World’s Sharpest Obsidian Knife

African blackwood or ebony

any type of burlwood

TKOR SUCKS WITHOUT YOU. JUST SAYING!!!

Good to see you Nate!

purple and black swirl resin ?

When Nate showed up for real, you can see the cardboard cutout for a split second

Same

I didnt realize he was real until like 5 minutes in

I'm so happy to see him on a channel similar to the one he quit because of bad management.

Look at the background at 4:31 lmao

Except knapping doesn't give a large enough workable edge to exploit the sharpness.... It's all well and good being a molecular thickness edge... but if it's a shitty mess of hundreds of small jagged notches on a lump of rock an inch thick, it's not going to function like a metal knife.
Obsidian is overhyped. It's only advantage cannot be properly exploited into practical tools, hence why metal weapons and tools were such an upgrade the instant they arrived in South America. A durable, consistent edge is far more value.

​@@AllThingsCubey Tiny obsidian blades are used in high end eye surgery as tips for the bisturi. Since the blade is a single molecule wide, it leaves extremely sharp and clean cuts that can mend without any scarring.
Aside from that you're right 😉

"and then i'd hit them with the wooden baseball bat in my other hand"

whips out baseball bat

I got this joke and I'm happy

The vegetables I cook don’t typically fight back

@@BluBird12 I don’t get it

But how WERE the cities laid out? 🤔
Enquiring minds need to know!

​@@bigchooch4434 Mesoamerican cities tended to have a central, dense urban core of monumental architecture: You'd have palaces, temples, ball courts, noble housing, and other civic, ceremonial, and communal structures., which were richly painted and decorated: when you see ruins today, you're seeing the grey inner fill of rough stones and mortar or the brickwork over them, usually not the clean stucco and then colorful painted frescos and intricate reliefs, sculptural facades, friezes, and other accents which were over them, which are only preserved occasionally: Look up the frescos found at the residences of Teotihuacan, or the Rosalila temple at Copan, or the paintings made by Scott and Stuart Gentling of Aztec cityscapes to get a feel for how they would have looked in their heyday.
These were generally organized around open plazas, with their arrangement aligned to maximize things like public viewing or human traffic for ceremonies and gatherings, or for ritualistic alignments: For example, the Maya E Group, for example, is a common arrangement of 3 structures that when viewed from another location, align with astronomic phenomena at certain times of year. Or how at Teotihuacan, the San Juan river was recoursed through the city's grid layout (which is unusual, I'll get back to that) to appear perpendicular to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the Ciudadela complex/plaza it's located inside, as those structures were heavily associated with water (the plaza even capable of being flooded like the Roman Colosseum), so when viewed from specific angles it would appear the river is coming forth from those structures. Speaking of, complex water management systems were also quite common: At Tikal, for example, there were a series of massive reservoirs connected to one another, with dams and channels which allowed them to flow into one another if needed to prevent flooding; with structures and plazas in the surrounding area having drains to similarly redirect rainwater or water from floods into the reservoir network. Some of these reservoirs even had advanced filtration systems, and some of the connections between them even had switching stations to choose how the water flowed.
Much like how the structures themselves in sites today are misleading with only the inner grey masonry being visible, modern archeological sites and their maps are often misleading in that they exclude many structures which are either still buried or destroyed. Compare tourist site maps of sites like Teotihuacan or Palenque which only show major structures for visitors, with the archeological surveys of those sites from Millon and Barnhart, respectively: those both show hundreds of additional structures tourist maps do not.
Significantly, they also exclude the suburbs around the urban core, which is the other key half of Mesoamerican urban layouts: While the urban core has a high density of planned structures for elites, ceremonies, or groups, which are built of stone and have fancy accents and decorations; the suburbs that surround the cores are low density, commoner residences interspersed with agricultural land (sort of giving a similar mental image to suburbs today, with homes spaced out between greenery), and are less planned: Commoner residences would have been built out of wood, straw, or adobe brick, usually on a stone foundation, with homes in so called "patio groups", with 2 to 4 homes built facing one another around a sort of mini-plaza. These suburbs would radiate out from the site core, gradually decreasing in density, as the area became more rural, without a clear end point, which makes defining the limits and populations of Mesoamerican cities quite iffy. Also, while these were "less planned", then the urban cores, much of the area the suburbs covered would still be landscaped (not necessarily, deforested, though sometimes: When tree cover was kept, it was in managed groves with a cleared underbrush for agroforestry and shade), and some would have "mini cores" with temples and some elite residences. Some large Mesoamerican cities, particularly Maya ones, had absolutely massive suburban sprawls covering dozens or even hundreds of square kilometers, like at Tikal, El Mirador, Copan, and Caracol, to the point where in the former two examples, you literally had multiple different city centers connected via the sprawls into Megalopoli. Tikal's in particular had a significant amount of infrastructure across it's sprawls, with palisades and more hooked up water management systems for agriculture and flood prevention and drinking water.
What i've described is the "typical" large Mesoamerican city, but obviously there were exceptions, some examples being Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan, and Palenque: The Aztec capital of Tenochtitan was located on an island (which was then expanded via grids of artificial islands used for urban development and as hydrponic farms known as chinampas, which actually made up most of the city's area by the time of Spanish contact), so it had a clear limit, though in the city there's still a more urban core and surrounding suburbs. Tenochtitlan also unusually had some of it's structures on a grid layout, contrary to the plaza based ritualistic planning I described. This is attributed to a specific urban revival of Teotihuacan's city planning, which was even more unusual: Almost the whole city layout was one giant urban sprawl on a planned grid, which covered 22 square kilometers, entirely composed of palaces and temples, organized around a central road, rather then plazas. The city did have suburbs, but they covered a much, much smaller amount of space compared to the urban area and most of the city's denizens lived in fancy palaces. For Palenque, the city was founded on a relatively small flat area of an otherwise steep hill, so it has it's commoner residences on terraced acropoli (which themselves weren't uncommon, moreso for palaces and temple complexes tho) packed tightly next to/alongside it's elite and ceremonial structures, I guess more comparable to the typical ancient/medieval city in Eurasia where you had everything packed together.
I wish I was able to link images of all of this, but youtube tends to act iffy when I do that, so if you want some let me know and we'll have to figure something out.

