"Stone Age house reconstructed -- repost" Topic

An interesting article that I thought I would pass on:

link

That was interesting!

Thanks

John

Back in the late Iron Age (1978, I think) I was at Butser providing unskilled labour in the fields, smelting copper and weaving wattle fences. Happy days!

I visited Butser back in about 1973 or 1974, before it was open to the public. Wonderful buildings, and I remember the small, black, celtic cows, and the striped piglets.

advocate, I bet you at least smelled like a Stone Age man at the end of the day!

It amazes me that people constantly assume that humans just as intelligent (if not moreso) than we are would be crude savages living in filth. These researchers figured out how to do this without benefit of oral tradition or years of training by more experienced builders. I imagine some of this would probably look pretty crude to the actual people of the time as they would likely have developed particularized skills and tricks. Living in such environments would also quickly reveal any practical shortcomings (such a whether homes needed to be elevated for drainage or dug in to preserve heat).

Similarly, I would wager they probably had some pretty clever tools since once you have simple ones, you can rapidly develop more specialized tools that work even better. For example a hand awl is fine, but once you have some woodworking tools, you can do table based drills, presses, etc, for higher strength, precision, and capacity, even without metal. Swap points, edges and needles as needed while still benefiting from more stability and leverage.