What task would you excel in if you lived in the Stone Age?

Dying.

Dying is not a task, dying is a condition

I’d be the best at powershell. Unfortunately I wouldn’t live very long.

I find the powershell method gives me hemorrhoids, I much prefer the gentler three shells method.
- But which one goes where?
Plot twist: powershell is slang for a sex act in the Stone age

Yelling yabadabadoo and sliding down that dinosaur

I know how to make rope, among other things, as an eagle scout, and I have some experience with atatl so, probably dying of fever at 14.

You don't think they'd hang you with your own rope?
- I mean depends on how the crops looked; im sure they'd tie me for bog body purposes and toss me in the dip if the crops were bad enough and I went feverish. The gods gotta eat too after all.

Excel, it wouldn't be useful but I'd still be great at it.

Great! I got a random Excel question. Sometimes when I pull reports at work the format for the price changes. Instead of showing the $ and the correct amount of spaces after the cent sign like .00, it has no $ and many digits after the cent sign like .000000000000000.
Now when I try to change the cell format back to currency, accounting, text, or anything it keeps the same format and amount of digital after the cent sign. The work around I found is to open up a different Excel doc type it in the correct format and then copy and paste over the incorrect formatted cell.
Do you can a better answer or did I explain horribly and your as confused as me when I try to fix Excel?
- That’s just excel being excel.
- Yea when I said that I excel at Excel I was somewhat exaggerating, much as I have at every job interview I've ever had. It's become something of a reflex these days. But as someone else has said I think that particular issue is just down to Excel being crap.
- I haven't encountered this but have you tried select the cell, going to the home ribbon tab I think, then clicking normal. Then adding the number formating you want

It always bugs me how cavemen wheels aren't ever depicted with a matching axle. That's the hard and novel part! I'm glad this guy found an alternative for it.
- With enough grease any old stick can be an axle for a while, the wheel is the hard part.

Recreational drug use can be traced to before written history. Bartering also existed then. I'd be a drug dealer.

Fun fact: Barter only seems to occur in human societies when a. markets were previously established b. those markets collapse. Check out David Graber's 'Debt: first 5000 yrs' for more info. Most societies are debt based- as in people just do things for each other but keep basic accounts in there heads. Eg. You paid for dinner out last month, i'll pay this month(doesn't really matter how much was spent, the exactness isn't very important) Or, my grandma makes the coolest knit socks, I'm gonna ask her to make some for me and then shes gonna have me do some yard work when i visit later.
You reckon the stuff back then was potent enough that people would buy it?
- No no, it was freely given.
- P sure psilo hasn't really changed

I'd probably be something of a builder/ "engineer."

I'm not actually an engineer, but I have a knack for utilizing what I have around me or simple enough objects to serve other goals. I suppose I'm what people used to call a Macgyver or "mechanically inclined."

So, what would you "build"?
- Definitely some kind of stone bulwark at the cave entrance to keep out the bears and prehistoric cheetahs.
- It depends on what was needed at the time, but probably things like tools and housing. Obviously considering the time we're talking about it would be very "primitive" lol
I have this but for bicycles and ropes exclusively. First one is out, so I'm rope guy I guess

Storytelling & oral sex.

But not simultaneously.
- Once upon a slurp slurp slurp
Beat me to it. Mine was "storytelling and sexually gratifying the hunters in exchange for food"
- There is a whole world of romance novels in this setting.

With or without my current knowledge?

Because I'm pretty sure I could smelt Iron with what I know, and a year or two of experimentation. So the answer would be "ending the stone age".

Without? I dunno, maybe building traps and snares.

Been watching primitive technology huh?
- I mean, I have, but I saw this long before he started trying to smelt Iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ
I don't even know what smelting ~~meant~~ means. Can we be cave-friends? I'm good at sharpening knives.

Dying

I came here to write Dying, but 7 other people had already done that.
- Yeah I typed my comment then scrolled and realized I’m extremely unoriginal:)

Dying

The only correct answer.

I would invent God so others would do all the hunting and gathering for me while I partied in the cave basement drawing on the walls.

I’m pretty good at thinking outside the box and innovating, so I’d probably just die.

I'm a natural at shooting a traditional bow.
I know every edible plant in my area, and some that get you high.
I can find north without a compass, day and night.
I can make a fire from things I can gather in the woods.
I know how to safely fell a tree, split logs and build a shelter with hand tools.
I know how to act around most predators and have experience handling a spear.