As an archaeologist, I agree. Strike a flake from a core and you get the thinnest edge possible. Further retouch or knapping is good for shaping tools and for sharpening a dull edge, but you'll never achieve an edge as sharp as the initial flake. Fun video though.

@@MajoraZ thanks for the long write up, I was actually rather curious

@@MajoraZ I wasn't sure if we'd get an actual write up, I'm so glad you actually took the time to write all that out.
This type of sharing of niche knowledge is what the internet was made for.

Why did they fire him??

They fired him?

@@daniela9594 poor veiwership and creative differences

@@dynamitedingo8183 I don't think it was Nate that was causing poor viewership

@@dynamitedingo8183 nate was great on TKOR. What a p*** take. Im sure Grant would have something to say about that and not be happy.
Nate always did the stuff everyone was thinking needed to be done. Not the strange lady that looked like she was on drugs half the time.

Is that the guy that exploded into the ground a while ago? Can never remember his name or what channel it was.

@@skrimper
Hang gliding accident.
Also had a bit of an issue with setting off an explosive reaction without permission in Canada.
I don't recall every detail, but it's a minor rabbit hole to follow.

@@skrimper The thing you replied to had both his name and his channel? You slow?

@@SCh1m3ra existing without permission

@@troliskimosko Lmao

Like when Death sharpens the Scythe in one of the Discworld books, I forget which one.

Jesus Christ died for your sins please repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ✋ 🖊 🤚

@@jesuslovesyou2616 keep spreading that good news brother! Jesus is the son of God come in the flesh gave his life in our place and shed his blood to pay for our sins. Then rose from the dead and is coming back for us soon!

@@clark987878 its a bot

Gloves laugh you 😄

Exactly

He isn't licking it precisely because it is in fact obsidian. He might be dumb but not an idiot who will instantly bleed his tongue out if he licks it. That's how you know it is real.

I’ve accepted the change,,, and they are doing their best,,,,, but damn I wish I knew why they forfeited their entire channel, that they spent a decade building….. why?
I don’t think I would have ever started watching this channel if not for Mitch & Dan…..
so strange

I agree. I have all but stopped watching this channel because he is so damn annoying.

I unsubscribed because it got so annoying and unfunny.

