Sounds like someone's been reading Van Daniken- or, more hopefully, Diamond. But it shouldn't amaze you; ingenuity is often the very product of limited resources.
Ever see the movie The Fifth Element? No, it's not about boron, though I made that joke dozens of times. A friend kept pestering me to watch it, and when I finally did, my first thought was "this feels like it was written by a twelve-year-old" (funnily enough, I'd later learn that the writer (and director) actually DID start writing it when he was twelve, so I wasn't wrong!). I meant that in the best possible way, though: there's a scene in the beginning where a professor is exploring the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple in 1914. Now, how, in that position, would you illuminate the building?
Electricity is out; there's nothing like a power grid there, in the middle of the empty desert. Flashlights did exist at the time, but the quality was lousy (that's where the "flash" in the name comes from). Building a fire risks smoke damage, and torches have the same problem on a lower scale, plus the risk of flaming pitch falling on your hands (and a torch of the type Hollywood likes to show you would only last about 20-30 minutes before burning out). So what does he do? He hires a local boy to set outside, holding a shiny plate to reflect the sunlight into the structure.
That's the kind of cunning that only a child would come up with- the modern world has given us so much by way of convenience that many of us struggle to actually think problems through, but children don't have access to all that we do.
