I feel that again misses the point. Sure, it's perfectly possible for a resourceful and knowledgable human to hand-engineer various tools from the environment.

I feel that again misses the point. Sure, it's perfectly possible for a resourceful and knowledgable human to hand-engineer various tools from the environment. But to make something very much like an ordinary pencil made of wood, graphite, rubber, metal, and paint would be a monumental task, far beyond the cost of a pencil in our established society. The fact is that globalization and industrialization has democratized the construction of literal artifacts. Consider the single-use plastic bottle, with a precisely machined screw neck and matching lid. It's lightweight, transparent, and will last for years. It would be exceedingly difficult to find and process the raw material to craft such an artifact from scratch, yet millions of them per day are used once and discarded. Same goes for most office supplies, now that I think of it. And we haven't even touched integrated circuits yet.