Tim Queeney

Yeah, that's right.

The hand axe, which, from what I understand, the people I've talked to, archaeologists still aren't completely sure what those things were used for.

But there are so many of those around, and they were used for such a long time.

And in my book, I talk about the hand axe and stone tools happening before rope, but it's quite possible that they were around contemporaneously with rope, but we have that issue of them rotting away.

But once you've developed this multi-strand rope...

it now has all these great uses that it can be put to.

Probably the biggest use for early peoples was just the ability to organize your stuff.

You can tie things together in bundles, which sounds maybe a little simplistic for us, but we do the same thing in lots of other ways.

We just keep our stuff organized, and they had to do the same thing.

And so rope was just a great tool for that, in addition to using it for domesticated animals and being able to keep them in place so they don't run off, and lots of other things.

you

Yeah, the whaling ships would carry more than 10,000 feet of rope just for use on board the whale boats that went out to actually hunt the whales, not even discussing all the other uses that rope is put to on a sailing ship.

And as you point out, a sailing ship, which was the premier technology for hundreds of years for crossing oceans, is absolutely dependent upon rope.

both for the standing rigging, which holds the masts up, and the running rigging, which controls the sails.

Going all the way back to the Egyptians, they had the exact same issue.

They had to have rope to keep their boats under control and for them to keep the masts from falling down.

And if I could just go back for a second to the Egyptians, very interestingly, different way of building ships than the way a ship was built.

For example, for a whaling ship in the 19th century, the way of building ships in the Western world is to put down a keel.

Then you have ribs that are 90 degrees to that keel.

And then you have planks which cover the ribs.