I had one of the best sleeps of my life on a bed of soft sand, in the curve of a dry creek that I really should not have slept in due to flash flood risk. Since then I've wondered if ancient people might have made mattresses of sand, but they were so simple and evanescent that they left no trace.
Accounts by westerners enslaved by nomadic tribes (when they shipwrecked on the coast) often talk about looking for sand to sleep on, especially when in the rocky parts of the Sahara, so I’d wager humans have been sleeping on sand for a very long time.
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.
You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...
Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).
It would be in fact quite amusing if the technology the Neolithians were actually most proud of had nothing to do with stone, just didn’t last. Better fabrics? Waterproof clothing? Elaborate wooden tools made using “dumb” stone ones?
If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.
He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...
omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.
i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)
"The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.
The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.
This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."
Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with.
Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.
Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).
He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc. https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...
His skeleton clock build is one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, up there with Bartoz's gorgeous webpages: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/
i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)