The Greeting Committee — Interview radioutd.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from radioutd.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It was on a family outing to attend Archeology Days at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village in Mitchell, South Dakota, that I was first introduced to some of the sharpest of man-made blades. I’ve been fascinated since boyhood by any tool made to cut, so imagine my curiosity as I watched a young fellow practicing the ancient art of flint-knapping, which is a controlled chipping away of bits of stone to sharpen and shape their edges. I also noticed a display of long, slender, shiny glass-like shards, the likes of which I hadn’t seen before.
The Mitchell site’s director, Dr. Adrian Hannus, explained that these blades were actually flakes of obsidian, a naturally occurring type of glass. He added that, when he had needed some surgery, he talked the surgeon into using a replica of these ancient tools instead of their modern metal counterparts. It was a little startling to me that prehistoric tools could be used in place of modern scalpels, but Hannus said he had been told the cu