Page 160 - Russian History Viewed through Distorted Mirrors, Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. Russian History Viewed through Distorted Mirrors. Vol. 1

and forest-steppes of the Temperate Zone, man must create enough food supplies for
the whole family to survive cold times. For this purpose it is necessary to solve sev-
eral vital problems. It is necessary to build firm and dry repositories for food supplies
which would also protect them from undesirable “guests” during a long winter. In
such a storehouse man can keep fruits, berries and mushrooms, etc. which he gath-
ered in the forest. Besides a repository, man must consider how he can preserve the
products he gathered with minimum losses. For this purpose man must develop some
methods of drying and preserving by means of salt-curing, smoking, freezing, etc.
and (much later!) canning.

In the forest there is no problem with building material: there are plenty of trees
around; conifers and oaks are especially good for this. However, a stone axe does not
allow the speedy felling of a more or less big tree, not to mention the removal of the
branches from the trunk and its following treatment. One way or another man is
forced to think about more rapid methods of logging. Casual or not so casual discov-
eries of copper and iron deposits allowed man to create qualitatively new instruments,
both for logging and many other ends. Iron ore could be found in numerous forest
bogs pretty often. It was necessary to create or, more precisely, recreate the technolo-
gy of metal smelting and treatment. Only in this case can the time necessary for the
building of food repositories be considerably reduced and then even one family will
be able to build everything it needs. We also should not forget that modern man does
not have thick hair cover and feels an urgent need for a warm dwelling in autumn,
spring and especially in winter which he could make only of wood.

It is well-known that wood preserves warmth quite well; therefore that made
wood the basic building material (as well as its availability which also plays a very
important role). Stone is a pretty rare phenomenon in the forest and, besides, it is
quite cold in stone houses without permanent heating: the temperature inside a stone
house does not differ much from that of the outside. Sure, the roof of a stone house
will protect man from rain and snow and give good isolation — from wind and
draughts, but it will not be warm in there. Moreover, an enormous amount of fire-
wood is necessary to warm it. All this made wood the basic building material in the
Temperate Zone in the areas with sufficient or even surplus moisture. The drawbacks
of this building material are its relatively short durability and high flammability.

So, man succeeds in building a warm dwelling and a food store and this is great,
but as he does not have his own hair cover, then without warm clothing he would be
forced to spend the whole of the cold period inside his dwelling which is highly im-
probable, because, at the very least, he would have to go out and replenish his fire-
wood stock to keep his house heated permanently. Thus, life forces man, whether he
likes it or not, to make warm clothing for which he needs the hides of animals, the fur
cover of which allows them to easily endure the biting frosts.

This means that man must learn to hunt for such animals, sometimes exclusively
because of their warm winter fur. Usually the animals “put” on their winter fur coat
in late autumn or at the beginning of winter which makes it difficult to get their hide.
Therefore man has to invent effective hunting instruments. Also, he has to learn to
treat those hides so that he can make comfortable and warm clothing. Certainly, all

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