Originally Posted By: Finn
I often read "Countryside" and "Backwoodsman" magazines and there is a growing trend of getting back to the values & skills of our parents, grandparents & further back. Too often, our parents, in seeking a better life, shunned (and sometimes destroyed) those things which helped make them. Now, we struggle to re-learn those skills. I still regret that I didn't bother to learn canning from my mom.


Skills are good, but they will perish unless they remain practical for the changing times. A very good book for the anthropological readers is The Invention of Fire by R. Wrangham. As you probably can guess, the book is about how fire changed human physiology, society, and behavior. A part of the chapter mentions some primitive, but ingenious cooking methods that certain Stone Age tribes still use today (or in recent history until they discovered the iPhone like the rest of us). Many such clever techniques are now lost, because we no longer need them, and haven't needed them for thousands of years.

It would be nice to have a compendium of pre-industrial and primitive techniques and technology, if only for our intellectual curiosity and for posterity. (It would be dreadful if we have to reinvent the wheel!)

As for getting back the values of our parents, I dunno. Guess our parents are very different. I didn't like all that sexist and racist crap.