There's an anime called "Dr. Stone" which also explores the concept of starting civilization over with nothing but modern knowledge. The protagonist basically has all of Wikipedia memorized so that he can make optimal choices to advance technology given the resources at hand.
It's kind of silly and often hand wavy (especially when it comes to how much labor is actually needed to realistically produce refined materials). And it has the usual eye-roll-inducing shonen anime tropes. But if you like the "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel, you might get a kick out of "Dr. Stone".
On a related note, you might be interested in the book "How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler" by Ryan North. It addresses that idea, of restarting civilization and reinventing the technology that has been most helpful.
Not quite as pre-historic, but along similar lines, I quite enjoyed Honzuki no Gekokujou (Ancendance of a bookworm), a series about a book-loving girl reborn as a sickly poor commoner child in a fantasy world and her attempts to create books (and other modern products) from scratch.
Something like this was why I loved Jules Verne's Mysterious Island as a kid. In retrospect it was kind of unrealistic how the Smith (the Engineer) happened to know all the tech they needed to survive, but it certainly set my path!
I once went on a foraging walk with an expert forager. It was fun and entertaining and sort-of-useful. But he’d say things like “see this seed” holds up VERY tiny plant with VERY tiny seed “if you collect enough of these you can grind then up to make flour and then make bread.”
The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply chain is.
This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured all this out for us a long time ago.
I was in Costa Rica recently and a tour guide pulled a fruit about the size of my fist from a tree. He quizzed us on what the top of the fruit was. We could not identify it. We ended up feeding it to a cow.
It was a single cashew.
That experience changed my perception of supply chain, you can buy thousands of those for very low price. The fruit is huge and you get just one nut!
we've been getting into gardening a bit more this year and looking at all that's involved with buying a can of beans or veggies or whatever I look at those things with a whole new appreciation. We don't just pay for the raw produce from some place, we pay for all the labor that went into cleaning and packaging, and everything that brought that piece to us. When you grow your own you need to do all the prep and washing and canning etc if you so choose. It's quite a chunk of labor to commit to.
One of the things that really stands out is just how much wood goes into every gram of iron he extracted. That charcoal pile was huge and it was only enough for a dozen or so BB sized chunks of iron. The limitation on the availability of iron in primitive times seems mostly limited by the size of the nearby forest and how good you are at converting them into charcoal.
The same observation is likely true for a lot of carbon-intensive goods. I’ve read how much carbon goes into a kilo of beef, but I’ve never seen a graphic representation.
As a kid I was fascinated by the extraction of iron from sand using a magnet. I’d hang out in sandboxes on playgrounds and collect it. I figured out you could wrap the magnet in a plastic bag for easy removal of iron filings. Last I recall I had filled two and a half peanut butter jars.
There are beaches on New Zealand’s west coast that are black iron sand. It’s used to make steel at Glenbrook near Auckland.
The sand is hot as all hell in summer and it gets into everything, things with magnets in particular. Watching people cross the sand in summer is amusing. Patients with it on them need a good wash before MRI scans - a known hazard in radiology here.
I recently saw a documentary that showed researchers actually using a magnet to find micro meteorites. I tried it in our yard with my five-year-old, and we found lots of small iron containing particles, some of which looked black and glassy under the microscope.
I love this channel and have been watching it for years, but one note of caution: this isn't the same type of primitive technology our ancestors used tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago. I would best describe it as "technology from scratch using all available modern knowledge".
In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years go) could have done this, but they didn't. Metallurgy did not appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact, he's not even trying that hard, as he doesn't use the stream to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though he did build a water hammer once).
Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.
Sure, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago nobody was working with metals at all. And the centrifugal fan he uses is a modern invention; the oldest mention of them in the literature is less than 500 years old, in De Re Metallica.
It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!
Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.
There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.
Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.
Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.
Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.
Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.
The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.
Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.
Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.
Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.
I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).
Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
If you're interested in traditional ironmaking, Christopher Roy filmed a documentary a few years back on the techniques used up to the beginning of the 20th century in Burkina Faso, From Iron Ore to Iron Hoe: Smelting Iron in Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ
It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.)
So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel.
If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interested in the unbootstrapping efforts for software described at http://bootstrappable.org/.
