I've never done it. It's incredibly time consuming but satisfying, from the first hand accounts I've read. You can cut hours or days off of your work time by using modern tools for some of the most seemingly trivial steps.
Search for Tai Goo, Tim Lively and Wayne Goddard. Primitive knifemaking is another good term to search.
<a href="http://www.aescustomknives.com/>Ariel Salaverria</a> doesn't do primitive as far as I know, but he does have some tutorials for making some things that most makers buy/outsource. Tutorials for resin impermeated handle materials, like denim micarta.
This cool post showed up when I Googled "primitive knifemaking" <a href="http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/40386#.TfYp7UfW5oE...;
If you (or anyone else, for that matter) is interested in talking about this stuff, shoot me an email (it's in my profile).
By "stop at steel", I meant to ask how far their bootstrapping went — did they bootstrap from stone-age materials to just, say, pre-medieval steel metallurgy? Or did they go on ahead to technologies like organic polymers, machine tools, bicycles, internal-combustion engines, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, digital computers, and heavier-than-air flying machines?
I wonder if Ariel Salaverria sells his work at handicrafts markets here locally. Maybe I could go apprentice with him :)
In your second link, I think the fragment ID is broken; did you mean the whole thread at http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/40386 ? Or a particular post in it?