‘If you’re not bleeding, you’re not doing something right.’

Stone Age wimps.

You never hear about them.

Think “caveman” or “Stone Age,” and you think of tough guys. Tarzan of the Kitties, Conan the Delicate, they just wouldn’t hold the public imagination.

There were no sissies in the Paleolithic?

No.

Forget what the anthropologists say, and all the serious scientific literature about aberrant socialization among the hunter-gatherers. Instead, backtrack down the family tree to a class in making Stone Age tools--arrowheads, spear points, all kinds of things that will be handy again if civilization fails its final exams.

There is a catch.

You have to make stone tools from rocks. Rocks are very hard, much harder than your hands. Sit on the ground. Grasp a rock in one hand. Hit it with another rock, knocking off everything that doesn’t look like a spear point. Hit it for hours, hard.

Hurts, doesn’t it?

Worse yet, things like this happen: You take a rock in one hand and a piece of sharp antler in the other. Dig into the rock, and pry off a chip. It’s not easy. Push. Push harder.

“Oooooo-yeeeee-aaaaaaargh!”

Yeah, the rock slipped and you shoved the nice, sharp antler into your hand. Or maybe into your thigh.

This is why there were no wimps in the Stone Age. The equivalent of a quick run to the corner deli, in Paleolithic procurement terms, required the pain threshold of a redwood. Potential wimps simply mutilated themselves into a state of permanently jut-jawed fortitude.

These are things you learn, sitting around a picnic table on a hot afternoon in the Santa Monica Mountains, where the Wilderness Institute of Woodland Hills runs classes in making stone tools.

There are 11 students. Except for the 10-year-old-girl whose father brought her (this is the kind of educational experience fathers insist on, for which the lucky ones are eventually forgiven), all are mature males. Eight have beards or mustaches. Four are students of Indian lore.

Four work with computers, as programmers or designers. “I guess if you work at one end of the technological spectrum, you wonder about the other end,” explained Gary Mason, an Oxnard software engineer.

The course is surprisingly technical, probably to the gratification of the keyboard-heads. Don Fisher, the instructor, distributes an eight-page list of definitions and recommended reading (“The Stone Hammer and its Various Uses”), titled “Handbook of Lithic Technology.” That’s professor-speak for “stone tools.”

Like all crafts, lithic technology comes wrapped in jargon. The first thing is to learn how to speak properly. There are distals, dorsals and debitage, chert and chalcedony, percussion (hitting the rock) and chatter (hitting it like a klutz).

Flint-knapping, once an almost vanished craft, has been saved from oblivion by a new wave of researchers and artisans, Fisher says. Many create works of beauty, primitive technology as art, a new ancestor to plumbing pipe furniture and heating duct decor.

The best rock is obsidian, a natural glass that forms evil-looking knife edges suitable for surgery (a use that occurred to the ancient Aztecs, fathers of punitive cardiology). When chipped, it can spray tiny glass splinters, testing the courage and eyelid reflexes of the chipper.

Fisher dumps out obsidian for students to practice on, along with pieces of plain, old, man-made glass, which is about the same. In a pinch, the bottom of a beer bottle substitutes for obsidian.

Fisher tells the students they will make much debitage, lithic-talk for garbage. It might last until the next Big Bang and should be buried with some dated object, like a penny. This preserves future archeologists from enshrining the students’ mistakes in a monograph on “unexplained deterioration of motor skills among aboriginal inhabitants of the Santa Monicas.”

Fisher describes the level of fortitude needed by a lithic technologist.

In this class, students should wear heavy leather gloves and goggles and leather pads on their legs, he says. Then he acknowledges that he doesn’t do that when he’s working by himself, because all that protection interferes with the feel of the rock, and the control an artisan must have.

“Every tool kit should have plenty of Band-Aids in it,” he says. “Blood likes to come out and breathe, and when you make stone tools, lots of it likes to come out. I’ve cut myself many times. I’ve had to have obsidian surgically removed from my body and stone splinters from my eyes.

“If you’re not bleeding, you’re not doing something right.”

In fact, he says, he will be unable to demonstrate some techniques today because one hand has still not healed from the last time he injured it. Later, he grits his teeth and demonstrates them anyway.

Students chip away at rock and glass, Fisher coaching them individually.

A distinguished-looking, gray-haired man takes off his heavy gloves, slashes his finger, and re-dons the gloves. He admits sheepishly that he is an emergency room surgeon in Orange County.

A squirrel hops by, cocks itself upright and stares quizzically at the students, tap-tapping and curse-cursing softly.

A student wearing moccasins looks down at the glittering, wicked-looking arrowhead in his hand and stares back at the little animal.

“Lunch,” he mutters.