I think I'd do reasonably well.
Sometimes I wish I was born in the stone age. My ADHD is completely gone whenever I'm in the wild.

I started reading and was like "okay, sure buddy" then I remembered I have developed a lot of the same skills, including tracking wildlife.
And then I remembered the time I learned to identify clay deposits and to separate out the clay so I could build stuff with it.
So I thought: "wth, this is so weird! Ohh, they have ADHD too... That explains a lot".
I wasn't diagnosed at the time, when I was learning to find clay, but that should have been a sign lol

making fire.

You good at making fires in the present?
- am i an expert ? no.
  am I pretty good at it. I'd say yes. what i haven't done I have seen done enough times I should be able to get it to work.

drawing dongs everywhere

Just by knowing how to wash my hands, medicine. Up until 20th century.

Wash the wound with soapy water, apply cloth that has been boiled. Yeah that should have a better survival rate than most of human history.
- Soap is animal fat and what in a survival situation?

Dying quickly

dying

Either making elaborate traps and contraptions out of sticks and stones.

Or brain surgery.

Hey, maybe you'll be the most successful neolithic brain surgeon and only kill half your patients
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning
You'd be the shaman putting holes into heads to cure headaches
It could go either way

I wouldn’t survive long with my poor eyesight. Maybe I’d create tools or something. Love tinkering.

This, anyone with strong glasses would be disabled in the stone age, lol. Needed some surgery before? You'd be dead. Ever broke a bone? Likely dead.
I went through my whole (living) family tree once and I'm pretty sure none of us would have survived, including me.
- Yeah loooooots of people wouldn’t survive

Starvation.

technical art and programming for video games

Dying, mostly.

I've got some decent smithing skills, I'd go looking for bog iron and skip the bronze age.

Is that Marjorie Trailer Greene?

That's a supermodel compared to her.

Wanking

Who (and when) was the first person in history to wank? And how did they find out?
- Genesis 38:8-10
  Juda, therefore, said to Onan his son: Go in to thy brother’s wife and marry her, that thou mayst raise seed to thy brother. He knowing that the children should not be his, when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled his seed upon the ground, lest children should be born in his brother’s name. And therefore the Lord slew him, because he did a detestable thing[.]
  In all seriousness, since apes do it (a lot), I don't think there ever were a "first person in history". It's more just a consequence of having long enough arms.
- Probably like probably most people still do find out nowadays.
- I want to know how they figured out shagging and how that creates babies.

Probably tool making.

It would take time to get back into it, but I was turning out decent knives, spear points, and arrowheads for a while there. Nothing that would blow anyone's mind as art, but pretty enough and usable.

One of those things I did just because I wanted to see if I could, and it turned out to be really relaxing and enjoyable. Arthritis took the enjoyable and relaxing part away, so I stopped, but on a survival level, I could get the job done well enough to make up for being a bottom tier hunter.

Hoarder. Of things that might conceivably be used one day.

You need weird rock? I got weird rock.

sucking dick

While I believe you, dear nutsack, take a minute and think about the whole process of sucking dick before showers were a thing.
- They were just used to it. Even today, bathing frequency is culturally dependent.
  When old love poetry talks about the musk of a lover, I do wonder at what range it was noticeable.
- you do what you've got to do

Cavernbook: a cavern where everyone chisel his/her photo and his/her thoughts

I'm guessing "chisel thoughts" is more akin to painting than writing. I like the idea though, very Lascaux

Finding fruit trees. Hunting would be my weak point.

Hog cranking

Navigation and being the first to try a cool looking mushroom and findout how dead I get.

why navigation?
- I just have a really good sense of direction and memory of places and paths.
  Usually if I went somewhere even only once, even a year later I can recall how to get there again

Foraging for plants.

pretty useful skill, even now

Time travel, evidently.

obsessing over plants and accidentally dooming the world with agriculture

Oh! I'm actually somewhat decent with some useful things. I got sent to a wilderness school for fuck up kids when I was a teen. So I know how to, and have applied a lot of survival stuff.

I know how to effectively make a somewhat permanent shelter. I can make and use a bow drill to make fire, and along the same principal but with much more effort and time I could make fire with hand drill or fire plough techniques. I know how to make basic traps. I can make cordage, and have very, very very basic tracking skills. I know some edible and toxic plants in my area (not exhaustive by any means). I know how to clean and dress game. There's a lot of other stuff, but those popped into my head immediately.

It's been a long time since I've done all this, but the knowledge and know-how is all there. I'd actually be a decent person to have around!

