The Original Aboriginal Amateur Scientist

Donald Sieber.

Mankind has come a long way since the days of the hunter-gatherer. We tend to forget that the legacy of our ancient ancestors is the abilities we share in the contemporary world.

We have become experts in our own homeostasis, or ability to maintain ourselves under a wide range of conditions. If we get cold, we make fire or wear heavier clothes. How many of us can really appreciate the inventions of our ancient kin, and the dedication they displayed in finding new ways for all who followed to not only survive but to prosper as well. This all came about because of mankind's curiosity about the world. They were the first amateur scientists.

One of my hobbies over a ten year period was to learn how the ancients lived and about the discoveries they made. Can you imagine the feeling of elation the caveman felt when he first succeeded in making a fire under his complete control? He could have simply waited for the next lightning storm or volcano eruption and saved some burning embers, but these events were rarely convenient. For that reason, the mastery of fire making was on top of my list of primitive science. There's no need to explain the usefulness of that art.

Next in importance, discounting the necessities of finding food, is the ability to make cordage. Why should a length of string be so important? Think of what string can do. It can make fish line and nets. It can make snares and bow strings. It can be woven into cloth for warmth. It can be made into backpacks and drive belts and can even fasten parts of buildings together.

Tools must come high on the list. Just as many people today have tools, it was probably no different a few millennia ago. Materials for tools have evolved into the sophisticated and specialized ones we use today. Wood, bone, and stone rather limits us today, but they sufficed in the beginning.

Making Fire

Fire is one of the states of matter. It does not generally occur without being ignited in some way, and it then requires careful tending to maintain it at some beneficial level. Once the magical temperature of ignition is reached, the fuel needs only an oxidizer to continue burning. Ignition temperature for a given fuel can be reached in various ways, including magnified sunlight and electricity. The most practical ignition means for primitive people was friction.

I began my exploration of the art of fire making in a reverse engineering manner. First, I chucked a piece of wood into an electric drill and proceeded to drill another piece of wood, called a hearth. I quit after the room filled with smoke, and I had succeeded in burning a hole into the linoleum floor. I decided that making fire didn't need to be that extreme and began experiments to determine the woods and methods that were the most efficient. I had just reinvented the study of materials science.

The results of testing many materials for the drill and the hearth provided what I consider the best I could do using materials widely available in the wild. Black cottonwood (Populus) or willow (Salix) worked as a hearth. The cottonwood also forms one of the best mediums I found for the fruiting of the edible oyster mushroom (Pleurotus) but that's another story.

The material for the drill proved to be critical, and I would have patented it if it hadn't been around so long. Everyone has seen the lowly cattail (Typha) and its fluffy seed head. It is truly the mother of the temperate zone primitive. The fluff makes good insulation for clothing or bedding. The leaves are good for shelter and basketry. The edible roots are almost pure starch and can be used to make a form of flour. I've eaten many a piece of cooked "cattail corn," which is a young seed head when it first emerges.

The fire drill secret is in the small part of the tip of the mature stalk. The stalk just below the seed head is tough and hard. Further down it becomes pithy and hollow, which, incidentally, makes a pretty good blowgun, straw, or a pipe stem.

The method of fire making I ended up with in its simplest form was a piece of dry, mature cattail stalk about 46 cm (18 inches) long and a notched piece of dry cottonwood in the form of a typical hearth. That's it. With this I routinely was able to start hot coals in less than 30 seconds. Even my kids, who were not very old at the time, could do it.

Be forewarned, however, that it is a very good exercise to spin a fire drill by hand. I estimate the body power generation necessary was in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 watts. I once saw a documentary on the Discovery channel about a primitive tribe making fire the same way. It took two natives a good 10 minutes to get hot coals, and they were really working!

In a future article we'll move our scientific time machine up a few tens of thousands of years to the epoch of the cord and fabric era.