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5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

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Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#41

Post by robin_reala »

MarkusQ wrote: post #6
toolslive wrote: post #2

It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.

Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.

people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats

Historical sea levels were wildly different at different times, so not necessarily. For instance, the British isles were settled at a point when it was a part of the mainland: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland.png

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#42

Post by jstanley »

vee-kay wrote: post #39
ReptileMan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to make a drill bit of highly alloyed copper you need a bit more tools and knowledge

Do a web search for "Wootz steel", "Damascus blades" and "Iron pillars India". The ancient world certainly had expertise in advanced metallurgy. Wootz steel was actually nanotech.

But that doesn't mean the average person will produce all that stuff from a standing start within 12 months just because they would like to drill a hole.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#43

Post by tephra »

saidnooneever wrote: post #40
MarkusQ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.

they dont even accept claims with properly documented and preserved samples. your methodology doesnt matter if it disagrees with the common accepted 'truth'. archeology is a cesspool. not to mention tons of hings being twisted into weird shit only to try and push colonial agendas!

Do you have any examples of this?

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#44

Post by eth0up »

profsummergig wrote: post #12

Bow drills were still commonly used in India in 25 years ago. Because electricity was unreliable and machinery was expensive.

I keep one of those Amish hand-crank drills in my vehicle toolbox. I have one in the closet too.

I have a thing for old tools, but not much can substitute a drill when one is needed. And the ones I refer to are surprisingly effective, and built to last. Borders on art for me.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#45

Post by chmod775 »

chmod775 wrote: post #33
mattlondon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together. You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in th…

> You need to create string. That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools. Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use. These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they h…

> That region typically used flax for string.

Replying to myself because I looked into this a bit. Looks like date palm fiber might have been more common for rope (likely much easier to make if you needed a lot).

For this use-case probably nowhere near as good though.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#46

Post by rm30 »

I think archaeology requires a multidisciplinary approach that has only recently begun to emerge. For too long, especially in past centuries, archaeologists focused on history and languages while neglecting engineering, chemistry and the practical techniques that enabled survival and innovation. That's why the general public views our ancestors as 'primitive,' when in reality they possessed techniques many of which we've lost or still don't fully understand.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#47

Post by rm30 »

I wonder if the bow drill principle for boring holes evolved from fire-starting techniques, where the same reciprocal motion was already understood and mastered in that years.

Just speculation, but it suggests how practical problem-solving builds on existing techniques rather than appearing fully formed.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#48

Post by adrian_b »

gehsty wrote: post #34
chmod775 wrote: post #9

Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days. That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly. Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting r…

Alloying copper with silver and lead is sophisticated. How could they have got to this without structured research, experimentation, controlled manufacturing. It’s a lot closer to our drill bits now than a sharpened bone.

It is likely that only silver was the intended alloying element.

Except for native silver, which is very rare and usually mixed with gold, most silver is extracted from sulfides where it is mixed with lead (because silver ions and lead ions have the same size), so simple smelting will produce a mixture of silver and lead.

There are techniques of purifying the silver from the lead (i.e. "cupellation"), which were well known in later antiquity, but, at the time of early tools like this, probably the purification was not yet efficient.

The knowledge of the fact that pure metals are soft but mixing them makes hard metals is extremely ancient. Before learning this, metals could be used only for jewelry (except for very rare natural alloys, like the meteorites made of Fe-Ni-Co-Ge, which were the source of the oldest iron-based tools found in Egypt and elsewhere, thousands of years before the discovery of how to extract iron from its minerals).

Before discovering tin and the bronze made from copper and tin, which happened relatively recently, around the time when written history also began, for many thousands of years various weaker copper alloys were used, but which nonetheless were much harder than pure copper.

The metallurgy of 3 metals, lead, copper and gold, is very old, around ten thousand years or more. So more time has passed from the time when the techniques of smelting metals and making objects of them were first discovered until the discovery of other metals, e.g. silver and tin, and the diversification of metal-working techniques, than since that moment until the present.

There was a lot of time for refining the techniques used by smiths.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#49

Post by Sharlin »

rm30 wrote: post #47

I wonder if the bow drill principle for boring holes evolved from fire-starting techniques, where the same reciprocal motion was already understood and mastered in that years. Just speculation, but it suggests how practical problem-solving builds on existing techniques rather than appearing fully formed.

Given that humans must have "always" known that carving a hole in something is easier if you use your wrist to reciprocally rotate the tool, I'd be inclined to suspect that both hole-making and firestarting with a bow drill were invented more or less contemporaneously.

Re: 5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

#50

Post by jazz9k »

toolslive wrote: post #2

It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.

It's this kind of gate keeping in archaeology that has kept Graham Hancock out of the industry for years, and we are now just finding out his theories are true.

My theory is that the industry is so small, they are afraid it will put them out of a career.

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