61–70 of 90 posts
A tip: turn on captions. The creator somewhat famously doesn't talk, but does provide really informative captions for each step of the build/experiment process. Related: if you like this and want more I recently read a book series called Bonesetter that has a protagonist who lives in primitive times and it tells the story of a person kicked from their tribe, but who prospers by building Primitive Technology type inve…
> This form of farming is a good way to get around the conventional farming practice of clearing trees to make fields. Yeah, you harvested two yams (less than a day's calories) over a six month period. That doesn't scale up the way modern farming practices do.
There's a lot of sophistication in "primitive" agriculture. Humans have always been as intelligent and ambitious as they are today; they just didn't always have today's tools. Yams always make me think of Gone with the Wind . The climax of Act III (not labeled as such, but stories are stories) is Scarlett O'Hara at her family's plantation. Yankee soldiers have come through and taken every scrap of food, but they didn…
Does anyone have an idea when these procedures by humans could have been done? The techniques this guy used could have been done 7000bc? (Super recent) They look advanced requiring: passed down knowledge, seasons knowledge, plant knowledge, fire creation, pot making etc. Doing this would have also created villages since you need to stick around to tend plots of land - which would have invited attacks from other tribe…
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10966.long
Analysis of stone tools suggests that a wide range starchy foods were being systematically gathered and prepared for much of the Middle Stone Age (~280,000 BP to ~25,000 BP) although it is unclear whether these foods were being actively cultivated.
http://www.academia.edu/426173/Middle_Stone_Age_Starch_Acqui...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How's that? Hard to refine? I did hear elsewhere that aluminium is one of the most common metals on the world, possibly even moreso than iron.
Made with electrolysis of a molten aluminum salt. Requires a lot of electricity. Back in the 1850s they made it with expensive chemical reactions and the french elite used to wear it as jewellery.
A tip: turn on captions. The creator somewhat famously doesn't talk, but does provide really informative captions for each step of the build/experiment process. Related: if you like this and want more I recently read a book series called Bonesetter that has a protagonist who lives in primitive times and it tells the story of a person kicked from their tribe, but who prospers by building Primitive Technology type inve…
Another tip: watch it once without the captions, then again with them. There's more 'wonder' this way.
It's fun to "play along at home" and try to figure out why he's doing something without the captions.
What a great idea, to feature this fellow's Primitive Technology blog (and his outstanding Youtube channel) here on a high tech news site. Fire making, clay pots, mud huts, stone axes, rope, hunting weapons -- these are what kept people alive for eons, and ironically in our modern high tech era, many if not most of these skills are largely forgotten by all but a few remaining primitive tribes and archivists like him.…
I clicked this fully expecting "yam", "cultivate" and "cook" to be archaic Unix tools. Instead I got this. Such a happy surprise.
It would be interesting to see a way to scale up production to produce more than just a couple of meals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, I was commenting specifically on this claim: > This form of farming is a good way to get around the conventional farming practice of clearing trees to make fields. It's not a good form of farming, because it's both low density and expensive.
Depends on your criteria. If you only aim to feed a small group, it is significantly less cost to make a handful of enclosures than to clear a large amount of space for a field, even if the field is more efficient at scale.
I stumbled on his videos a couple of months ago. Sadly, I only realized yesterday that there were captions that described his process, but watching it without isn't too bad either. He does things in a very evident manner and it's pretty relaxing just watching him do his thing.