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From that moment when our ancestor , Homo Habilis picked up a stone from the ground and started to use it as a tool.. is a very long and interesting time. These early people, started an era that we modern man today calls STONEAGE !
I kind of like that word .....a lot !
This time was to last for..2,5 million years !!!!!
Today, living stone-age people are scarse to find. If theres any left at all. Most of them have been integrated in to our MODERN AGE. All from ,the white Indians AKURIOS from Surinam in South-America to KALAHARI BUSHMAN in Afrika and INUITS from the north.
I met this multi-traveling man called Arnold. He told me a story when he actually was threatend by an Papuan man, with an stone-axe, ones. He had to run and hide into a house until that stonedude chilled out a bit !!!! There had been an trivial misunderstanding between them, but everything solved for the best. That's a realy good true story, I think !
So maybe, there still is some stoneage man, or stoneage woman out there in Papua-New Guinea.Who knows....
I hear that a lot, that I look just like an Indian. As soon as people see my feathers and the fringes on my buckskin clothes,they go..ahhhh, that man is an North American Indian. If it wouldnt had been for the fringes, they wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. As soon as people se fringes and feathers (including myself) we accosiate this so strongly with North-Amerikan Indian culture.
We don't think of it, generally speaking ,that we our selfes once was European "Indians" thousands of years ago, running around in brain-tanned deer-hide clothings and probably someone also did put feathers in our hair. This is not patendet by anyone ! It´s just a sign of expression. Feathers are beautiful so why not put themonto your body.
The thing about fringes is, that there is an tecnicaly advantage for it having them on to your clothes. Wet deer-hide dries up much faster when there is thin pieces och hide,like fringes, sucking the wet out of the main hide . It´s called capilary !
Brain-tanning is the oldest way of preparing hides, that we know of. So we must have done this for a pretty long time. No one knows when it started.
Living way up here in the north, hunting a lot of Rein deer and Red deer. we must have learned this pretty fast,I think, because they knew that it will make a very soft, strong and warm clothing. This is particular interesting when as I, live way down here in southern of Sweden that they have found an 7000 year old Stone-age gravesite/village , outside Skateholm.
Here they have find lots of big Red deer horns in the graves. My conclusion comes to that the Red deer probably was the most important animal they hunted, because of all the different materials that you can get from just one deer. It's practicaly a running toolbox , if you think of it! In those day's, they must have used almost everything on a deer.
The stone age of Europe went away a couple of thousand years ago.
The stone age of North America died out 1915 when the last living wild Indian died . His name was Ishi ! I recommend you to read the book : Ishi in two worlds . A very nice story of this soft spoken, humble man. Or you could read Farley Mowat's book : People off the deer.
He lived with the Inuits in the nintenfourties in the north of Canada and followd there hard way of living in the wild. The Caribou had an major part for survival for the Inuits back then.
Just as it did for our ancestors here in Europe 14 000 years ago !
In the beginning, I was myself inspired from all these Indian /Western movies coming out from Hollywood. But I kind of tired of liking a culture from the other side of the Atlantic.
So ,I asked myself, what did WE do around here? What did WE look like? How are WE? How did WE live?
And I started to dig where I was standing, and I found so much interesting things, in our own museums , about our own heritage !
So, today I have learned a lot, but want to learn even more and I am still finding new stuff to use,to build, to construct, to test and to experiment and so on.....
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