Practicing Primitive Aboriginal Skills By S. Watts. While I was writing the description for this book on primitive technology, using the ubiquitous symbol of modern technology, the computer, it had an unexplained failure, which I'll never understand. If I were an aboriginal shooting an arrow, and my bow broke, I'd figure out why, and improve the design. Much technology and many tools have surpassed the understanding of the average person. Long, long ago, most people knew nearly everything necessary to live. They made their tools, and with them acquired food, clothing, and shelter. So, how did we start with sharp sticks and end up with nuclear weapons? Animal skins to Goretex? Raw fish to glow-in-the-dark cheese ancestors began with wooden spears, added stone points, made replaceable parts, and invented more powerful throwing methods. You can use this book as a manual for native crafts, survival, and history. By making these tool how failure led to inspiration, how civilization evolved through new ideas. Among the projects are rafts, spears, arrows, knives, nets, cordage, storage, housing, skins, needles, pottery, beads, oil lamp, art, fishing tackle....Also fascinating for armchair explorers and philosophers of all ages and expertise.

Primitive technology can help us explore the world of our prehistoric past. Insights into our ancestors provide insights to ourselves. That's the author's belief, and by learning the techniques and building the tools used by the first people, we come to understand the evolution of ideas and society. For example, you'll learn to make spears and stoned points, beginning with a sharpened, fire-hardened stick, next adding a stone point, then a replaceable point, and graduating to shafts with improved balance, sharper points, and versatile launching methods. NO, he doesn't lead you all the way to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Other tools and ideas--bark houses, fish nets, containers, musical instruments, ropes, hooks, weaving, watercraft, blowguns. Just how do ideas evolve? How do we get from dugout canoes to bark canoes? Sticks to tools? What can we use to make shelters? Why did we decorate objects, and ourselves? This is a great book for learning useful woodcraft and survival skills, but a fabulous book for discovering how we think. 225 pages, paperback. $24.95