Transcription
My name is Sam Kean. I am a science writer, and my latest book is "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sight, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations."
A day in the life 75,000 years ago. So imagine yourself in Africa 75,000 years ago. You're a bit nomadic. You probably travel around from place to place, maybe spend a few weeks sleeping in a cave. But caves have hard dirt floors, not very comfortable. So you're going to have to make a bed of some sort.
Also, your main activity is probably going to be gathering food and water. So you would have a canteen of some sort to carry water around, probably made from an ostrich egg. And then to get ready to find food that day, you're going to have to make your own tools and go out on a hunt.
So let's start with the bed. The first thing you would do is you would spread a bunch of debris around in the cave and you would light it on fire. It would burn. That's going to clean the cave out. But also importantly, leave a nice soft layer of ash. That's essentially going to be your mattress.
Then you're going to go out and gather some plants, aromatic leaves especially. You're going to lay those down as sort of a top sheet on that layer of ash. So this is going to be fairly comfortable because ash, it's nice and soft, sort of like sleeping on the beach. And people have actually recreated these beds and have slept in them overnight. And they said that they were, in fact, pretty comfortable.
It also had another benefit in that the ash kept away ticks. Insects were a big problem for people thousands of years ago. They didn't have repellent. They didn't have ways of keeping them off. So having a nice ash layer on the ground prevented ticks from burrowing up and latching onto your legs.
I talked to a woman who actually gathered a bunch of ticks, put them in the center of a nice ring of ash, and then watched what they did. The ticks tried to burrow through the ash. Most of them did not make it out. They died partway through. And the ones that did make it through the ash, their mouthparts ended up so gummed that they couldn't bite anyone afterward. So the ash also provided a way to prevent ticks from biting your legs.
And then the top layer of the leaves, they were usually aromatic leaves that kept mosquitoes away. So in addition to providing comfort, this bed also kept away parasites that can annoy you and spread diseases.
So when you get up in the morning, you're probably thirsty. And if you're in this cave, you're going to reach for your water receptacle, which will be an ostrich egg canteen. Ostrich eggs are usually pretty large, and they're usually pretty thick and dense. So what they would do is they would take a stone tool and they would saw the top of the ostrich egg open. Usually make a little square or something like that. They would pour the insides of the eggs out, and then they would clean it out with some aromatic herbs, wash it, and then you have a nice little canteen.
For the book, I actually bought an ostrich egg online and tried these steps myself. I got to cook the ostrich egg in a big old skillet. Parts of it were delicious. The yolk was this amazingly rich, sort of caramelly egg flavor. It was delicious. I loved that part. The whites were less good, a little runny, kind of foamy, not my favorite, but you know, they weren't horrible.
And then after I had cut open the top of the ostrich egg with the stone tool, I washed it out and used it to hold water. It held about six cups of water. And one really cool thing about ostrich eggs is that they're slightly porous. Not so much the water is going to leak out of it, but microscopically there are tiny little pores in the ostrich egg that let water escape from it. Evaporation cools it, so it keeps the water colder than the ambient temperature. So an ostrich egg is actually a self-cooling canteen.
So after you get your nice drink of water, you're probably going to start on one of the main activities of the day, which is making stone tools. For this, you're probably going to use chert or flint, a very hard rock that fractures very cleanly. This is an example of a stone that you might try to make a tool out of.
So you're going to hold it in your lap like this. Then you're going to take another stone called a hammer stone, and you're going to drop it onto this tool. So imagine my fist here is the hammer stone. Usually, they're sort of potato-shaped, kind of big and oblong, and very smooth on the outside. So you would take the hammer stone and you would drop it down on the very edge of this stone. And you're not going to smash it down, you know, like really pound it on there. It's more of a controlled drop to just strike the edge of it.
So you take it in your lap, you would drop it down, and then a piece would come off. And you can see how nice and clean this edge is. It's not going to shatter like a pot or something like that. And you're going to get a nice edge here, and you can use this piece and refine it more. You know, maybe get rid of this, make a little smaller tool.
And this is an example of something that you might be able to make if you were a master flintknapper. You can see a nice little head there on this little spear that I have. You can also see how it's hafted to this wooden shaft. So this would be animal sinew. So from a tendon, a ligament, something like that. You would pound that out, you would separate the fibers, and use it to wrap around and haft it to this shaft. Then you would dribble resin, probably from a tree that you would gather. You'd warm it up, and you would dribble it around there to act as glue essentially, to really bind it to this spear. And then you have a nice little hunting tool that you can use.
One coveted material in ancient times was obsidian, like you can see here. It's a black volcanic rock, and if you strike it properly, you can get extremely sharp flakes from it. Flakes that are sharper, actually, than modern steel scalpels. They're extremely, extremely sharp. And those are dangerous. I actually cut myself with obsidian at one point accidentally. And I was surprised that I didn't notice how deep the cut went. It was right across my arm. And unlike a paper cut, it did not hurt at all because that edge was so sharp. But it immediately started bleeding all over the place. I was surprised how quickly things got bad with it. I had to wrap it up pretty quickly. And you can imagine if this was 75,000 years ago and you had cut yourself like that, it could get pretty dangerous pretty quickly. They didn't have antibiotics. There was no hospital to run to. So however important knapping tools was, it was also a dangerous occupation.
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