You get some stuff, and start taking it apart. But, you are restricted to the use of “ordinary” means (fire, sunlight, your digestive system) and you cannot use atom smashers or atom bombs. What is the smallest piece that you are likely to be able to produce:

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Consider what “ordinary means” can accomplish when you’re taking something apart. 
Option by option:
Option: A nucleus. While every atom has a nucleus, you would need nuclear reactions or high-energy processes to separate an atom’s nucleus from its electrons and to break the nucleus itself. Ordinary means like heat, light, or digestion do not provide that level of energy or mechanism. So this is unlikely with the given constraint.
Option: A proton. Protons reside inside nuclei; isolating a single proton from matter typically requires nuclear interactions or particle accelerators. With ordinary means, you won’t realistically detach a lone proton from a material. This is not what you’d obtain by simple dismantling.
Option: A quark. Quarks are never found in isolation due to confinement; they always exist within larger particles (like protons, neutrons, etc.). Moreover, ordinary means cannot liberate quarks from hadrons. So this is definitively not attainable in this scenario.
Option: A neutron. Similar to protons, neutrons are constituents of atomic nuclei. Extracting a free neutron would require specialized nuclear processes; ordinary means would not yield a free neutron from ordinary matter.
Option: An atom. When you start deconstructing ordinary matter with everyday methods (e.g., physical separation, chemical processes), you can break materials down to their constituent atoms, and in many cases further separate molecules into individual atoms. This is the smallest stable unit you can generally obtain without specialized equipment or nuclear reactions. 
Summarizing the above, the practical smallest piece achievable with ordinary means is an atom, since subatomic particles and quarks require non-ordinary techniques to isolate, and a nucleus or nucleons are not readily produced in everyday dismantling. The answer that aligns with this is An atom.

GEOSC 10 (SP 25 Merged) Geology of National Parks RockOn #1

You get some stuff, and start taking it apart. But, you are restricted to the use of “ordinary” means (fire, sunlight, your digestive system) and you cannot use atom smashers or atom bombs. What is the smallest piece that you are likely to be able to produce:

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