I'm definitely not that person, but that level of dedication to religion is absolutely amazing to me. Outside of my family, and maybe that was the real motivator, I don't have a single thing in my life that I am that devoted to.
>> Outside of my family, and maybe that was the real motivator, I don't have a single thing in my life that I am that devoted to.
I believe it's really more about fear(of death/hell) than devotion. Most religions have pretty effective rituals/routines to keep you in that kid of state. Once hooked-in it's hard to get out.
They fled religious persecution. They and the people they associated with were treated like crap by the Tsars and then the Bolsheviks showed up and cranked it to 11. I think that fear of persecution was the real motivator that kept them from going back. I think it's easy to see where the expectation that "If we show back up after years they will instantly take our kids and throw us in jail" comes from.
-Taking the opportunity to suggest that anyone remotely interested in the old believers - or Dukhabors - go find a copy of Philip Marsden’s eminent exploration of the south Caucasus Dukhabor heartlands in his book ‘The Spirit-Wrestlers’. Part travelogue, part history, part religious - it is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.
> I believe it's really more about fear(of death/hell) than devotion.
I disagree. Religion isn't about being afraid, it's about learning to cope. Rituals are important because rituals are rote. You can fall back on them when life is spiraling out of control and find a foothold.
I think one of the big problems that modern Christianity faces (since that is the tradition I am part of) is that it has shifted to focus too much on the feminine side of things. There is a reason churches are predominately filled with women. The things the church focuses on appeal to women.
The church and religion have a place for men too, but broadly what men need from religion is not what is being delivered.
One of my favorite hymn lines is "Learn from Jesus Christ to die". To me, that is what the church offers that appeals most directly to me. How to face mortality, failure, and uncertainty. Several years ago when my father was dying of cancer, it's something I leaned on heavily. When you are too devastated to think clearly, you fall back on the rituals that you can perform without thinking and take solace from the wisdom within them.
>> I disagree. Religion isn't about being afraid, it's about learning to cope.
It's no wonder that we become religious when we are most vulnerable. Giving up control gives us comfort. Religions have a ready answer for everything but don't be mistaken, they always double down on fear because fear sells well. "All" the religions threaten with hell in this life and the afterlife if you dare to dissaffiliate. Not to mention that deep down you know that without religion you are doomed to face a harsh reality. I used to believe that religions serve a therapeutic need but unfortunately they've been twiested in so many ways , they try to be so many things that I can't see them more than some tales of wisdom like the Greek mythology. I belive it's a red and blue pill choice.
One of my key takeaways from this story was just how "minor" the schism that produced this appears to me. I am a Christian and take doctrine very seriously but I find the issues that the Old Believers [0] were concerned about utterly baffling.
In the linked article, the table of the "main" differences are shockingly trivial from my perspective and include:
1) How "Jesus" is spelled
2) How to hold your fingers when making the sign of the cross
3) Procession direction (CW vs CCW)
4) etc.
That either side was willing to kill or die over these things is something I simply can't understand.
Well, I think those are just markers. I think the real issue began with mass murdering of Old Believers during Nikon reforms, which were mainly about power (to separate from Constantinople).
By the time Nikon reforms happen, the Russian Orthodox Church already had its own independent patriarch.
And in fact, the reforms were about making things more like what the Greek church was doing at the time. Russian traditions, meanwhile, were based on old Greek ones, and basically better conserved. It went above and beyond matters of dogma and ritual, even down to stuff like clothing and hairstyles.
Tsar Aleksei was also a Grecophile, and to him this was less abstract than just church issues - he was seriously eyeing Constantinople as a potential "Orthodox Reconquista", with himself as the new Constantine -the emperor of the Orthodox faithful. Military feasibility aside, this all is a lot easier if tsar's take on Orthodoxy itself is more consistent with what the Greeks see as such.
I suspect hated of religion may have blinded you, making you ignorant of facts.
For example in the Koran believers are told, in unabrogated verses, to kill anyone who isn't Muslim (paraphrasing: 'strike down non-believers wherever you find them').
In the New Testament believers are told to love everyone, including foreigners and non-believers and are given a specific edict to pray for their enemies.
Buddhism seems to me to be most pacifist of the major World religions. In contrast Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism all have warring as central elements of their doctrine; modern followers may have 'workarounds' for those.
