you can create shelter. You can create a fire kit. You can create hunting weapons. You can create a tool that allows you to dig into the ground and harvest underground storage organs like roots or quorums or tubers. Because of this tool, you can not only survive, but you can thrive in the wilderness.