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Chapter 40 Soul torture
Women began to learn to identify herbs in detail, memorizing their respective uses and cooking methods.

There are hundreds of herbs, and even the same plant has different uses in different parts.

For example, the stems of hops can be eaten after being peeled and boiled. Its flowers are suitable for making tea. The cone-shaped fruit is ground into powder and taken with water. It has the effect of calming the mind and is suitable for medicine.

Another example is that the young leaves of plantain are boiled and taste similar to spinach. The juice can be used to smear wounds to prevent infection, or the whole plant can be boiled to relieve chest tightness and shortness of breath.

There are many kinds of these, and there is a lot of knowledge in them, which cannot be mastered in a day or two.

Due to the language barrier, the cost of communication was greatly increased. It took Lin Yu a lot of effort to express things that could be explained clearly in one or two sentences.

However, Lin Yu was always very patient, and the women also studied hard, including Zhang Tian and Xiao, who were underage, so it was normal for them to mix with women.

Only the tiger tongue seemed out of place.

Men and women in the tribe have a clear division of labor. Generally speaking, they do their own work. On the one hand, it is to improve production efficiency, and on the other hand, it is also based on ethical and moral considerations.

Although Grandma has repeatedly emphasized that mating within the same race is prohibited, but such things as desire cannot be suppressed with a few words of vernacular, so it is best to separate them and keep less contact, so as not to prevent women from being overwhelmed and men from shooting themselves off.

The tiger tongue is a bit awkward, but he is determined to show his talents at the tribal conference, conquer the hearts of women with perfect barbecue, and then get a woman's body. The help of spices is indispensable, so he lurked in the crowd of women with a cheeky face.

Women choose small pieces of flowers and plants that are suitable for spices, some are ground into powder, and they are stored in bamboo tubes by category, and then taken out for seasoning when cooking and grilling meat.

As more and more bamboo tubes were filled, Zhang Tian launched a soul torture to them: "How do we identify which spice is contained in which bamboo tube? For example, I want mint grass now, does anyone know which bamboo tube it is packed in?"

Sister Mint, who was pregnant with Liujia, smiled and said, "Open the cover and identify it!"

Zhang Tian said: "But now there are so many bamboo tubes, and there will be more bamboo tubes in the future, some are filled with spices, some are filled with herbs, some are filled with honey or fish maw, but only one is filled with mint. Every time I want to use mint, I have to uncover all the bamboo tubes and identify them one by one? Isn’t this troublesome?”

The women fell silent, staring blankly at the bamboo tube in front of them, lost in thought.

These bamboo tubes look almost exactly the same, and it is definitely impossible to identify them just by looking at the bamboo tubes, but it is indeed too troublesome to uncover them one by one.

Lin Yu didn't know why, so she asked Lan Hua in a low voice.

Lan Hua translated Zhang Tian's soul torture to her, and then saw her laughing suddenly.

"You know what to do?"

"No, I do not know."

Lin Yu shook his head, suppressed his smile, and also showed a puzzled expression.

Of course she knew what Zhang Tian wanted to do.

The people of the tribe have always lived a very rough life, and the food for the winter has always been piled up together, so they have never encountered similar problems, but now they start to store them in a refined and classified manner, and the previous management method will naturally not work.

Xiao suddenly said: "We can mark the bamboo tube, just like the three hares!"

Of the three wild rabbits he was talking about, two were killed yesterday, and three more were made up today. One had a piece of back hair cut off, one had its leg hair cut off, and the last one was bald. The rabbit walks side by side, can you tell me if I am male or female?
"This method is good! We can draw pictures on the bamboo tubes, and different pictures correspond to different flowers and plants!"

Immediately, someone thought of the murals painted by Grandma, and engraved these paintings on the bamboo tubes, so that the paintings can be seen as objects in the future, so there is no need to lift the cover!
Everyone thought this was a good idea, and looked at Zhang Tian at the same time, as if asking for his opinion.

Zhang Tian didn't deny the people's thoughts, and spread his hands together and said, "Don't look at me, I just thought of this problem suddenly, and I don't know how to solve it. Whether it works or not, don't you understand after trying it?"

Practice is the only criterion for testing the truth. He hoped that people in the tribe would try to do more when they encountered problems, instead of asking him for answers as soon as they came.

Everyone moved immediately, only Lin Yu and Zhang Tian sat on both sides of the fire and remained motionless.

Lin Yu quietly gave him a thumbs up, and Zhang Tian grinned.

"Oh, no!"

As soon as I painted, I found that this method did not work. The patterns drawn by charcoal on the bamboo tube could not be preserved for a long time, and the color would fade after being rubbed lightly.

Xiao Xiao had a flash of inspiration: "We can carve on the bamboo tube!"

He took out a fruit knife, worried that he would cut his hand, Zhang Tian threw a smaller pocket knife to him: "Use this!"

Others use sharpened stones. Although it takes a little effort, as long as you work hard, you can slowly carve simple patterns with iron pestles ground into needles.

What pattern should be used to represent the flowers and plants in the bamboo tube?

The first thing the tribesmen thought of was to use the flowers and plants themselves, just like Grandma used a line and a circle to represent the spinning wheel, they also imitated the shapes of flowers and plants to carve lines on the bamboo tube.

But soon someone found a problem.

Some flowers and plants are very similar in shape, but their carving skills are very rough, and it is impossible to distinguish them accurately.

So some people thought of distinguishing them by their uses. For example, some flowers and plants are suitable for making tea, and similar flowers and plants are suitable for medicine. Then add two waves under the patterns of flowers and plants suitable for making tea to represent water.

The power of thinking sprouts in the cave.

The clansmen engraved the lines enthusiastically. During this process, they kept discovering problems, and kept proposing solutions to the problems, and then tested them with actions.

Perhaps the solution they came up with was not the best, and some ideas were even cute in the eyes of Zhang Tian and Lin Yu, but neither of them interfered.

Zhang Tian engraved patterns on the surface of each bamboo tube and symbols under the patterns according to the ideas of the people of the clan.

These patterns and symbols are still far from real words, but the idea of ​​using simple things to symbolize complex things has already matched the original meaning of the words.

In the future, when there are so many types of materials that even the use of patterns and symbols is complicated, these patterns and symbols will naturally gradually evolve into relatively simple pictographs, and then with the improvement of productivity and changes in demand, pictographs will be developed again. It will be gradually simplified and eventually evolved into modern text.

As for whether it will eventually evolve into Chinese, Zhang Tian probably won't see it in his lifetime, and he doesn't intend to interfere. Civilization should never be controlled by one person, but created by a group of people.

He lit a fire in this barbaric age, that's enough, the fire will burn where it should go.

(End of this chapter)