>In the New Testament believers are told to love everyone, including foreigners and non-believers and are given a specific edict to pray for their enemies.
But also:
>34 Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ‘A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.…
Yes, do you have anything that suggests it's not figurative? All the NT reports are of Jesus being entirely pacifist. In the NT "the sword" is the Holy Spirit, like "the son of man" is Jesus. There is an incidence of sword use by a disciple, cutting the ear of a Roman soldier at Jesus arrest; Jesus berates the disciple and heals the soldier; though IIRC Jesus tells them to bring a sword if they have one.
To remain consistent to the message of the text it seems Jesus must have been speaking figuratively in your quote and I don't think any stretch is needed there? His immediate disciples appear to have acted consistent with that after his death.
In contrast, but with similar consistency, when Mohammed says strike down unbelievers, that is also what he did - he was a successful warlord who besieged and put to the sword entire cities (according to Islamic sources: Koran and Hadith). IMO his transition to allowing opposing fighters to live, if they convert; then allowing Christians and Jews to live if they pay jizya; were the principle elements that allowed early growth - he turned cities in to golden geese, rather than razing them to the ground.
His immediate followers of course also killed non-believers (and all the rest that we associate with mediaeval war).
It's worth noting that where I am in the UK, there are many Muslims and quite a few are amongst my friends; none of them appear to follow Mohammed or the Koran in this aspect.
People are not religions. There are examples of Buddhists being extremely violent for example, that doesn't mean Buddhism is bad; adherents who act malevolently didn't negate the worth of a particular doctrine. And vice versa: doctrine that is malevolent doesn't negate the worth of supposed proponents.
Whether that verse is abrogated or not is a matter of debate in Islam, particularly when it comes to its specific meaning (i.e. many would say that it's not abrogated, but that's because it only applied in the original context of Muhammad's conquests, and is not a broad commandment).
In Islam, to my understanding, Mohammed is the paragon, the perfect example to be imitated in all things.
Do you have a source that you've found convincing on those surah being abrogated?
Presumably sources that say that was only for Mohammed necessarily would condemn his warring (making him not a paragon, and destroying a central premise), and what of the caliphs that followed Mohammed. I'd be interested in a mainstream condemnation of Islamic military expansion, if there is one?
Imitation also has to consider conquest. So again the question becomes whether it was a general guideline for warfare, or specific to the particular circumstances of the specific conflict that Muhammad was engaged in at the time. So far as I know, the mainstream position is that it is the latter. It doesn't mean that they're abrogated - it just means that a similar situation is unlikely to arise again. It also doesn't imply a condemnation of war.
Even the "righteous" caliphs did all kinds of things contradicting the Sunnah, so I don't think that's a very useful yardstick. But overall, given that the Caliphate had plenty - indeed, early after the initial conquests, the majority of its population - following different religions, it's pretty obvious that the commandment wasn't taken quite so verbatim even then. And, on the other hand, consider the ultimate fate of the Kharijites, who kinda took it to heart.
Most of those are proxies for the underlying theological differences, though.
For example, with the fingers, the original two-finger crossing gesture was said to represent the dual but inseparable nature of Christ. This is particularly important for Christianity, because of the heavy debates on christology in the early centuries of the Church resulting in several major schisms. I mean, even the Nicene creed - which is still the standard creed for most major Christian denominations - specifically addresses it.
(And since the Oriental Orthodox churches produced by those schisms never went away, neither did the importance of emphasizing the theological differences with them. So the accusation of monophysitism was still a serious business especially in the wider Orthodox community.)
The official explanation was that three fingers stood for the Trinity - but non-trinitarian Christian denominations were already so obscure at that point, it was seen kinda like declaring that water is wet, i.e. not controversial at all. Thus, doing away with two fingers and replacing it with three, sounded to many believers like the Church leaders were suddenly reluctant to criticize monophysitism. From which there's an obvious step to believing that the Church leaders are secretly harboring that heresy themselves.
Yep, I saw the headline and thought it must be that one story I read about back in 2013. It's still a captivating read, however.
The stories about the Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific islands for decades still thinking they were at war with the Allieds are right up there with this one.
