I like to think that when I carry a knife I am
simply wearing the badge of my humanity. Knives to me are what
define us as human. And they have had a huge impact on our
genetic makeup.
Its not just a tool/weapon, its an appendage. Chimps don't need
edges because they are born with them. So too with the other
creatures, all bearing tooth and nail.. We, on the otherhand, have
traded nature's edges for the knife and are disadvantaged without
it. We are designed by nature to function in tandem with the edge
because as a species we have traded body parts for it. Take away my
steel claw, and I am functionally disabled.
Knives make us more human!. As James Mattis say's, "-- "the invention of the knife" -- "allowed our species to alter nature, and there by make moral choices both necessary and possible".
To cut or not to cut, that is the question. The knife forces upon us a dilemma that is central to our humanity. Wanted and waste, right and wrong, all that good human stuff. The knife is the apple of the tree of knowledge and every blow of stone on stone, another bite.
My knife is part of me. In this context,I carry it and feel complete. |  |
Here's a genetic time line.
4.5 million years ago --- the first hominids appear. (Australopithecus)
Shorty! Not too bright.
2.5 million years ago --- the genus homo appears. We are its sole representative today.
1.9 million years ago --- homo erectus appears. Tall, slim, very upright and gaining cranial capacity.
.8 million years ago ---- archaic homo sapiens appears. That cortex is developing fast.
.3 million years ago ---- homo neandertalis appears.
.1 million years ago ---- homo sapiens sapiens appears. Thats us, but you'd
never guess
Here's a tool making time line.
2.5 million years ago --- homo made a knife, crude, (Flakes and choppers)
2 million year ago ------ homo made a simple biface
1.8 million years ago --- homo made a hand axe (the Swiss army knife of the mesolithic)
.25 million years ago --- homo made handaxes from prepared neuclei.(?)
.05 million years ago --- homo made flake tools from prepared neuclei.(?)
Here's a range timeline
4 million years ago ----- Australopithecus is herbivourous and is confined
to the Rift Valley(?)
2 million years ago ----- homo is omniverous, and extending its range
1.9 million years ago --- homo erectus is built for speed and moving into
the African grasslands.
1.8 million years ago --- homo erectus is in China.(?)
1.6 million years ago --- homo erectus is in Georgia in the Former Soviet
Union.
1 million years ago ----- homo erectus makes it to Indonesia
Looking at the time lines two things stand out clearly for me.
Two and a half million years ago the first cutting edges were made and the
genus Homo appeared. Is this coincidence? And also it looks like there
was an explosion in range on or after the development of the biface and specifically the hand axe, a multipurpose biface par excellance.
Today, my claws are virtually gone, my teeth pathetic, I am less powerfull physically but I've developed a cortex, so that I can control and manipulate a little sliver of stone or steel. I have even developed language to pass on complex information associated with its use and manufacture. Scientists may still describe me as a hominid but I am refined and altered by this tool.
As my genetic makeup and the history of my species is irrevocably altered
by this one tool, can it not be viewed as a part of me since I cannot function to my full potential without it.?
The incredible thing is that knifemaking should have arrived so early. We
got fire only half a million years ago. We were "looking for the zippo" for
at least one and a half million years after we discovered edges. Before
fire, before art, before speech, and before we left the woods and moved into
the grasslands. The biblical Garden of Eden and our expulsion there from is perhaps a metaphor for that, a racial memory written in the gibberish of our genes.?
Its said that our movement into the grasslands was prompted by two things. First our diet had changed from herbivore to omnivore (a result of our new found ability to cut hide and sinew?) and so we followed the herds. Also the climate and vegetation changed on our home range.
The cutting edge may be a pretty abstract idea to a simple creature unfamiliar with it. The need for transmission of information regarding its manufacture and use may have lead to the advent of structured sentences as distinct from single sounds, particularly as skills and tools became more complex. Motor skills associated with its use would certainly be improved. Knives were invented by someone with the equivalent brain size of a present day baby but unlike that baby, it lacked a cortex and the ability to reason or imagine, so this creature had nothing like the same degree of intelligence. Shortly afterwards the brain cavity doubled in size and we see the beginnings of a forehead on top of those brow ridges. Take a look at an Australipithecus skull 3 million years ago (500 cubic cm) and a homo erectus skull 2 million years ago (1000 cubic cm), you will see what I mean. Right in the middle, 2 and half million years ago, we began on a road of technological discovery based on the cutting edge.
