None of these knives broke (the first two pictures demonstrate the real danger of batonning...
it can result in time travel 
):
I know! 94' was a great year.
In 800,000 years of more than a few hominins controlling fire, only in the last 50,000 years have modern humans practiced ignition at will for fire. Although the oldest known bow drill bits are about 8,000 years old. The hand drill being one of the simplest methods goes back even further, but not much survives the millennia, soft woods and all. These were fashioned with stone tools easily and weighed less comparative to modern knives. Not as many take the time to master these skills.
The "baton" you speak of is still used by primates today. Seriously. It's not a complicated tool to use. Humans around 40,000 years ago lightened them up by making them out of antler and putting holes into it, similar to swedish arrows/atlatals. The namesake came from an earlier version associated with use, but is now referred to as bâton percé or roughly pierced baton. These tools also could have been used to straighten their arrows, but they were certainly shifted to make better use of leverage for efficiency in hunting.
I bring it up in that it has a lot to do with history, accessibility to elements, and if wet firewood was really that much of a survival issue, we wouldn't have made it this far as a species to a point of making fire in primitive inspired ways for learning and for fun. Splitting small wood for kindling will not provide you the proper technique for creating and controlling large fire for survival. The chances you will be able to perform even simple seeming tasks when under duress and anxiety will be difficult at best. It's a nice fantasy for a what if situation, but I won't be depending on my knife to split wood, I'll have much bigger problems to worry about. Survival fire size is something that should be discussed more in depth at that point, and largely determined by geolocation and weather. If you want to split wood with a knife, sharpened tuna can, whatever gets your kicks, have fun doing it and find what works best for you, but in todays world, it's much harder to beat the humble match or bic lighter.
:thumbup:
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