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Doc the old knives were symmetrical and were much wider than what we normally call a dagger with lots of belly.
A good example is the old Hudson Bay Trade Dagger.
I have some of the Time/Life Books on the American Indian and there's a pic in them that shows some of the northwest people with very large obsidian daggers that were probably or at least could have been the model for the HBTD.
Most stone ndn knives are not too big or at least the ones I have seen and handled.
I saw another interesting dagger at a museum in Montana when I was about 16. The blade was solid copper and had a wood handle secured with either sinew or rawhide.
It would be interesting to know whether the copper knife came after the obsidian and before the trade daggers or whether it was fashioned after the steel one.
It wasn't too uncommon to find copper nuggets, sometimes rather large ones, in the northwest.
The ndns there used it to good advantage. Not everything shiny was used for jewelery.
Jelly Fish that's very interesting.
It seems that a lot of us don't think about the explorers and adventurers in other cultures besdes our own.
And that's really a dayumed shame since all those who were free spirits blazed the trails for the rest of humanity.
Something else that's interesting is the similarity of the tools those early explorers used in spite of the difference in distance or culture.
Or perhaps because of the distance and culture?
A lot of people study our origins and such and I find all that very intersting, but What I Would find Most Interesting is the answer to questions like where and how certain things like the bow & arrow, the atlaytl, agriculture and similar came about in so many different places in common time lines.
Every culture I have studied (not a lot compared to the many that exists or exsisted) has their legends of one who came and taught the people all of these things as well as how to live without killing everyone off.
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Yvsa.
"VEGETARIAN".............
Indin word for lousy hunter.