He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.
I wonder, how many years (centuries) might have gone into inventing, discovering and perfecting even this "primitive" technology.
Not to undermine his efforts, but this guy could do all this "so fast" mostly because he is working in a rather comfortable and secure environment of modern and more civilized times, whereas the real primitives had to look out for predators (lions, tigers, etc), for other human attackers and so on.
Kudos to this guy and more kudos to all those anonymous primitive hackers who created such an incredible technology.
Lesson to take: I should stop complaining about those little inconveniences and discomforts I encounter in my modern life.
I'm not sure what you're imagining pre-history to be like, but humans are generally the top of every food chain. It's also very rarely worth it to attack another human without desired resources. The big risk in Eurasia would be wolves, who would have to be very hungry. Non-pack animals usually are a threat when sleeping or to children, not an awake adult who can, well, walk away or climb a tree.
Point is: you're much more likely to die from starvation, infection, or disease while pursuing technology. Time was a major issue: any time not spent feeding yourself had better help you feed yourself later.
If you've ever seen a brown bear...there isn't much you can do if you aren't armed with a gun, and even then....
Of course, the main benefit of agriculture was food security and surplus, allowing a whole bunch of activities not possible before.
At no point was predation a major problem for humans. Again, nutrition and infection would most likely dominate hunter gatherer mortality.
How many remains have we found of mauled humans?
Also as a PSA, playing dead works (better) for brown bears since they aren't so interested in dead things, never try that with a black bear who are more like scavengers. If you saw a bear in he states outside of northern Montana or Alaska (or yellow stone), it was just a black bear.
But, then, the source of the iron is also pretty incredible:
Then I collected orange iron bacteria from
the creek (iron oxide), mixed it with charcoal
powder (carbon to reduce oxide to metal) and
wood ash (flux to lower the melting point) and
formed it into a cylindrical brick. I filled
the furnace with charcoal, put the ore brick in
and commenced firing. The ore brick melted and
produced slag with tiny, 1mm sized specs of iron
through it. My intent was not so much to make
iron but to show that the furnace can reach a
fairly high temperature using this blower.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2909898/Befor...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron
[1] http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/...
However, this entirely breaks the game and if you dont have your entrances and exists covered, you will be sieged VERY soon.
That and hatch covers (building destroyers can't destroy on different z-axis) makes it really hard to lose in Fun ways. Most of my fortresses die from FPS death.
Every time this article comes up, I have two questions I've never found a satisfactory answer to:
1. How did they light fires?
2. How did they cook and boil water? From experience pots and pans fail after much less than 40 years.
I've read somewhere as a kid that prehistoric people who discovered fire kept it going round the clock since it was more convenient to always have a light source and warmth on demand and wood is generally plentiful enough.