When I was 6 or 7, I binge read "The Misterious Island" by Jules Verne. Later in school I re-read it to ace half of elementary chemistry - all things about acids, bases and metals. I think it was one of the books that shaped my life the most.
I was afraid this was going to be a "fake" primitive technology channel... but it seems that this one, "Primitive Technology", is actually the _only_ real one! It was even used as "a baseline for what SHOULD be achievable in a natural setting" [0]
The video hyperlinked below is a fascinating debunking of most other "primitive" channels.
I also recommend buying his book [0] as a means to support his awesome work. I will almost certainly never actually do any of this, but it's fun to read anyway! Especially after watching the videos of him doing it.
This is awesome haven’t seen one of these videos for a while - think the last one I saw was him building the hut. Awesome reminder of how much iron is just around on the ground.
Really got a kick out of the rotating bellows that’s super cool.
If anyone is out at Zion NP and hiking angels landing there’s a large chuck of iron ore on one of the last switchbacks leading to scouts lookout - just love seeing that every time I’m up there. Great reminder of where the red color in the rock comes from
Does this guy lives in the perfect spot to do these things? Making clay seems to be easy. Large quantities of metals in the ground. Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.
> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.
> Making clay seems to be easy.
I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]
> Large quantities of metals in the ground.
I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.
He used to live in the city in Australia and go out to a piece of property owned by a friend, based on the amount of money that he's made from his channel though I think he now bought a property just to do this. He was a lawn maintenance guy if I remember correctly.
Just this summer I noticed that the magnets on the back of my barbecue thermometer were picking up a lot of magnetic sand from the local riverbank. I went back with a super-duper magnet-fishing magnet and found that probably 20% of the rocks there were magnetic. I've explored a little bit, and (mind blown) there are magnetic rocks all over the place, from cliff sides to rocks in my front yard to gravel from my friend's driveway. I haven't looked anywhere outside of Oregon and Washington though, but it seems like rocks with significant (presumably)-iron content aren't rare at all.
Thank you for this, I always knew that if I had to restart civilization from scratch I would have to go without anything digital because I understand the way thing work abstractly, but I could never make it happen. At least now I can think back on this video and wonder what magical tricks he did during those moments when the scene fast forwarded and magically progress was made.
Probably easier to just scavenge stuff, if you're fortunate enough to survive the initial fallout/disruption from say a nuclear war there's going to be a lot of stuff and not so many people.
David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from scrap" is a very fun read though
In the description of the video on youtube he often explains how long the full project took, and clarifying what took longest, it's always much longer than I expect (in the trebuchet video I think the problem was that collecting bark to make the rope took a very long time)
If you like the Primitive Technology channel (and if you don't, why are you here?) I'd like to suggest Advoko Makes. It's not stone age, it's a lawyer from St. Petersburg with a cabin up in Karelia. A different take on going out into the wilderness and domesticating a little patch of it, his ingenuity and craftsmanship really shine through.
Using a primitive sluice to extract heavier particulate matter (presumably mostly iron or some form of iron oxide -- since iron is one of the most common elements in the earth's crust) -- is absolutely brilliant!
(I suppose if you were a survivalist, and you were "cheating" (not going through all the necessary steps to realize iron without modern tools), you could simply use a portable neodymium magnet to go through large amounts of dirt -- whatever particles stick are "mostly iron" ore -- which can now be processed further, such as being smelted, etc.)
Related:
How To Make Everything - Smelting Iron from Rocks (Primitive Iron Age Extraction):
A lot of comments here are talking about starting a civilization from scratch or ancient practices. Those are interesting topics but be aware that's not really what the "Primative Technology" channel is about. He's really just a hobbiest seeing what he can do from scratch without modern tools. He's not practicing for a collapse or reconstructing the past.
It became a thing at my elementary school in the 80s to try and sell iron to hobby shops for cash, so kids were tearing out the big magnets from speakers and digging into the sandboxes at school to pull iron out of the sand.
I never did it because I doubted you could really get money for a few ounces of iron and it looked pretty tedious to dig in a sandbox all day with a fist-sized magnet, and they were ruining speakers to do it. Who knew there was an even more tedious way to do this with clay and water?
