alt Hacker NewsI think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together.
You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).
There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.
The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.
I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
> You need to create string.
That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.
Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.
These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.
> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.
I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.