Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work

[struggle4progress]

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Volume 27, October 2019

Abstract

The ethnographic account of an Inuit man manufacturing a knife from his own frozen feces to butcher and disarticulate a dog has permeated both the academic literature and popular culture. To evaluate the validity of this claim, we tested the basis of that account via experimental archaeology. Our experiments assessed the functionality of knives made from human feces in controlled conditions that provided optimal conditions for success. However, they were not functional. While much research has shown foragers to be technologically resourceful, innovative, and savvy, we suggest that this ethnographic account should no longer be used to support that narrative ...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19305371?via%3Dihub

Winner of the 2020 Ignoble Prize for Materials Science!

[soothsayer]

1. Would have been the worst episode of Mythbusters ever

[grumpyduck]

2. I guess they were shitty knives.

[abqtommy]

3. It's obvious that some people have too much spare time and too little imagination!

[Thomas Hurt]

4. No shit?

[Warpy]

5. Please tell me they didn't ge an actual grant to study this.

Stone would work a lot better, the Inuit in question would just have to dig down a bit to find some of the right type if he'd dropped his bone knife somewhere.

Inuit are creative and resourceful. Lacking really good wood for bows, they developed a wrapping technique with sinew that made their bows strong, flexible, durable, and particularly lethal.

That frozen shit story sounds like one of them goofing on a particularly earnest anthropologist.

[NNadir]

6. Some years back, I attended a lecture by Marc Abrahams, Editor of J Improbable Res.

It was recorded and is available on line: Science on Saturday: Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes

To say the least, it was an illuminating lecture, inasmuch as the prize is not really about ridicule.

One of the prize winners were Dunning and Kruger, for the research study “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.

This study has proved to point to a very serious matter, given the behavior of the clown pretending to be President of the United States.

He is in fact, the effect reified. (Abrahams put Trump's picture up when discussing the effect during the part of the lecture discussing Dunning Kruger.

And then there's Andre Geim who won the Ig Nobel for levitating a frog, and the Swedish Nobel Prize for his work on graphene.

Attempting to make a knife out of shit may be amusing, but we are going to have to work on shit quite a bit for the next century, because we have effectively mined most of the world's best phosphorous deposits. It's another way our generation expressed its contempt for all future generations.

This is decidedly not a joke.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. But do frozen fish make usable sledge runners ?

Because I read the Inuit used that, too. As they use up their supplies, they can shorten the sledge by eating it ...