It's the human endurance piece of these stories that is just fascinating for me. There are times in my very cushy life that I worry about how hard I have it, and don't believe that I can go on.
Then this comes along. Humans really, genuinely are remarkable creatures.
That was a very fascinating video to watch - thanks for that. Only thing is it delivered a pretty gnarly case of motion sickness after a few minutes ..
What was really interesting was the observation, towards the end, that once he'd hiked for 4 days and then arrived at Agafia's place and been there for a day, he felt like he'd arrived in civilisation!
One wonders what the plan for the area is, once Agafia leaves this mortal coil. She's not alone at the moment - it seems she gets regular visitors - but would this be enough of a settlement to form the basis for a new township to be founded? I confess, the idea of moving to that valley is very attractive these days, if but for the harsh environment I clearly know nothing about ..
This is doubly strange because “recounting dreams” is, in modern society, a pretty surefire way to bore other people. But it may be that when you live this kind of pre-modern life you don’t have all the random coins of so much life, media, and other humans around you, so the most reliable source of surprising material is dreams.
You mean a way to bore strangers? Because our family share funny, interesting, or strange dreams and I don't find it any less boring than hearing about other aspects of people's day (and sometimes far more engaging).
Most people are bad at telling stories in general, both recounting events in a captivating way and making up tales to entertain. Like anything, you get better at it with practice. All cultures have a history of sitting around the campfire and listening to the elders spin yarns. What else would you do at night? Your average caveman was probably a more engaging speaker than most people today.
> [...] old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
Especially the last part: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
>Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion.
This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species
Correct, its a big benefit over the furry prey. Especially when chasing the animal in the hottest part of the day for hours, pre-modern people had quite a different life.
You know I've thought about this, and if you look at it a certain way, I think you can say life is no different.
We still wake up as a group. We still "hunt" except the payoff is money convertible to food. We still eat together. We still sleep together (just across from one another in houses).
Also, the massive impact of having a complex enough brain to form complex and intricate social structures made it possible for humans to dominate the food chain.
Is that right? As a beardy guy, I find beard is cooler in Summer and warmer in Winter. I'd speculate that hair allows more heat transfer to sweat. Hair also send to keep a local air layer near the skin which helps Summer-cooling and Winter-heating.
Keeping a "local air layer" near your skin is not going to help at all with summer cooling. You need constant sweat evaporation to cool off. I don't think a beard is going to have much effect either way, since it's small, and our cheeks and chins are not designed to radiate heat or even sweat much compared to most of the body.
Surely if the evaporation can cool the skin surface, then a local insulation layer would prevent ambient air from heating the skin. Just as a locally warmed layer prevents ambient air from cooling the skin during Winter.
It's certainly a hypothesis I've long held but never had chance to test.
Citations for support/contradiction welcome, thanks.
Unless it's above body temperature, the local ambient air isn't heating your skin up, and if it's that hot you need to sweat profusely to avoid hyperthermia.
I think the beard is cooler in summer because you lose so much moisture from exhaling, it would go to waste not evaporating from your beard. In the winter, it solidifies and adds an extra layer of insulation. But if we were pushing that much moisture out everywhere, we'd probably dehydrate much too quickly.
Meat eating really helps a lot too because we can shove a couple thousand calories in our face in basically no time at all compared to a herbivore that must graze and forage those calories. That alone lets us cover more ground week to week than a lot of species. When you top it off with an efficient high duty cycle transportation system (i.e. biped that can sweat) and from the perspective of a water buffalo it's like being chased by terminator.
fire made eating animal protein much more efficient. imagine the patience of eating raw deer off the bone - hours of chewing. With fire, it converted a monotonous task to something efficient
"In essence, cooking—including not only heat but also mechanical processes such as chopping and grinding—outsources some of the body’s work of digestion so that more energy is extracted from food and less expended in processing it. Cooking breaks down collagen, the connective tissue in meat, and softens the cell walls of plants to release their stores of starch and fat. The calories to fuel the bigger brains of successive species of hominids came at the expense of the energy-intensive tissue in the gut, which was shrinking at the same time—you can actually see how the barrel-shaped trunk of the apes morphed into the comparatively narrow-waisted Homo sapiens. Cooking freed up time, as well; the great apes spend four to seven hours a day just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the intellect."
