Today in Technology History
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March 25
The man who might have been the last person to grow up using only Stone Age technology died exactly 86 years ago.
One of the side effects of the Gold Rush of 1849 was an explosion of hostility between the 90,000 settlers and miners who flooded into California in a single year and the Indian tribes native to that region. The next few decades were rife with skirmishes, battles, massacres and epidemics. By the turn of the century, the frontier was closed and the native Indian population was either assimilated into general society or living on reservations.
The last few dozen members of one tribe, the Yahi, went into hiding in a forest. There, they continued to live in the manner they had for thousands of years -- hunting and gathering, with simple Stone Age tools. By 1908, only one Yahi was still alive, and after three years of living alone in secret, the 50-year-old left the forest and stumbled into a northern California town, starving and alone.
He was brought to Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist at the University of California. Kroeber and his colleagues studied his language and history -- and the Yahi man, given the name "Ishi" (the Yahi word for "man"; he never revealed his real name) showed the scientists a great deal about the technology his tribe used. It had evolved little over the centuries.
Ishi showed the scientists how his people had woven baskets, built fires and make bows and arrows. He taught them his techniques for making arrowheads of flint, obsidian and bone. Those basic materials were also used by the Yahi to make needles and other small implements. The Yahi also used spears and the "atlatl," a device which gives a spear-thrower much greater range. Ishi, meanwhile, eventually made some connections to modern technology: he worked at cleaning medial instruments in a local hospital, and there are phonograph recordings of some of his singing.
When Ishi died on March 25, 1916, his body was cremated -- except for his brain, which was put into storage and forgotten. Ishi's brain was finally buried in 2000.
Related links:
Click here for a timeline of Ishi's life.
Click here to read about Ishi's bows, arrows, arrowheads and quivers.
Click here to read about Ishi's hiding place.
Click here to read about Ishi's brain.
According to work done in the 1990s by an anthropologist at Berkeley, the similarity of Ishi's arrowheads to those of other tribes suggests that he may not actually have been a pure Yahi. Click here to read more.
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