Man has been working rocks, stone, and bone into tools, utensils, and weapons for millions of years. Given its abundance in nature, rocks and bone are perfect materials for making tools and weapons in an emergency wilderness survival situation.
All stone-working methods require “lithic reduction” and involve the use of a hard hammer (i.e. a hammerstone) and a soft hammer fabricator (wood, bone, or antler), to detach “lithic flakes” from a lump of tool stone (called a lithic core). Given the appropriate stone materials, a stone worker learns to control and direct the application of force so as to shape the material being worked on.
As flakes are detached in sequence, the original mass of stone is gradually reduced. Lithic reduction techniques may be performed in order to obtain sharp flakes, which can be used for a variety of tools such as arrowheads (given the properties of rock, the flakes created can be very sharp, often with edges only a few molecules thick), or to rough out a blank for additional refinement.
