Macuahuitl the sharpest sword ever (picture heavy)

Your welcome, since I had been posting these in all the what is the best sword debates I figured it was about time to give them a bit bigger exposure with a full thread about them.

They are a very interesting design and concept. Though not the only culture to produce a nonmetal sword. Many other cultures made their own nonmetal swords usually using teeth as the blade.

Pacific islanders commonly made shark tooth swords




close up of the above sword




Even Africa had shark tooth swords



Though shark teeth will never equal the sharpness of obsidian, nothing will as it is the sharpest material. But the macuahuitl was not the only nonmetal sword made.

Very cool, it's all too easy to get caught up in the European and Oriental cultures and forget these other styles. Nice to see them get some love, i've wanted one for ages.

Glass blades were tremendously successful and critical stone age tools with tremendous cutting capacity.

The shortcoming of the medium is their relative brittleness once in contact with denser metals.

Swordlike, but more a tactical axe.

Nice write up. Thanx for sharing.

(I put in the part 1 here with the part 2 for easier reference to both videos)

How to make a Maquahuitl, Part 1




How to make a Maquahuitl, Part 2

Tom,

Check out this article on Trepanning/Tephination

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trephination

Seems the practice of boring/cutting holes into our heads (voluntarily) goes back all the way to neolithic times.

Yep I think people often underestimate what "primitive" people were able to do. We have this incorrect concept as modern humans as the best most knowledgeable people but really people have lost a lot of knowledge. We can make the Great Pyramid, with all our modern equipment, the experts, and by experts I mean the people who build stuff not Egypitoligists, say there is no way for them to build the Pyramid. Similarly the walls in South America built with megalithic stones in a jigsaw construction style, again building experts say we have no way to do such feats in our modern age. Then of course maps made with accurate longitude and latitudes in times that predate (the need of accurate time device) modern invention of longitude ability. There are many amazing things through out history that don't fit with the theory of upward mobile cultural evolution. The reality is it was fits and spurt and many falls and rises. Egypt lost the art of glass making and at the time of King Tuts burial glass was worth more than gold due to it being so rare. Later they again discovered the glass making secrets.

As Tom points out these brain surgeries have shown up and been successful and seemingly a very high rate of success. Imagine in a dirty primitive world exposing someone's brain and them surviving the surgery. You would expect infection if nothing else would end up killing the patient.



I discovered this a decade ago and actually thought of getting it done. Yes it sounds crazy but there is evidence of this procedure actually enabling increased metal ability. I don't mean giving special powers, just an increased ability for thinking. I came across it researching body modifications, back in my days when I wanted to get tons of piercings. While the possible ability for higher ability to think sounds nice, two draw back to the procedure. No real doctors will perform the surgery, and your left with a soft spot, hole, in your skull. These two down sides quickly made me reconsider getting it done.

There are many things that might show ancients did have flight. From carvings that look like planes. They have done wind tunnel tests on some of these and found they were designed truly aerodynamically.


Also the Hindu texts that describe flying Vimanas. Go over to India and ask who invented flight and they will give a much different answer than your used to.

As for nuclear power, there is evidence alchemists knew it before modern science. The French physicist who torched open Hitler's safe with plutonium in it. Was actually visited before the success of the Manhattan project by the last living alchemist. The last alchemist described radioactive fall out and radiation sickness to the physicist and even mentioned the physicist's failures had to do with their failure to understand how to geometrically stack the radioactive material. This was all told to the physicist as part of a warning to him, the alchemist said they had done this stuff already and could do so with equipment as simple as found in a normal modern kitchen (remember the time period of that conversation as it was at the beginning of the Manhattan project era) and that this knowledge was dangerous and the world not ready for it. Sadly the physicist did not listen then but did start to wonder about this strange encounter after they solved the geometric stack, saw radiation poisoning, and effects of radioactive fall out. There have been found similar green glass fields that date back a long time ago that appear to be just like the green glass fields we created with atomic testing. Later in life this physicist believed the ancient alchemists did truly know and achieved atomic blasts in ancient history.

So we might have lost just as much as we have gained.