[er4hn]

Another interesting exploration of this is The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel (https://vpostrel.com/the-fabric-of-civilization). Her first chapter talks about how one of the overlooked innovations of the Stone Age was that twine needed to be created to actually secure the stone tool head to a wooden shaft.

After that she discusses the enormous amounts of labor required to turn raw materials into threads and how the development of different tools was an important part of developing civilization. This book mostly talks about cloth, which is an entire other chapter owing to how that is its own step up in complexity from producing thread.

[elevation]

I haven't read Postrel, but the idea of twine being necessary to secure a stone tool to a wooden shaft seems wrong to me.

Jon Plant secures a stone tool head to a shaft by building a stone axe called a "celt" with more primitive methods [0]. The friction fit he achieves is likely more robust than a twine lashing because it helps deliver a higher impulse to the work-piece than a mount made of cordage.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY

[WalterBright]

I would expect that the first attempts at attaching a handle would have been done in another way, and after twine was invented the former way was abandoned and forgotten.

One very low tech method is to drill a hole in the stone and wedge the handle in it - just like how a modern axe haft is attached.

Drilling a hole in stone isn't that hard. One twirls a stick (the drill) between one's hands, and use a mixture of sand and water at the work face. It's slow, but it works. I read that the ancient Egyptians used this technique.

[kragen]

in theory abrasion with wood or the harder reeds like bamboo seems like it ought to work, but in the archaeological record drilled stone in egypt occurs at the same time as the introduction of copper tools, copper residue is found in many of the drilled holes, and experimental archaeologists who have attempted to drill stone using reeds have failed, but succeeded using copper tubes

surprisingly copper works better than bronze for this

possibly better abrasives like emery (the ancient egyptians used quartz) or something like fire-hardened wood might enable this technique to work without metals, but the ancient egyptians don't seem to have managed it

celt axes are attached to the handle in the opposite way: a slot is cut through the wood handle, and then the stone head is wedged into it, pressing against the ends of the slot (which are end grain) but not touching the sides, because that would split the handle

[WalterBright]

Or cut a pocket in a thicker handle, and just press the stone into the pocket. Add some glue (from sap) to keep it from falling out.

[kragen]

i don't think that will work because of the large moment from ax strikes that aren't perfectly dead-on, but i'm interested to see your results

[WalterBright]

If the pocket is large enough that the center of moment is within the handle, it should work fine.

[nunuvit]

Why wouldn't you finish cutting through to make a slot? The slot has the advantage that using the axe fixes the axe head more firmly into the slot by wedging itself. Even if you wedged the stone in the pocket, the pocket will loosen and the stone will eventually bottom out and won't be wedged anymore.

[kragen]

i don't see why it matters whether the center of moment is within the handle or not; the problem is that the glue has to be able to resist the moment without breaking, but it's much closer to the center of moment than the blade edge

say the blade is 100 mm long and 30 mm thick with a cylindrical back edge; the moment is being applied to the blade edge 85 mm from the center of moment, while the glue is resisting the moment from only 15 mm away, giving a 6.7:1 mechanical advantage, and the force is the full force being applied to the workpiece multiplied by sin θ, where θ is the angle the central axis of the blade makes with the force applied by the workpiece on the blade; typically this will be on the order of 0.1, but in a bad strike perhaps closer to 0.3

i don't know, give it a try?

[Cthulhu_]

> It's slow, but it works.

This is why so many people cannot fathom things like rocks cut accurately or large structures like pyramids, Stonehenge or the Moai; they don't consider what can happen if you spend days, weeks, years on something. I think it's evidence of this claim that people back when had much more spare time for things not directly related to their survival.

[OJFord]

Weren't pyramids built by slaves? Not necessarily disputing 'more spare time' (I don't know) but it's not really evidence of it is it?

[dagw]

Most modern historians seem to agree that they were mostly built by paid labor.

[MengerSponge]

I've read that pyramids were probably labor projects like the WPA or the CCC. The workers weren't slaves (they went on strike at one point), but they didn't have a ton of other ways to feed their families.

[andrewflnr]

I think sinew (long animal ligaments IIRC) is an option for attaching axe heads. I've heard of survivalists using it for similar purposes. And that's assuming simple strips of hide don't do it.

[Zuider]

Sinew tightens and hardens with time, while hide stretches and ultimately becomes brittle, so sinew makes more sense to tie axe-heads. It is why early stringed instruments used sinew stretched across tortoise shells, since it could be kept at high enough tension to sound a clear note without breaking.

[analog31]

I wonder if gut is suitable. It's still made into musical instrument strings, so it's properties are not entirely a mystery. The shaping of the string to a constant diameter along its length is a final processing step, meaning that a basic string for holding things together is a simpler technology.