Neolithic News

The Looming Peak Flint Fiasco

By our environment correspondent Ug Nariad

Peak flint anyone? We are all familiar with flint utensils, they are part of our daily lives, but for how long? That is the concern of an overwhelming number of flint academics. They point out that our reliance on dwindling flint resources highlight just how precarious our lives really are.

From scrapers to axes, from arrow heads to hair trimmers, our dependence on flint has exhibited unsustainable growth over recent generations. There is mounting evidence that dependence on flint cannot continue indefinitely. Our entire clan is edging ever closer to a catastrophic tipping point where the supply of flint simply runs out. Only this morning on my usual stroll to the lake I didn’t stub my toes on a single piece of flint. All gone.

Flint academics have devised ingenious spells and incantations to predict the effects of indiscriminate flint use. Firstly of all the sheer scale of flint consumption is mind numbing. Within a normal life each of us may use more flint than an adult can safely carry. To put this finding in more precise terms, that amounts to a lot of flint in quite a long time.

This is simply not sustainable say the academics, but unfortunately their wisdom has been challenged by a few fanatical flintists, some of whom now advocate an even less sustainable technology - bronze. This the flintists claim will replace flint so we should not be concerned about flint running out. Flintists base their entire argument on something they refer to as staying alive.

Needless to say, bronze is even less sustainable than flint because it uses up such a lot of fire and where will all the fire come from when we’ve used it all up making so-called bronze? Not only that, but a single bronze axe head can cost as much as an entire pig. Bronze is shiny claim its proponents and although shiny has enormous appeal we should not blind ourselves to the obvious drawbacks.

The only truly sustainable resource is of course the stick. Sticks grow from the earth and they return to the earth, a mystical cycle which goes on and on until the Great Bog rises up and we all sink into Bog Heaven. The stick is Brown, the earth is Brown. Hardly likely to be a coincidence as flintists try to claim. We Browns have recognised the importance of Brown for some time and as well as advocating Brown lifestyles have embraced the stick as the only truly sustainable resource. Sticks can do anything flint can do apart from cutting, piercing and not breaking.

Recent stick developments have greatly assisted us in promoting the Brown message against powerful vested interests who claim they don’t want to die. We are back to that tired old staying alive mantra which they tediously claim is incompatible with abandoning their addiction to flint and embracing the stick. For these die-hard flintists, Brown is a step too far, however enlightened it clearly is for the longer term.

What about the future, what about the future of our children? This is the unanswerable Brown question and it is a powerful one in spite of the enormous forces behind flintist propaganda. Not only that, but we now have to contend with bronze propagandists who clearly expect to stay alive more easily by adopting a wholly unsustainable bronze culture.

Something we can all do here is to lobby our clan elders, promoting the Brown message and the Brown path of hope for the future. We must not be forced into the position of allowing mere hunger to divert us from fundamental Brown virtues. Stick technology works. Each season sticks will become ever more available until sooner or later flint addicts will have to admit that the future is ours, the future is Brown.