Blog | A Week In The Stone Age 🫎

We were once wild. For hundreds of thousands of years our ancient ancestors survived and thrived within the untamed landscapes of Earth.

Their lives wern’t perfect, but they laid the foundations upon which our modern global society is built.

Since then, we’ve replaced their stone tools with plastic and metal, their animal hide clothing with cotton and polyester, and their diverse wild diets with hyper-processed domesticated food.

I don’t say this to romantisise our wild past. Readers of our book know how I feel about going backward. But, that’s exactly what Amber and I chose to do for a week in Norway during mid-spring – training with one of the world’s leading Stone Age practitioners, Lynx Vilden.

Working with Lynx has been on the bucket list since we saw her on Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild back in 2017. Watching how she recreated Stone Age practices in this modern world sewed a seed in both of us that has no doubt contributed to both what we value and the growth of Beyond Domestication.

As I’ve said before, our mission to move forwards, not backwards. But sometimes, the methods to heal the human soul are found by looking backwards first.

In true BD style I am going to share our experiences of our week in the Stone Age by breaking it into the Seven Practices:

On day three we were asked to go off alone and spend 45 minutes with a plant of our choice. The only rule: pick one we didn’t already know well. There was limited guidance, but we were encouraged to draw the plant.

The goal was to become intimately connected with a new plant friend. Where does it grow? What shape is the stem? Is it near water? We’ve made friends with plenty of plants over the years but this was the quickest I’ve ever bonded with one.

Amber connected with the Bilberry plant, which was abundant in the area and a little familiar from our UK hikes.

I chose Wild Strawberry, drawn to its resemblance to domesticated strawberry leaves.

To see both of these fruit-bearing plants thriving in a Norwegian mountainscape was a reminder of the abundance to come during the summer months.

Alongside this mindful activity, we ate many familiar spring edibles such as dandelion, nettles and medium plantain. As well as many new ones such as coltsfoot, spruce tips and vetch.

On the meaty side of things we got the chance to try moose, reindeer and even dried seal & seal blubber which was hunted by Lynx the week before.

Our water practice in Norway brought us closer than ever to the drinking lives of our ancestors.

We’ve drunk wild water before, but always with a filter system like the Sawyer Squeeze. On Lynx’s land, we were able to drink directly from every water source by either dipping our heads in like deer (extremely fun) or by collecting it in buckets, one of the modern luxury items allowed.

Responsibility for our water was tasked to Otter clan, one of the three main clans our tribe split into on the first day. The other two groups were Wolf clan who looked after firewood and the toilet and Raven clan who looked after camp tidiness and timekeeping.

Due to the big numbers in our group, Otter Clan was tasked on day two to turn into beavers and begin damming the stream further up the watercourse. This created two collection points and took pressure off the spring near camp.

As can happen when humans interfere with nature, the first dam wasn’t perfect, and it ended up redirecting water onto the path, creating a muddy mess. However, some rock magic from Otter clan quickly fixed that and their second dam worked beautifully.

Unsurprisingly, there were no showers in the Stone Age. But we did get to wash in a beautiful little brook.

What more is there to say about Air? We spent a wild week living and sleeping in a Norwegian mountain forest – airbathing at its finest.

Interestingly my practice of active breathwork slipped during the week, as I found myself distracted by the routine of camp life. I realised that I have been using Oxygen Advantage breathwork as a coping method for modern stress.

In this Stone Age world, without phones and mortgages, those anxieties melted away. It wasn’t until the last couple of days when I let my mind go back towards the modern world that I felt the need to practice long, calming nasal exhales again.

Interestingly, someone on the immersion was practicing Wim Hof each day as a tool to manage his pollen allergies, which we hadn’t heard of before.

One point of contention with our air practice came from time spent around the campfire. During the week, fire was our only source of heat and was essential for cooking, comfort and crafting. This naturally lead to increased smoke inhalation, something our ancestors would have also dealt with over their lives.

It affected those most who were not used to open fires, and even I took a few days for my nose to adjust.

Humanities relationship with fire is an intimate one, and I wonder what impact smoke inhalation had on our ancestor’s longevity.

I don’t know how many people go to Norway and are lucky enough to say it didn’t rain. Well… we can’t say that either! But we came close.

Ominously, it rained on the drive up to Lynx’s and the short walk to the camping zone. However, that was not a sign of things to come as the rain then stayed off until the last night, which Amber felt was representative of her damp feelings about leaving the Stone Age. In between, we were blessed with a small flurry of snow, but mostly bright, beautiful sunshine.

It was that mountain sunshine where you are layering off when out the wind, but layering up as soon as the wind picks up out in the open.

This made safe sunbathing easy as we could use layers to protect our skin during the long days. For the trip, we had been gifted some sun cream samples from the founder of Beach Street that we used to protect our faces (mainly nose and ears) once we’d gone past our safe sunbathing limit.

