They lived in a world without metals, without domesticated animals, without agriculture, without writing.

But they were not primitive in any meaningful sense.

Their cognitive capacity was identical to ours.

Their knowledge of their specific environment — the animals, the plants, the seasonal patterns of the Pacific Northwest coast and its hinterland — was probably more detailed and more practically useful than the knowledge most modern people have of any natural environment.

Their technology, while it did not include the materials we associate with complexity today, was the product of generations of accumulated understanding about how to shape natural materials into functional tools.

The Manis bone point is, in a very real sense, a piece of engineering.