Bone tools 2: Primitive bone knife, chisel & awl, antler pressure flaker 🦴
Channel: Make It Primitive
Date: 2020-12-07

Along with rocks and wood, bone is an excellent material for primitive tools. You don't need to hunt animals yourself to get bones, you just need to find a place of a somewhat recent kill by a predator. In  the second part of my bone tools series, I make a bone knife, two bone woodworking chisels, a bone awl, and antler pressure flakers for flint knapping.

With foxes being the largest predator in our woods, I rarely find bones from a kill - unless a human hunter leaves some behind. Recently I discovered a spot where hunters discarded undesirable (to them) animal parts. I collected many bones and made some primitive bone tools. Future projects will show how well they work in practice.

Most of the bones are lower leg bones from deer. I also found two hog craniums, one with the lower mandible, some deer mandibles, vertrebrae and unidentifiable bone splinters. Some pieces were already too old to work with, but many seem to be in a very useable condition.

On previous trips, I had already found two deer craniums. They now had to give up their antlers, which I plan to use as pressure flakers for flintknapping.

00:00 Intro
00:98 Gathering deer bones
01:52 Getting antlers from deer craniums
02:52 Making bone chisels
4:23 Making bone awls
5:02 Making a bone knife

I found bone to be a very nice material to work with - under the right conditions:

- Soak the bone in water for a while to make it softer for grinding. It will harden again once it dries.

- Breathing bone dust is not only stinky, but also not a good idea health-wise. Soaking helps against dust, too, but I still prefer to do this kind of work outside.

- Before picking up bones in the wild, please inform yourself about animal diseases in your area that might be transmissible to humans. In some areas of the US, for example, a deer might have died from CWD (chronic wasting disease) - really nasty stuff. In my region, there are thankfully no such diseases, plus it was pretty clear from the nearby hunters' raised stand what the former owners of the bones had died of.

#bonetools #primitiveskills