We also embraced the sun as a timekeeper. On our first morning of cooking duty, we had to be up at 7:30, fire going and food underway. Walter (head of Food clan) helpfully told us that at this time of year, 7:30 coincided with the sun cresting the ridge near camp.

Despite this cue, Amber had a restless night as the long daylight hours and constant chorus of bird song tricked her into thinking it was morning. A sneaky GoPro check revealed Amber had woken us up at 4:45. We snuck in a bit more sleep and 7:30 soon arrived accompanied by the sun poking its head into our valley.

Although not sunlight directly, we also consider infrared exposure part of this practice, and what better way than to sit at a crackling fire? As a member of Wolf clan it was my responsibility to ensure there was enough firewood processed and that we had a fire first thing. This tied together the sunlight and movement practices, as one of my biggest calorie expenditures out there was the processing of firewood.

In bushcraft, we often talk about the energy equation. Simply, the calories you spend versus the calories you gain. If you burn 500 calories to harvest a root that gives you only 150, you’re in the red.

Our ancestors had to constantly balance this, consciously or not. A tribe stuck too long in a negative energy loop risked starvation.

Stone Age life made me more mindful of how I moved. I had less food than I’m used to, but I also wasn’t running or training as much as I do at home.

We embraced any method that improved energy efficiency. Within days, someone built a yoke to carry two water buckets balanced across the back, as opposed to in each hand. Water was the lifeblood of the camp and we did multiple runs to the dam each day. This simple tool enabled one person to easily complete the job of two, reducing the camps overall calorie expenditure.

We also spent a lot of the week entirely barefoot, walking amongst the spruce and birch trees, grounded. When we needed footwear, Amber and I had our trusty Vivobarefoot Tracker boots, which did most of the heavy lifting. We also had our Vibram FiveFinger’s that saw more use as the weather warmed up. Not quite deerskin moccasins, but they worked great for those times when boots were a bit overkill.

I should also shout out the two ropes I used to practice rope flow. The whole camp really took to rope flow and by the end of the week over half of the group could do the three basic patterns: underhand, overhand and dragon roll. It was great to share something I love and see others flow with it.

It was a privilege to test my coaching skills on such a wide and diverse group of people from all over the world.

I’ve already shared our mindful plant-drawing exercise and how free I felt from anxiety without my phone. But this was also a time to go deeper into one of the book’s core mindfulness practices: gratitude.

It was hard not to feel grateful when you are stood amongst a tribe of like-minded people, eating food we foraged together, whilst watching the most incredible purple-orange sunsets from a wild mountain forest that we got the privilege to call home.

We saw wolf tracks, bear scat, and plenty of moose sign. Even though we didn’t spot the animals themselves (despite trying), we felt deeply connected to the ecosystems we modern humans often forget we belong to.

Lynx invited us to connect with the land’s rocks. We each picked two, then arranged ourselves by the sound they made when struck together. Even in a small area, the diversity of tone and texture was remarkable.

Each rock was there waiting to tell its story. The rocks we turned into cutting tools felt comfortable in the hand and performed their tasks just as adequately as our modern tools (in some cases, such as meat preparation and tree de-barking they felt even easier).

We became students of the land. It fed and watered us, but we only scratched the surface of its abundance.

This experience left us yearning to go deeper. We’ve ticked a week with Lynx off the bucket list (after visualising it since 2017), but we plan to return for a full Stone Age project. That means no modern tools! Can’t wait to start creating our Stone Age toolkit and animal-hide clothing.

This was the furthest I had travelled north, and with the summer solstice only a month away, we had daylight for days!

Without clocks, and with daylight dominating the rhythm, we had to rely on our circadian rhythm to guide sleep and wake times. That’s how we ended up waking at 4:45 that first morning. Thanks again, Amber!

Thankfully, Raven Clan had a backup system. One person had a watch, used only to maintain the camp schedule. Each morning, they’d announce a 7:30 wake-up and 8:15 breakfast call.

One of the early risers within Raven clan had the fun job to bang the gong (an old gas tank with a wooden stick). This sent a signal reverberating around the valley, no doubt scaring off any of the animals we had been on the lookout for, but also signalling that it was time for the human tribe to come together.

Banging the gong was as fun as it sounded, and we all eventually got a turn. Even those going full Stone Age with no clocks could stay in sync with the camp.

One word of caution: don’t try to wake your partner back in the modern world by imitating a quiet gong. It’s… not well received. Some things are best left in the Stone Age.

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into our life Before Domestication. Lynx runs all kinds of experiences all over the globe, and you don’t need to be a bushcraft instructor to attend. There were people on our course who had never held an axe or saw before.

If this calls to you, I encourage you to check out her website and join her newsletter for first access to new offerings. Or give us a shout if you have any questions!

Stay wild, everyone.