We also changed our diet around this time. Hitherto mere hobbyists, meat eating as a career, became a serious spin off from knife making and must have effected genetic change in itself. It takes a lot less time to metabolise meat. In fact you have to put it through your body fairly quickly or it starts to rot in there. Veggies are different. They can hang about in your digestive tract for longer. Carnivores have more aggressive digestive juices so they can do their work in the time allowed.
We adapt to dietary changes very rapidly, for instance, the Japanese can't handle high fat in their diet, it gives them colon cancer. That's because their body is adapted to a low fat diet of rice and fish, seaweed and such.
It only took them a few thousand years to develop this susceptibility.
The Pima Indian tribe in the U.S. have an astonishingly high rate of obesity
and diabetes, because today they eat burgers like the rest of us instead
of the almost exclusive diet of corn and beans they are adapted to. Like the Japanese with rice, their bodies became adapted to this diet very quickly.
A change in diet is bound to result in eventual adaptation of the digestive tract to metabolize the new diet better. No evidence is required for this conclusion, it's just plain horse sense. Like mammy always said "You are what you eat", and if your diet is high in scepticism, well I can understand that.
Yet another spin off, as previously mentioned, we became nomadic for the first time in persuit of the meat. This had an effect on the shape of our bodies in that we became more narrow hipped and long limbed so that we could cover the distances required between carcases.
Generally, species die out and are superceeded by others with improved technology or adaptivity. That's how evolution works for the most part.
We are inevitably effected by the forces in our environment and the bigger the force the bigger the required change. Knives are the most momentous event in our development in 2 and a half million years and the point of origin for everything that followed. They may not have as devastating a short term effect as famine, climate change etc, but their long term incremental effect can't be ignored. And the advantage they render to the user is enormous. Even world wide climatic events such as ice ages do not last for two and a half million years.
Try cutting textile or hide without a cutting edge. Our world simply does not function without them. They are fundamental to our technology. Sure you can string leaves together and point sticks on coarse rocks but without the cutting edge you are dead in the road and so also is your species as it stands today. Take the edge out of the process and the process fails either through time constraints, effectiveness, or on a more fundamental level, possibility.
People on the Equator would hardly be wearing clothes today were it not for the intervention of Europeans. I see little need for clothes in such a region, not today, and certainly not two and a half million years ago. Though I hardly think clothing is required in the tropics, we could not have left Africa in the absence of both clothing and the edge because we could not weave without the edge anyway and we could hardly have skinned up with any degree of regularity either.
If the cutting edge was never invented, human life, if any, would be very different. Look around you, your naked, for a start, its cold and you can't cut trees to build a fire. The furniture has got to go, it was made with knives also. If you live in the US the house goes too. (timber frame.) The car, is outa here. you like air travel, its gone! We never made it to the moon. Neil did'nt get to make his pretty speech. Ships and shipping are history or rather they are not history. Those naval battles never happened. Come to think of it neither did WW2:-) Europeans if they exist at all are a really hairy bunch of people:-) Communication between continents is non existant except for castaways. Information is passed on verbally from one generation to the next. How we gonna mail letters?. What letters?!
I have to agree with the fellow who said that knives make the ride smoother, rather like a lubricant. And we all know what happens when you run something without lubricant. It comes to a grinding halt.
Woops! my computer just disappeared.
Where's my knife? I gotta fix this before I disappear myself.
