Viking Dork Normansson

Today we visited the museum to have a talk with Viking Dork Normansson. This was very nice, we had a great time. Its a very nice guy who re-enacts the viking and he is quite a good replica.

Adolf Hitler on BBC Exclusiv on Vox

This evening we are watching an episode of BBC Exclusiv on Vox.
Its very interesting, as its a historical piece on Adolf Hitler and the people who tried to kill him over the years of his ruling.
The people who wanted to kill him and how they ended if, if they did.

Flint knapping

Today we went to the museum in Camberley - the Surrey Heath Museum.
There was an exhibition organised where you could see flint knapping being performed by Karl Lee. This was extremely interesting, as he really showed us how several stone age time tools were made. He also made the tools with the tools that they used back then.

He explained to us that in some area's people who do flint knapping will use more modern tools, but he doesn't think the replica's made that way are real replica's.
Karl is an experimental archeologist. Therefore he makes replica's. There aren't many people in the world anymore who can do. Some people like the Aboriginals in Australia still do it, they didn't stop doing it. This is really cool, they are still doing it the authentic way there.
In the US there are only a handful of Native Americans left doing it as unfortunately their culture is slowly but carefully dying out. Which is a pity. Languages dying out as well, its such a shame, our planet was so rich in a big variety of cultures and languages and there is so much gone. Just like animals and plants, so much gone.

What we also discussed was the film Dances with wolves, as its a very educational film. It shows a lot of things very well and pretty accurate historically.
The next thing we discussed was the attitude of the white people back then towards the natives. They first tried to kill them all, but when the natives proved to be too clever they resorted to other measures, trying to kill all their food. This is also pretty clear in Dances with wolves as you can see in the film how the white people killed a load of buffalo's just for their hide and tongue, with no respect for animal, earth or fellow human being.
Its pretty rude if you ask me, to do what happened. The natives were friendly, fed the white people, invited them into their homes, next thing, the white people just take their homes.
Pretty sick minds were around then I would say.

The other thing that was really interesting that Karl had to say was that back in the stone age times people knew lots and lots more about which plants people could eat and which plants were good ad medicine. These days we eat such an incredibly small amount of plants, compared to the people back then.

What he also told us, was that people didn't get much older than about 30. I wonder about that, as I have read bits and pieces here and there where people state that girls have never started their periods sooner than now, so how could that be then, coz the kids that the people get have to grow up before they can take care of themselves.
So if periods didn't start until 16 to 18, and they would die at 30, their kids would be like 12 or so. Doesn't fully add up to me, so I have to look into that a lot more.
The other bit is that their diet was much much healthier than ours, so if we get as old as we get, how come they died so young. They did have good hygiene contrary to medieval times.
That is a topic for some time soon, coz the kids were also very interested in that.

I think this was really super cool. He explained so much to the kids, they could ask away, the kids enjoyed it tremendously. I also think he enjoyed their interest in it all. He talked about how people lived and hunted and everything that had something to do with that. Really great.

And then lateron I ran into the following article which really says it all.

The title is:

The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2032

Have a read, I really enjoyed reading the article.

Next week we will go the museum to talk to someone who knows tons about vikings and who re-enacts them. I think that is pretty cool as well.