In practice it's better to go dig limonite from bottom of the lakes, rivers where it has already been concentrated. Bog iron (mostly goethite) from bogs is also a good source of iron.
My fluid mechanics intuition lets me think it would be better to place the outlet of the centrifugal blower (at around 5:50 in the video) tangentially to the housing. Am I wrong?
[+] [-] umvi|3 years ago|reply
It's kind of silly and often hand wavy (especially when it comes to how much labor is actually needed to realistically produce refined materials). And it has the usual eye-roll-inducing shonen anime tropes. But if you like the "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel, you might get a kick out of "Dr. Stone".
[+] [-] domador|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhorie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitiral|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|3 years ago|reply
(also, featuring Epic Crossover!)
[+] [-] imtringued|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marak830|3 years ago|reply
Edit: This whole comment chain is a gold mine :-D
[+] [-] mgaunard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] make3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|3 years ago|reply
The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply chain is.
This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured all this out for us a long time ago.
[+] [-] cabaalis|3 years ago|reply
It was a single cashew.
That experience changed my perception of supply chain, you can buy thousands of those for very low price. The fruit is huge and you get just one nut!
[+] [-] jxramos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netman21|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leobg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] martythemaniak|3 years ago|reply
In a way it's even more interesting than trying to do primitive technology as it actually was. In this example, he's using modern knowledge of ore smelting and doing it in a way with the fewest tools/processes possible. Our ancestors (250,000 to ~3000 years go) could have done this, but they didn't. Metallurgy did not appear until a few thousand years ago and iron working working even later than bronze and other types of metal working. In fact, he's not even trying that hard, as he doesn't use the stream to build a waterwheel and automate many of his processes (though he did build a water hammer once).
Really makes you think what's perfectly possible physically today, but we lack the knowledge to actually do it.
[+] [-] kragen|3 years ago|reply
It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!
Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.
There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.
Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.
Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.
Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.
Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.
The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.
Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.
Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.
Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.
I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).
Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
[+] [-] kragen|3 years ago|reply
It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.)
So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel.
What similar opportunities are under our noses today? (More examples in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697419.)
If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interested in the unbootstrapping efforts for software described at http://bootstrappable.org/.
[+] [-] SergeAx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] showerst|3 years ago|reply
Turn on closed captions to get an explanation of what’s going on.
[+] [-] gregsadetsky|3 years ago|reply
The video hyperlinked below is a fascinating debunking of most other "primitive" channels.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
[+] [-] VWWHFSfQ|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Technology-complete-making-...
[+] [-] dieselgate|3 years ago|reply
If anyone is out at Zion NP and hiking angels landing there’s a large chuck of iron ore on one of the last switchbacks leading to scouts lookout - just love seeing that every time I’m up there. Great reminder of where the red color in the rock comes from
[+] [-] javajosh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holoduke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|3 years ago|reply
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology
> Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant. Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of Queensland,
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland
> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.
> Making clay seems to be easy.
I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]
> Large quantities of metals in the ground.
I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.
[+] [-] soperj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13of40|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Narretz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avidphantasm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheeeep86|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegativeLatency|3 years ago|reply
David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from scrap" is a very fun read though
[+] [-] inasio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reidjs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skykooler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter_d_sherman|3 years ago|reply
(I suppose if you were a survivalist, and you were "cheating" (not going through all the necessary steps to realize iron without modern tools), you could simply use a portable neodymium magnet to go through large amounts of dirt -- whatever particles stick are "mostly iron" ore -- which can now be processed further, such as being smelted, etc.)
Related:
How To Make Everything - Smelting Iron from Rocks (Primitive Iron Age Extraction):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUn6LzakHsM
Good and Basic - Smelt Success! (Iron Smelt #8):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_zVvG4FNo
[+] [-] advisedwang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|3 years ago|reply
I never did it because I doubted you could really get money for a few ounces of iron and it looked pretty tedious to dig in a sandbox all day with a fist-sized magnet, and they were ruining speakers to do it. Who knew there was an even more tedious way to do this with clay and water?
[+] [-] Nokinside|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ofrzeta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn8305823|3 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emXo7l42vRA
[+] [-] bertil|3 years ago|reply