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WELCOME
B
ruce Sterling wrote about flintknapping
— the making of stone tools — in the first
issue of Make: in an article wonderfully titled
“Make the Tools That Made You.” He wrote that
stone tools date back over two millions years.
“Modern humans are just 200,000 years old” so
our hominid “ancestors spent 1.8 million years
making tools out of rocks.”
Search for flintknapping on YouTube and you’ll
find many instructional videos, usually with a
person showing their knicked-up hands directing
a blow of one rock on another. Knapping is not
something you can learn just by watching. You
need to develop the feel for it, which requires
hundreds of hours of practice.
Dietrich Stout, an experimental anthropologist
at Emory University in Atlanta, spent 300 hours
learning to make a stone hand axe. Now he’s
having his students learn knapping as well.
Stout’s interest is “what happens inside the brain
when a person knaps away at a piece of stone.”
Stout and his colleagues did MRI scans of the
students’ brains to look for changes over time
that might provide clues to human evolutionary
development. “What matters is the kind of tools
we make and how we learn to make them,” he
writes in a Scientific American article, “Stone Age
Brains” (April 2016). Stout thinks “humans stand
out in their ability to learn from one another.”
The development of more complex stone
tools coincides with the development in humans
of larger brains with new capabilities. “The
demands of toolmaking — combined with
complex social interactions for teaching these
skills — may have become driving forces for
human cognitive evolution,” writes Stout.
“Teaching and learning increasingly complex
toolmaking may even have posed a formidable
enough challenge to our human ancestors that it
spurred evolution of human language.” There was
an evolutionary advantage to being able to make
and use complex tools as well as using language
to share the learning process with others. If
making has made us
who we are, learning and
teaching are inexplicably linked to developing the
ability to make. That is to say “show and tell” goes
back a long, long way.
Today’s makers, from novice to advanced, have
learned how to make using YouTube, a vast visual
library of skills, techniques, and knowledge.
We might take it for granted that this resource
is so broadly available and so widely used but it
has become indispensable. YouTube’s ordinary-
seeming how-to videos — often humble, raw,
and personal — usually feature someone talking
about what they do and showing you how to do it.
We might think of it as the form of a very old story
that we are wired to learn from.
In this issue, we celebrate YouTube’s content
creators, who not only are capable as makers but
as communicators. They are using the advanced
communications tools to do this most basic thing:
sharing how to do something. What makes these
videos so good is not the production values but
the authenticity of the person sharing what they
know and what they can do
For many, YouTube provides a way to learn
those things that are not taught in school. It
has also been a readily available substitute for
learning in person. How many people do you
know who could teach you flintknapping? You can
find plenty of those people on YouTube.
During this pandemic, we are all making use
of video learning, whether live or recorded. I’ve
been learning how to mill flour for sourdough
bread but also how to get rid of gophers, make
masks, and prune sprawling tomato plants. I
watch the videos differently than a TV show or
movie. The end is not the video; it’s accomplishing
what I want to do.
YouTube is where there are so many who can
teach and so many who want to learn. YouTube
is like a campfire that we gather around in small
groups, watching what each of us can do and
learning to do it for ourselves.
by Dale Dougherty, Make: President
Sharing Skis
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