His gaze fell on a pile of deadwood collected earlier for firewood. He selected a dense hardwood branch roughly the thickness of an arm. He placed one end of the wood at the edge of the fire repeatedly to roast it.
"Fire is our best shaping tool," he explained while rotating the wood, "Through carbonization, we can easily remove excess moisture and make its structure more solid."
A few minutes later, when one end of the wood was charred, he took it out and easily scraped off the carbonized part with a stone, revealing the hard core inside.
Through repeated roasting and striking, a mallet with one end thick and the other slightly thin was born in his hands.
"Look," he said with satisfaction as he weighed the mallet in his hand, "Compared to using a stone directly, it is lighter and more resilient, allowing us to obtain thinner and more controllable stone flakes when striking the stone nucleus."
With this key processing tool, he officially began making the Stone Knife.
