Making Cordage from Red Deer Sinew

Sinew from the leg or back tendons of large animals has been a valuable resource since the stone age. it's often used in bowstrings and making bows, but is also excellent as a strong thread for other purposes.

Today I am processing fresh tendon into a storable form and pounding it to release the strong collagen fibres which are perfect for cordage making.

[ShadowDoomDork]

"I need to go and find my favorite rock and a nice piece of wood" - lets all find our favorite rock, and a nice piece of wood wouldn't hurt.

[dharusiokay]

Always a joy to see a new video by you.

I will, in all likelihood, never in my life handle deer sinews, but i'm sitting here eyes glued to Screen.

[offinthehaed]

I build things for a living; more than 40 years now. One of my pass times is studying ancient technologies, tools, methods etc.
I am continuously amazed at how textiles are often only marginally spoken of, or not at all, by some academics when discussing ancient peoples and their tools.
It seems to me....the use of fibers for cordage is the first tech after chipping stone.
While most textiles have a shorter shelf life than tools made from bone, stone, wood or copper ; thus making the finding of preserved specimens more difficult, there importance Is unsurpassed.
Thank you so very much Dr. Pointer for all your work ! ! !
And Yes, i jumped ahead a little bit and gave you the Phd.

[juliajs]

Yet another skill that begs the question "how do you come up with that?". Were they drying sinews as jerky and one just wanted to soften theirs up, and then recognized the fibery part from working with plants?

[angelduncan]

I carefully remove the
metatarsal glands before harvesting the sinew. I've never had a sinew smell bad unless it was on the edge of rotting. Still usable, but not nearly as pleasant to handle. And the thread wasn't as long lasting as sinew that was kept fresh and dried carefully before decomposing started setting in.
I treat it like I'm going to eat it. 😊

[Odontecete]

Fascinating, I always wondered how sinew was processed, now I know. I can see how processing sinew led to cellulose fibers, it's almost the same process. Just like making cordage by hand led to the development of the spindle. So cool! Thanks. :D

[mcv]

Thanks for the text boxes, cos after seeing the cat go for it, I *was* wondering how it tasted!

[KitAlda]

The pounding seems like something you could make even quite young children do, and making cordage should be doable for maybe 10-12 year olds? Maybe even younger? My son is 5, and seeing what he can and cannot do is super interesting when thinking about division of labour in prehistory.

[johnnytyn]

I use deer leg sinew to wrap my primitive deer bone spears, once they have been hafted using pine pitch. I always lightly chew the sinew for a couple of minutes, so the collagen in my saliva and the sinew collagen combine making a very pliable and strong lace. After a couple of days the sinew tightens so much that it squeezes the hard pine pitch from in-between the wrappings making little raised ridges.

[kurtj]

Ms. Sally, you need to try some bison sinew from the USA. The Native Americans used the bison for EVERYTHING here. They would make little 1-2 person boats from the bison hide to float across rivers and lakes, and water bottles from the scrotum of the bison. It's pretty neat what they would do.

[AnimeShinigami]

I love that bit about the cat. My cat's a chewer and he will shove his mouth in anything. He'll even chew open a loaf of bread and take ONE BITE and leave the rest to go stale and attract flies!!!!

[SkylerLinux]

I do find it a bit interesting that when working Nettles you've used stone floor and wood beat-stick, but for the Sinew it was a wood slab and a hammer-stone.

[caspenbee]

Gorgeous! This is a process that wasn't intuitive to me and I always wondered how it was done. Thanks for sharing!

[witchways]

So happy to see your videos. I'm an avid hiker and going through an old burn area in the NW there was a large amount of disintegrating western red cedar bark on the ground that looked quite fibrous. based on you videos I thought I would see if it would make cordage. It did but was too splintery to do much of it. But I was delighted. Thank you for your videos.

[Marialla.]

As an autistic person with ADHD, I can see this activity as being so very calming and engrossing for hours and hours to keep fingers busy (stimming). Especially during the winter months when there is not much to do outdoors, this would be satisfying to work on by firelight.

I think autistic and ADHD people have always been prevalent in human populations, but only recently have our daily activities become so dynamic that we have lost a lot of the former survival skills at which people of my temperament would have excelled. Thus we are considered disabled by modern standards because we cannot adjust so quickly to the changes of society around us, while simultaneously losing those bits of work that would have made us so valuable producing needed outputs which more neurotypical people might consider too boring to work on for very long. Basically, a lot of our special strengths have been replaced by machinery and automation.

Gosh. I guess that means that in some ways perhaps people like me were sort of like the machines of the pre-machine age. But of course, we have feelings and are fully human. Which is somehow funny, when you compare how sympathetic people can get over "pet" machines in their lives, such as their car or their Roomba.

[ignaz]

Sinew is magic stuff! If you really soak or chew it, you can wrap up things like arrow shafts, it will stick to itself and even tighten while drying. It is a very quick and firm mean of binding stuff.

[jolaynemichaud]

I'm going to try this after the next hunting season!

[wendymoyer]

I was going to ask about the smell as they were drying, because our stove has a dehydrator setting; by the sounds of it though, that might not be a popular choice!😂😂

[Eqwatherto]

Our indigenous do the same thing with kangaroo tail sinew. good video. Though they just use they're mouths to pull it all out string by string, the length of the tail, chew it all together to make it malleable, then they wrap it tightly around a stick to dry

[SMTRodent]

Your videos are always so absorbing! (And yes, I did wonder how it tasted.)