1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:28,960 Ancient weapons are a thing of the past, but for Joel Dickinson of Green Bay, their 2 00:00:28,960 --> 00:00:34,560 ingenuity is timeless. 3 00:00:34,560 --> 00:00:37,360 Most people probably don't even know what an adult adult is. 4 00:00:37,360 --> 00:00:43,560 Most people would know it as the spear thrower. 5 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:50,040 Thousands of years before the first bowstring, the adult adult was the Great Equalizer, a 6 00:00:50,040 --> 00:00:53,160 high velocity invention of the Ice Age. 7 00:00:53,160 --> 00:00:58,160 What that allowed us to do was hunt at a greater distance, which allowed us to keep ourselves 8 00:00:58,160 --> 00:01:03,960 safe from the animal that we're trying on. 9 00:01:03,960 --> 00:01:09,560 That prehistoric engineering is reborn in Joel's basement workshop. 10 00:01:09,560 --> 00:01:15,480 I make replicas of ancient weaponry, I make stone tools, clubs, adult adult spears. 11 00:01:15,480 --> 00:01:21,640 He forges a lethal edge from a stubborn shard of obsidian, bridging the present day with 12 00:01:21,640 --> 00:01:23,960 the ancient past. 13 00:01:23,960 --> 00:01:30,720 They must have had infinite patience and curiosity and great knowledge. 14 00:01:30,720 --> 00:01:35,920 I could turn this into a knife if I wanted, I could turn it into a spear if I wanted. 15 00:01:35,920 --> 00:01:44,880 It's extremely sharp. 16 00:01:44,880 --> 00:01:52,440 Each chip is an echo from the Ice Age, turning raw material into weapons that once stood 17 00:01:52,440 --> 00:01:56,800 as the only thing between humanity and extinction. 18 00:01:56,800 --> 00:01:58,960 We were a hunter and we were a prey. 19 00:01:58,960 --> 00:02:06,360 We stood shoulder to shoulder with the best predators of the day. 20 00:02:06,360 --> 00:02:15,400 The predators captured Joel's imagination, but an illustration captured his attention. 21 00:02:15,400 --> 00:02:22,720 I came to this page in particular and it has a bunch of Pleistocene-era animals. 22 00:02:22,720 --> 00:02:30,440 We have the mammoth and the mastodon here, giant sloth, giant armadillo, American bison, 23 00:02:30,440 --> 00:02:32,960 and the very bottom is a little human. 24 00:02:32,960 --> 00:02:34,560 I was just awestruck. 25 00:02:34,560 --> 00:02:36,560 We existed alongside all these beasts. 26 00:02:36,560 --> 00:02:44,640 It just blew me away and as a child, I was always fascinated with ancient weaponry. 27 00:02:44,640 --> 00:02:48,760 And the rest, as they say, is ancient history. 28 00:02:48,760 --> 00:02:53,680 These little purple arrowheads are the first ones I ever made. 29 00:02:53,680 --> 00:02:54,680 That's Flint. 30 00:02:54,680 --> 00:02:56,920 This is what they would have used here in Wisconsin. 31 00:02:56,920 --> 00:02:59,520 We didn't have obsidian in Wisconsin. 32 00:02:59,520 --> 00:03:05,600 Joel actually taught himself how to make these prehistoric tools by reverse engineering 33 00:03:05,600 --> 00:03:07,560 timeless traditions. 34 00:03:07,560 --> 00:03:12,280 A lot of trial and error, they needed to know how to nap an arrowhead. 35 00:03:12,280 --> 00:03:16,840 They needed to know how to make sinew and process it. 36 00:03:16,840 --> 00:03:19,240 They needed to know how to make pine tar pitch. 37 00:03:19,240 --> 00:03:25,720 When they find ancient arrowheads, the fingerprints are still stuck in the pine tar pitch that 38 00:03:25,720 --> 00:03:27,840 they use. 39 00:03:27,840 --> 00:03:35,160 That's what made us a fierce beast, is our intellectual capacity to know how to take 40 00:03:35,160 --> 00:03:40,520 the things up from our environment, the stones and the pine tar pitches and the sinews and 41 00:03:40,520 --> 00:03:45,280 combine it into making ourselves a very lethal and effective weapon. 42 00:03:45,280 --> 00:03:51,720 Besides weapons, Joel also crafts handmade instruments, reclaiming the music that sings 43 00:03:51,720 --> 00:03:56,600 to his ancient soul. 44 00:03:56,600 --> 00:04:04,840 Birdbone one here, it's a little bit higher pitch. 45 00:04:04,840 --> 00:04:12,800 And then the bull roar, that's what the crocodile Dundee used. 46 00:04:12,800 --> 00:04:20,240 This goes back about 50,000 years, so you can communicate over a distance. 47 00:04:20,240 --> 00:04:26,160 That connection to the past has traveled through the millennia, passing from hand to hand until 48 00:04:26,160 --> 00:04:27,720 it reached Joel. 49 00:04:27,720 --> 00:04:28,880 I get a connection. 50 00:04:28,880 --> 00:04:33,920 I get a connection to all those people that have come before me, all my ancestors. 51 00:04:33,920 --> 00:04:40,800 It's been able to do something that my ancestors did 10,000 years ago. 52 00:04:40,800 --> 00:04:55,400 Joel guards these primeval lessons and realizes it is these raw instincts that make us human. 53 00:04:55,400 --> 00:04:58,760 I think there's that urge to sometimes want to be primal. 54 00:04:58,760 --> 00:05:10,200 To take an ad-lattle and let that baby go and watch it soar in the air. 55 00:05:10,200 --> 00:05:15,440 It's almost like time traveling in a sense where you get to experience something that 56 00:05:15,440 --> 00:05:21,720 is an ancient thing and it's cool. 57 00:05:21,720 --> 00:05:27,200 That allows you to kind of picture yourself in another time and another place and say, 58 00:05:27,200 --> 00:05:30,640 you know, I could have done this, I could be brave.