Tools: As Close As Your Hands

    Tools, how would we do without them? If you think about it you always have tools. Most people have their hands, their fingers, their fingernails. With your hands you can make tools to accomplish tasks that alone they could not. Humans are the only creature on Earth to go one step further and use one tool to fashion another. While there are examples of animals using tools: chimpanzees using sticks to extract termites, horses scratching themselves with a stick, vultures picking up stones with their beaks to hammer open thick shelled eggs, otters breaking open mollusks with a rock—only man has taken tool manufacture and use one step farther. One of the things that sets humans apart from the animal kingdom is man’s ability to take the next step. The true survivor will take what he has to work with, however little that may be, and one step at a time advance uphill, taking each stage as a summit of development, instead of thinking of the impossibility of the task because they can’t construct the modern tool they are used to. This installment of this blog will focus on celts, axes and hammers. Tools you can make in a survival situation as needed.  (more…)