If you were in the woods( pick a spot) and had whatever food/medicines you needed could you build pottery from scratch.
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
Electricity is fine and all, but I imagine the basics of civilization could be replicated by a few good craftsmen(people)
You make a hole or find a piece of slate for processing, you mine clay from a stream bed, and then you make your first pot as a tool for moving water, the second pot for making food, and before or after the second pot you make clay bricks to build a kiln to high fire other things more efficiently - less fuel and more multitasking of other tasks.
I think at least a few of them may have trouble locating pure clay where they are dropped but not all of them, every season, for years.
They all have a pot already. The benefits of more pots seems low. Conversely the calorie cost seems high (if only just collecting clay and cutting wood to fire it.)
On Alone thd priorities are shelter and food. Clay pots seems like a luxury in terms of utility use and energy cost.
Anyhow, some mud and clay skills would help make a decent fireplace.
Staying warm is a crucial skill, not a luxury. Some of them got frostbite.
Also, most of them had food storage problems where their meat would get robbed. Some went to great effort to make their meat inaccessible, to no avail. I imagine that would make a storage pot useful.
To win you need to make a minimal cabin and spend all your time looking for food.
One person did quite well finding wild onions but as I recall got some stomach distress from them. Raw onion doesn’t agree with people when you aren’t eating much else. But those greens would have made soup for days.
It's really hard to make a pot if you are trading making that pot with finding food for the day.
That's why when they did the season with couples, they were able to get a lot more done simply because 1 person could spend the day building a shelter while the other person foraged.
The moose guy that won did so because he had a huge calorie surplus from killing the moose. That freed him up to spend pretty much all his time foraging for plants or building shelter.
> Making lots of tea and thin soups in the winter should have been a target for many of them.
Most plants have almost no calories. Soups are useful as a preservation technique but only work if you are constantly adding fairly calorie dense items (like meat) into the mix. If you haven't sourced beans, potatoes, or rice plants then a soup won't really do much to improve your survival.
The benefit of tea or soup is you are boiling the water which prevents a good number of diseases.
Digging in semi-degraded postglacial till filled in with a few conifers (the Great Slave Lake site is largely talus/scree) is not especially productive in terms of clay.
I would love to see them invite Primitive Technology's John Plant on the show. I do understand if North Queensland is more his climate though.