The super sharp obsidian blades aren't knapped, they're made via the prismatic method: you flake singular long blade pieces off a core with each strike, so the blades have a continuous edge; vs knapping where you're making multiple strikes on the edge of your blade which results in some chipping and not one flush cutting surface.

@@MajoraZ Sure. I was just basing my comment off of what was said in the video. Thanks for the info', tho'.

@@kevjohn96 prismatic is the complicated way of saying it, as a knapper we just say blade cores, so if you're interested in that technology just look up blade core tech, you can make 100s of blades off of like a few good cores, it's insane how economic they were for their times

Man, I know these guys are doing their best, and it isn’t bad,,,,, I just really wish I knew why the shift was made….. I’m not sure I would have ever started watching this channel without Mitch & Dan…….

I like the new guys too. They're doing a good job

I'm wondering the same!

They got caught up in the special military operation going on in Ukraine

More like it CAN cut between cells.

Obsidian was used for scalpels but it isn’t used as much now because it can easily be broken. Leaving the patient with sharp shards inside them that were hard to remove.

So, same like one eats tomato salad with some obsisian knive chippings in it? :D

If a scalpel could really cut *through* the cells, I'd call it one great scalpel. Typically they should be just crushing the cells for good.
As for cutting "between the cells", that's just tearing them apart, not cutting. Maybe in theory and with nanobots?
Either way, any clean cut with a sharper object usually is much easier to heal than the one taken with a dumb blade. Whenever I'd cut myself with my knife at its best sharpening, some of the cuts could be barely detectable at all - you can even miss the fact of having had being cut by such a blade at first.

​​@@getsideways7257Obisidian cuts between cells as it blade is 1-20 atoms wide

That was just your console starting a download in sleep mode.

For real, I unsubscribed last year when they disappeared

Agreed.

its not even the same channel.. and the guy who made this video didnt even make the last obsidian video...

“In the meat”? You mean in the flesh.

@@jch8175 🤓

Wow your channel is pretty cool maybe someday you could visit them lmao

Your channel is awesome and you clearly have worked obsidian more then I have, but I don't believe them grinding it to an edge would produce the super sharp edges obsidian blades are faous for: I do stuff on Mesoamerican history/archeology, and they (Aztec, Maya, etc) made blades via the prismatic method: you flake singular long blade pieces off a core with each strike, so the blades have a continuous edge. If you grind it or even knap it, you're producing many more fractures along the edge which won't make it a flush cutting surface

@@EddieBurke that would be super neat!

@@MajoraZ thank you for that compliment! And you are right. Really the sharpest you can get it is from breaking a chunk of obsidian and if you get a fresh sharp piece. And you're also right, knapping the stone, it becomes more serrated but still more sharp than that of grinding it but not as sharp as the initial break.
It's amazing how sharp that stuff is.
I just broke some large pieces recently looking for colored layers and had to find a safe place to put the freshly broken pieces.
That would be a good challenge to see how relatively sharp I can grind an obsidian piece without knapping it.

@@WorldofRockhounds I broke a chunk near my flower bed and knicked my hand randomly for years

I think I did a better job on a cheapo 440A steel knife with just three stones - could cut hair too and slice grapes.

It won't work with obsidian. You're not going to get it any sharper than a steel knife with a stone, with the added disadvantage that you're going to be chipping it away with a stone and not getting a stable edge. Obsidian is terrifying sharp when knapped, but that's really the only good way to get it sharp.

@Vegvisir92 Unfortunately, the main problem with obsidian is its fragility, very sharp but brittle...

Jesus Christ died for your sins please repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand ✋ 🖊 🤚

@@jesuslovesyou2616 democracy rules monarchy droolz

@@jesuslovesyou2616 also im not christian, so no.

Why now? Why here?

agreed , please send it this way !!!

I've watched enough LPL to know you're exactly right

"And here i was using a diamond pickaxe like a sucker"

💀

What happened to them where did they go?

I mean, it's great to see Nate here... but really, without Dan and Mitchell you're going to ruin this channel like they ruined TKOR when they canned Nate!

A few episodes ago they show up outside the building talking through a vent. They say they are looking for their last paycheck. Fired maybe?

it's thousands of times more brittle, most lasers would just cause microscopic fractures turning the edge to dust

I get it lol