I'm back :-)
To me the knife is not "one tool" or "a tool", it is
"THE TOOL" before all others and the source of all others. There
may be a rec.forge but I'l warrant there is no rec.hammer. The artist's
brush is but a means to an end. Writers don't form news groups to talk about
their ball point pens. The knife occupies a unique place in the human psyche. Its much more than a tool. Knife makers like Harley and others know what I mean when they talk about feeling primal with a good knife in hand. Thats not empirical evidence of anything but its meaningfull comment about something many of us feel but cannot give voice to. The almost
ineffable connection between this one tool and our species. Think you might
ever catch the likes of Harley or anyone else for that matter, waxing lyrical about their screwdriver?
Yet why is life without edges so inconceivable? Could it be that we
just can't do without them? that life as we know it would be quite impossible without them. Try and imagine an industrial base without knives, its simply a non event. We must cut in order to fabricate. We could develop a technology based on molding, but molding is no substitute for fabrication. How else do we remove the unwanted from the whole?. The only alternatives to the cutting edge to date are the lazer, the cutting torch, and the waterjet.
All of these things require a level of technology quite unavailable to Fred
Flintstone.:-) Abrasion is just too slow!. Books, car's, computers, all
these things could not be made without edges.
A book The car The phone The computer. The cutting edge is the basis of our technology. Even the electricity used to power this technology was generated by machines made with cutting edges. Because we live in this precut world we sometimes forget the great utility afforded by the humble handtool until we carry one and find all kinds of uses for it.
Entails cutting down trees. You have to haul the trees out of the woods with machines made with cutting edges. Even if you use a horse the harness leather of the horses tackle is cut with cutting edges and cutting edges are used to cut bar stock for bending into chainlinks used to grasp the timber itself. If you harness your horse to a cart the cart was made using cutting edges. Then you have to cut the wood into small chips. After which you have to pound it to a pulp with machines that were made with cutting edges. Then you probably have to squeeze it through rollers. These rollers were made on lathes using cutting edges. The lathes themselves were made using cutting edges. Then you have to cut the bulk paper roll into usable sizes. Ok! now finally you are ready to print and of course, printing presses are made with cutting edges. The dye you use has to be harvested and will probably require cutting edges to do so. In this day and age it is probably produced synthetically in machines made with cutting edges. Once its bound with thread which must be cut to length, the four sides are trimmed using, guess what, CUTTING edges. And that's just a paperback! You still have to package it, transport it in a vehicle(see below)and put it on the shelf which was itself made with a cutting edge.
Is almost entirely made with cutting edges. For instance to form a body panel you have to cut a steel sheet to a given dimension before you press it or form it. The machine you press it in was made with cutting edges. The glass of the windows is cut. The trim and seatcovers are cut. The seats are stitched on sewing machines that feature many cut parts. All the engine components are cut with the exception of the castings and even the castings have cut mating surfaces and cut working surfaces. Also the masters used to create the mold for the castings were cut. The same applies to all the plastic moldings in the car. And the wiring for the electrical system is
cut. All of the machine tools used in the manufacture of cars either use
cutting edges, and/or, were themselves made by other machines that used
cutting edges and so on.
Phone lines are probably manufactured by extrusion equipment that is made
by cutting edges. Relay switches and other components including the telephone itself is made by tools that either incorporate cutting edges or were themselves made by other machines that used cutting edges. Even the lineman's sandwich is cut using the cutting edge :-) So is the line as also is the pole.
The chip itself is cut from a larger wafer of silicon. All the plastic moldings were made using cut masters to make the mold. All metal stampings are cut. All wiring is cut. All the automated machine tools used to make computers, either use cutting edges or were made with machines that use cutting edges.
Here is a small list of machine tools that are used in industry. All these
machines use cutting edges. These are the machines that make the machines
of industry. They are, of course, themselves made with cutting edges.
Lathes.
Milling machines.
Arbors.
Shears.
Grinders.
Saws.
Drills
There are probably a few others but these are the main ones.
These machines are the knives of modern industry and our oldest tool in
its most recent form.
Should the knives of industry ever stop cutting, the simple handtool will still continue to do its job and afford us the same advantage in raw materials processing that it has since the begining of human time.
I welcome any information that would allow me to develop the above, or to
make corrections. Information is culled from a variety of sources some of
which may be out dated.
Sat May 10 02:05:43 2008
Last modified on 11/01/2008
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