That's a pretty excellent school to go to, hell I wish I had that level of training

Knapping.

Wait, I mean napping.

Fucking, for sure

i'm a fairly deft hand at pottery. i'm also decent at fiber crafts. depends when and where during the stone age, of course, that's a pretty big expanse. if i'm really lucky, i'd be in one of the many cultures with special spiritual roles for trans folks. i've also got good rote memorization skills, so i can help with oral history.

Bronze peddler. "Hello, have you heard of bronze? Just attach it to your axe instead of stone. No more annoying stone chopping! And look, it's shiny!"

Absolutely nothing lol. I do tech support for a living and work on cars as a hobby.

Well, cavemen also need tech support, just a different kind of tech.
Gork: "Stick go thud. I want go stab"
Pepsison: "Have you tried rebooting it?"
Gork: "?"
Pepsison: "Sorry, old habit" Sharpens his spear "try it now"
Gork: "Gork happy. Gork bring you mammoth"
And with Gork happy I'm sure he can help you find the right twigs twine and logs to make a primitive cart. Soon you and Gork can haul all the mammoth you'd ever need.
Maybe you could build a wooden bicycle.

Cave wall art. Carving trinkets and talismans. Might branch out into making spear tips, arrowheads, axes, stuff like that.

I think excel would be good software for managing hunter rotations, supplies and stone inventory.

Everyone alive right now must have ancestors who very literally did live & survive though the stone age and the ages before and after that. Wish I knew what my ancestors did to survive stone age, or better still if I could like watch them in a time lapse video. I guess I might have run away from stone lifting to go be a shepherd or something.

Butchering, I live on a farm and butcher sheep/lamb and chicken is second nature to me ( started when I was 12 )

I can make soap from fats and lye (from wood ash). Getting the right balance of fats/lye would be tricky; I've never used wood ash so I'd need some time to work out the right formula. But, theoretically, I could make handmade soap for everyone.

That is genuinely a revolutionary and practical skill to have

tfw you can't say "town bike" bc bicycles won't be invented for thousands of years

i think i'd make good bait though

The hard part about a simple bicycle isn't actually the bicycle, it's smooth road. If you don't have that you have to invent the mountainbike and that one's not even a 100 years old.
- becoming a rome weirdo not for any of the usual reasons, but because someone's gotta build the damn roads
the town (whatever the stone age word for flintstones car was)

hoardlng stones

I would introduce them to scrumpy, then teach them to grow apples so we can make more.

Reaching things on top of the fridge would be my special skill. I hope they'd create a special government position just for people like me.

Juggling. I'd find some nice stones or pinecones and teach everyone how to juggle and do some tricks. I also know an ancient game you can play with stones or knuckle bones. And I know some songs. And stories. People in the stone age had lots of free time to pass, so all of these would come in handy.

Wanna form a neolithic comedy duo with me?
- Okay, I'll be the silent part

Breeding

Being that person providing a better method halfway through a process. A cave person standing on top of another to cave art the ceiling? Halfway through I go "...You know you coulda just grabbed the log from outside, leaned it against the wall and climbed it". Someone halfway through whittling a bowl? "Oh, yeah, I saw some coconuts on the beach they'd be perfect".

I have the great hobby of Looking At Random Things, but the bad habit of assuming everyone else saw those things too so they must be doing what they're doing for a reason lol. That all said I'm sure I'd be dead from dysentery within a week or smtg, they wouldn't have to suffer me long.

Criticizing people about their hair styles

Protecting the womenfolk while the other menfolk are out hunting

Uhhuh - what were you doing in my wife's cave there

If I had my current knowledge, low-level iron forging, agriculture, and architecture (cisterns, wells, deep food storage) and very rudimentary medicine because the wife is obsessed with various herbs that are used to make our modern medicine

If I was starting from scratch, probably just be decent at hunting because I have good hand eye coordination and maybe tracking

Feeding the living with my body

Clan rock stacker.

I guess I could build a cart/waggon for easier transporting the dead animals the other guys hunted. Not sure if that would be much appreciated or if I just would be the weird guy again.

Maybe a plough would be more useful.

And building/improving shelter.

I could also make a fire after failing some time I suppose.

I can imagine you making a rock hammer, and having to sit there and justify to people why the end has that weird flange. "It's for pulling things out!"
- Right, come to think of it, I definitely would be the weird guy that doesn't understand how the community works. I couldn't speak their language, wouldn't know their common practices and hierarchy.
  I'd likely go (be exiled) on my own lonely journey (aaand thus quickly die).

