(04-25-2024, 04:48 PM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: Knowledge and experience is key to survival.
I believe that people should be taught basic survival skills first, before academic and other concerns. I'm not talking about Boy Scouts, although that is a great program, I'm talking about "primitive" skills used by stone-aged tribes. If you had the skills and knowledge they had, you could survive the raw elements with nothing but what was available around you. If you need something, you make it or take it from the environment around you.
I think the same. I learned how to stalk critters young, and track them, and what I can eat out of the woods. I can make my own bows and arrows - it ain't as easy as they make it look - and I can make my own powder, bullets, and cartridges for my black powder gun. I learned how to do that at a somewhat older age.
Still, I'm not likely to survive for more than a couple months after a major disaster. The problem is not what I can't do, it's what I won't be able to get. Medicine in my case. I may be able to fake it for a while with lower-powered stuff out of the woods, but it's eventually gonna get me.
Still, I've often thought how well "primitive" folks could do with the wealth of stuff laying around after a collapse. I started thinking about that after seeing a spear head that an Australian Aborigine chipped out of the glass that a telephone pole insulator was made from. I've seen arrows from Indians made a couple hundred years ago with heads make out of sheet brass - some rolled into cones, some cut into blades, and fastened to the arrow shafts.
I've made my own bowstrings out of nylon rope by stripping it down and then re-laying strands into a bowstring of the right length and diameter. Nylon stretches a bit over time, but it can be compensated for, and it's a damned site more weatherproof than bear gut or deer hide strings.
I've chipped arrow heads out of stone - I'm not very good at it... they're serviceable, but not at all pretty - and I've cut them out of sheet steel. The steel bands that hacks of lumber used to be bound with were great for that, Roofing tin would work, too, but it would be a lot more work than the steel bands. All you need is a pair of tin snips. I can see now why those Indians headed their arrows with sheet brass when it was available!
My point here is that there will be a wealth of raw materials just laying around for folks ingenious enough to make use of it. Folks talk about "traditional" this and traditional that, but primitive folks didn't have the luxury of being purists, and would use whatever was available to hand and easiest to work to make what they needed. A successful modern primitive will do the same.
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