Making iron from sand [video]
If you&#x27;re interested in traditional ironmaking, Christopher Roy filmed a documentary a few years back on the techniques used up to the beginning of the 20th century in Burkina Faso, <i>From Iron Ore to Iron Hoe: Smelting Iron in Africa</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ</a><p>It&#x27;s amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required.  Though I don&#x27;t know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope.  (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant&#x27;s video.)<p>So it&#x27;s particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India).  For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn&#x27;t know it.  That&#x27;s 3000 years longer than all of recorded history!  It&#x27;s similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China.  And it wasn&#x27;t until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel.<p>What similar opportunities are under our noses today?  (More examples in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32697419" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32697419</a>.)<p>If you&#x27;re interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interested in the unbootstrapping efforts for software described at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrappable.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrappable.org&#x2F;</a>.