I'd be the hairless monkey that stays up all night and talks to plants

wouldn't that get you killed very fast?
- Hey I didn't say I'd be successful
- someone's gotta be up at night, tho! Lots of theories around generational sleep patterns and teen-elderly sleep schedules leave very little time where someone isn't just normally awake- teens naturally stay up late and prefer to sleep late, old folks naturally wake up early and sleep early.

Not being on the internet

looking like that...most likely not a Don Juan. so hunting and fishing, i could scare anything to death...

I think he's got quite a friendly face tbh
- you are totally right...but it is not a pretty face.
If you could figure out how to make soap from fat, you could be the clean one. Supposedly that helped the Vikings take the ladies home.
- well...most of the women we took home were slaves...if we were clean or not did not make any difference...

I feel like I could get flintknapping down pretty well.

Engineering and chemistry. You know, sharpening knives/arrows and distilling seawater into salt for food preservation.

dying

I'm reasonably good at surviving pregnancy and childbirth, and nursing. Think all my other skills are only useful after the agricultural revolution.

I'd be a good forager, gatherer and tracker. I have a knack for identifying plants and animals and spotting signs of their presence. I'm sure with a bit of training I could become decent at trapping too but I've never done that.

I'd also be good at art, be that cave wall painting or figurine sculpting/carving.

I want to say "crossfit".

stoneagers would trounce any of us at crossfit

test plant on grug before eating

Hitting people with a cudgel

Coal mining, I fucking love mining coal

Yearning for the mines.

Dying from a decease.

tool making most likely. also fire keeping, and cooking.

Ironically, brute force. I would be great at hunting too!

Username checks out

Digging holes with a shovel. I'm good at that.

Whittling. Drawing.

Meditation.

shovel
We said stone age.
- We had shovels in the stone age.

You'd be a lot taller and probably also faster (maybe not stronger). You'd become a god-king in no time. Or be killed as a monster.

Counting and therefore distributing spoils fairly. I would become a well-loved chief and would probably get laid more than I currently do, although the hairy partners may not be of my liking.

eh beauty is relative and you'd get used to it. It sounds like you'd be the village sandwich maker, and yes I can imagine that being a very prestigious position

Our ancestors measured time to keep track of the breeding seasons of their prey as to not exterminate the local populations... so most likely for that

Or just to better understand how and where to catch them. Don't forget we hunted all kinds of things to extinction anyway.

Honestly if I had my current level of knowledge, probably hygene. Teach them to make soap (animal fat and a source of base like ash), wash their hands, keep poop away from potable water sources, stuff like that.

Remember, it literally took until Victorian times to figure out that washing your hands prevents disease.

Also, math. Teach them how to do basic arithmetic, how to use a unit of measurement to figure out how big something is, stuff we'd learn in elementary school but weren't rigorously developed until the Ancient Greek age.

Soap is super important, as for math - I'm guessing it's going to need to be geometry based before they can grok irrational numbers, or hell, symbolic notation in general

Cave paintings, since I'm an artist! 😃 Also probably building tools and things since I enjoy building stuff in general

Make booze

Being dead

Knapping flint while fishing. And shitting under a tree. I feel like my ancestors have more in common than I thought.

min-maxxing my sticks

I'm good with plants, I'm observant, I like stargazing, I'm a good de-escalator. I'd probably an elder and end up doing some type of weather forecasting.

Tell me you work in middle management
- Not quite. Former history teacher now in an office environment

Dispensing elderly wisdom

Dying from allergies & asthma.

While still living, the tribe could deploy me as an animal detector: place me at the front of hunting parties, and the moment I start sneezing & wheezing, they know they've got prey nearby.

Mandatory I'd have died more than once, but I suspect I would have been good at mental things like tracking and storytelling. I'd probably suck at everything else, too.

Selling camping gear

Being the cave complex idiot.

Chef

Wololooo

i think i could get pretty good at knapping stones into tools if i lived back then

Sloth simulator

I'm pretty ok at knapping flint and I'm not a terrible hunter. I'm also usually in poor health.

So I'd probably die as a baby.

I would excel in the use of the internet and computers as I would be the only one with knowledge about it. I would also be the only one who knows how to drive a car.

Eating the rich—if they tried.

- -
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

Probably dying at age <1.

Sleeping and eating

Georgia senator by the looks of the picture.

Being a bitch.

vee, loop up.

Computers! Shit.

Running away.