Ancient weapons are a thing of the past, but for Joel Dickinson of Green Bay, their
ingenuity is timeless.
Most people probably don't even know what an adult adult is.
Most people would know it as the spear thrower.
Thousands of years before the first bowstring, the adult adult was the Great Equalizer, a
high velocity invention of the Ice Age.
What that allowed us to do was hunt at a greater distance, which allowed us to keep ourselves
safe from the animal that we're trying on.
That prehistoric engineering is reborn in Joel's basement workshop.
I make replicas of ancient weaponry, I make stone tools, clubs, adult adult spears.
He forges a lethal edge from a stubborn shard of obsidian, bridging the present day with
the ancient past.
They must have had infinite patience and curiosity and great knowledge.
I could turn this into a knife if I wanted, I could turn it into a spear if I wanted.
It's extremely sharp.
Each chip is an echo from the Ice Age, turning raw material into weapons that once stood
as the only thing between humanity and extinction.
We were a hunter and we were a prey.
We stood shoulder to shoulder with the best predators of the day.
The predators captured Joel's imagination, but an illustration captured his attention.
I came to this page in particular and it has a bunch of Pleistocene-era animals.
We have the mammoth and the mastodon here, giant sloth, giant armadillo, American bison,
and the very bottom is a little human.
I was just awestruck.
We existed alongside all these beasts.
It just blew me away and as a child, I was always fascinated with ancient weaponry.
And the rest, as they say, is ancient history.
These little purple arrowheads are the first ones I ever made.
That's Flint.
This is what they would have used here in Wisconsin.
We didn't have obsidian in Wisconsin.
Joel actually taught himself how to make these prehistoric tools by reverse engineering
timeless traditions.
A lot of trial and error, they needed to know how to nap an arrowhead.
They needed to know how to make sinew and process it.
They needed to know how to make pine tar pitch.
When they find ancient arrowheads, the fingerprints are still stuck in the pine tar pitch that
they use.
That's what made us a fierce beast, is our intellectual capacity to know how to take
the things up from our environment, the stones and the pine tar pitches and the sinews and
combine it into making ourselves a very lethal and effective weapon.
Besides weapons, Joel also crafts handmade instruments, reclaiming the music that sings
to his ancient soul.
Birdbone one here, it's a little bit higher pitch.
And then the bull roar, that's what the crocodile Dundee used.
This goes back about 50,000 years, so you can communicate over a distance.
That connection to the past has traveled through the millennia, passing from hand to hand until
it reached Joel.
I get a connection.
I get a connection to all those people that have come before me, all my ancestors.
It's been able to do something that my ancestors did 10,000 years ago.
Joel guards these primeval lessons and realizes it is these raw instincts that make us human.
I think there's that urge to sometimes want to be primal.
To take an ad-lattle and let that baby go and watch it soar in the air.
It's almost like time traveling in a sense where you get to experience something that
is an ancient thing and it's cool.
That allows you to kind of picture yourself in another time and another place and say,
you know, I could have done this, I could be brave.