Who invented the knife?

Technically it was God, because he knows everything. When limiting it to humans, Adam would have needed cutting tools shortly after being kicked out of the garden, and probably invented them as he needed them.
 
Originally posted by shotgunner11
I'm almost positive Spyderco invented the first knife.
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I have to agree, I know I didn’t have a “real” knife till I got my first Spyderco.
 
Michaelmcgo, the 'K' in knife is only silent in English .The word comes from the Scandinavian where the 'K' is pronounced as in Fallkniven !!!
 
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The knife was invented by someone who was fed-up with all the human body's short comings. Damn our fingernails and teeth are fragile to the point of uselessness.
 
I don't know whoinvented the knife but the decendants of abraham were the 1st to make a knife sharpener.
 
Gollnick said:
It's an absolutely fascinating question made more so by the fact that man is the only animal that uses a knife (excepting claws, teeth, etc.). In fact, tool use is something that really separates man from the rest of the animals.

There are very vague examples of animals using simple, found tools. A sea otter, for example, can sometimes be seen pounding with a found rock to open a shellfish. But there is a huge difference between pounding with a found rock and pounding with a Stanley Claw Hammer much less pounding with a hydraulic power hammer. And yet pounding with a found rock is a fairly sophisticated example of non-human tool use.

I've heard anthropologists point out that some monkeys will pick up a stick, break off the branches, and then poke the stick down into an ant hill causing the ants to climb onto the stick from which the monkey can then eat them and saying that that is an example of making a tool. But even if we do concede that as making a tool, it is lightyears away from even making that simple claw hammer mentioned above.

Man is totally unique in the world, set apart dramatically and definitely, in that he purposefully designs and makes tools and that he purposefully and skillfully uses them.

Man's first tool was probably a pounding tool. He may have used a found rock to pound open a shellfish. But, man did not stop there. Man was not satisfied with finding a rock and pounding open a few clams. No. Man -- and man alone -- asked, "How can I make this better?" Even without knowing about levers, he somehow intuitively figured out that if he somehow attached the rock to a stick, he could pound harder with it.

Maybe, just maybe, in all of that pounding, he chipped off a piece of rock that had a sharp edge.

Rocks sometimes break naturally leaving sharp edged. There are occationally naturally-occuring knives just laying on the ground. But man alone picked one up and figured out how to use it.

Maybe, when his hammer head broke, he picked the pieces up. Maybe one of the pieces cut him. But man did not react defensively. He did not conclude that the rock had attacked him. He did not perceive the rock as a danger. Instead, man perceived it as something of potential value. He may have even tried to make more of these nifty rocks by pounding more. Over time, he figured out that some kinds of rocks work better than others and he developed techniques to get the best edges. And then he designed a tool, a sharp rock mounted on some sort of handle.

No other animal has ever done this. No other animal has ever made this leap.

So, when we celebrate the knife, we celebrate man's uniqueness in the world.

I am man, the tool maker, the tool user.
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Jeez Chuck that was almost poetic...
 
It was invented by those two guys on the Geico commercials. Jeeeesh...I thought everyone knew that ;-)
 
I'm a little late to this, but Gollnick, that was one of the best posts I've ever read here. :thumbup:
 
michaelmcgo said:
On another note, who invented the silent 'K'?
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The silent K is the result of the fact the it used to be pronouced Kanife. But try it; try pronouncing both the k and the n, k-nife. It is very ackward, isn't it? The human mouth just doesn't like to make that K N transition. And so this sound is what linguists call very "delicate". It tends to go away over time. Specifically, the K tends to fall away. But, the spelling of it was fixed five hundred or more years ago when "modern" English became written and especially when it became printed. Printing especially freezes written language, at least spelling, in time. But spoken language, despite the protestations of some, always evolves. English is one of the oldest languages to have been commonly printed. One of the first books mass-printed was the King James Bible in English. So, English is more afflicted by this than a lot of other languages.
 
Gollnick said:
The silent K is the result of the fact the it used to be pronouced Kanife. But try it; try pronouncing both the k and the n, k-nife. It is very ackward, isn't it? The human mouth just doesn't like to make that K N transition....
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Unless you're a bored German and start knacken your knuckles! ;)
 
As not being one who believes in evolution, I think some things were programmed in without having to be learned. Maybe being able to make and use tools is one of them. In that case, the first man may have been equipped by God to make the first cutting tool.

My cats didn't need to learn how to use their claws...
 
Vee3 said:
As not being one who believes in evolution, I think some things were programmed in without having to be learned. Maybe being able to make and use tools is one of them. In that case, the first man may have been equipped by God to make the first cutting tool.

My cats didn't need to learn how to use their claws...
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Good one. A bit of a sidebar, no transitionary fossils ever found (ie fish growing legs). Where are the stages of the growth in the evolutionary process? Also, the DNA is very hard to crack with all the complex proteins coding information, much more intricate than man can create,and remember how intricate information sharing is in the simple cell. Our own expertise can't create it! Therfore, can time and randomness with no intelligence create such a complex organism such as a simple cell.

Now back on track, Indeed our Creator gave us the intuition to create such tools.

God Bless
 
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