Here is another story I found about the Native Americans and sharing it with you. :)
In the era before the arrival of the white settlers, the American Indians managed to survive and prosper without any of the inventions of the more advanced European societies.
In fact, some of their accouplishments almost defy explanation. The Indians depended heavily on timber for their existence, but how was it that they could cut down trees without the aid of iron axes, indeed, without any metal tools at all?
The Indians sholved that problem as they did other problems that confronted them in their wilderness environment--buy using good old-fashioned American ingenuity.
The hardest material available to the Indian was stone, while the most powerful force they possessed was fire. By combining these two tools, they are able to trees quite efficiently.
The Indians made stone hatchets. These were sharpened in preparation for each timber harvest. For a harvest, the Indians first selected the trees to be felled.
Then, they would build a fire to encircle the bottom of a tree. The flames would burn the trunk in a narrow circular ring near the bottom of the tree. The charred would could be easily hacked with a stone axe.
When the first chard layer had been cut away, another layer was charred and hacked away, and this procedure was repeated until the tree toppled.
Stone and fire proved to be adequare substitutes for metals, which the Indians never knew existed until the coming of the white settlers.