Are there examples of how humans are/were able to outrun an animal until it collapses? I find it difficult to imagine unless you corner the animal and have enough manpower to not be run over.
If you watch big animals hunting (wolves, bear are the ones we have here), they also stand significant chance of being injured by prey (horns..), and as a result tend to harry the prey until it is exhausted and basically gives up.
The other strategy is a quick surprise coup de grace, like lions. We have lions/pumas here but they're hard to spot and I've never seen one hunting but I assume it's like a scaled up version of a house cat, or big felines seen on TV.
Where are you that you have all these top level predators?
Edit: Wait, nvm. This is probably the west coast of North America, and by lions you mean mountain lions. I was thinking the ones with the manes right away.
It should also be noted that the main reason why humans didn't evolve into that kind of hunters is because that niche was already firmly occupied in the environment in which we believe that evolution took place (African savannah). On the other hand, consistently hunting successfully during the hottest part of the day was not something any big predator could do, so filling that niche allowed humans to reduce competition for prey. And, of course, the prey itself had theretofore evolved to deal with the other kinds of predators.
A more recent example, some folks in Kenya chased some cheetahs, that had been killing their goats, to exhaustion and handed them over to wildlife services.
> I find it difficult to imagine unless you corner the animal and have enough manpower to not be run over.
It would be easy to imagine, if you had experience of collapsing from fatigue. Try to get on the roof of a skyscraper by stairs, you'll get all the needed experience. For more realism, you could run for a several floors, then rest for a few minutes, and to repeat it as needed. For even more realism find a person who is better than you at marathons, give him/her a stick and tell him/her to move slowly up by the stairs (1-2 steps per second, I believe, will do) and to beat you with the stick when he catches up with you. At some point you will prefer stick to moving further. It could be done without stairs on the plains, but it would take more time, up to a few hours.
I couldn't give you experience, but I could give you some theory. Moving animal needs to absorb oxygen, to oxidize glucose into ATP. If animal tries to move faster than some limit based on the ability to absorb and utilize oxygen, then some of glucose metabolizes only halfway to H2O+CO2 and lactic acid. Muscles start to accumulate lactic acid. If concentration of lactic acid in muscles is high enough, animal feels it painful to strain muscles. The more concentration is the less strain is needed to feel pain, the higher level of pain at the same strain level. At some point even the slightest straining feels painful. Cells in muscles could die from too much acidity, but it hard to do because of pain. (Though a heart could be damaged this way, for this one needs to force his heart to work at ~180+ beats per minute for a ~10+ minutes, it doesn't feels like pain in the heart, so be careful when pushing your body to its limits).
To get rid of lactic acid animal needs oxygen. Muscles could metabolize lactic acid to get energy, or the liver could do it. But in any case it needs oxygen, animal need to stop and to rest, or at least to run at lesser power, to have enough spare oxygen in a bloodstream.
If animal have no time to stop and rest for long enough time, then lactic acid concentration continue to grow. It feels like overwhelming fatigue, pain in muscles, and all you want is to take a break. If you try to work your muscles through it, at some point they just stop working. But it is hard to get to this point, because of a pain and a loss of motivation to continue.
I cannot accurate describe biological mechanism because I'm not a chemist and not a biologist. But I do not see how my explanation contradicts your link. Concentration of lactic acid is building up when there are not enough oxygen in the muscles. Lactic acid could be used as a fuel by muscles or a liver, but to do that oxygen is needed. Without it concentration just builds up to the fatal levels. It means, that to get rid of lactic acid, one needs to lower his power output, to move into aerobic zone when body have plenty of available oxygen, more than it needs, and to work there for some time. One could stop completely when tired, then lactic acid through a bloodstream will reach liver, where it will be metabolized into something more useful. I believe in this case the result will be ATP, which will be ejected into a bloodstream and then used by all the variety of cells in the body.
So you are going into a debt, when your power output is higher than your aerobic abilities allow. While it is a free debt, interest rate is zero, there is a limit how much lactic acid your body could contain without harm to itself. It is oxygen debt: the more lactic acid you have, the more oxygen you owe to your body. To repay this debt you need to lower your power, to run slower than you could run indefinitely (i.e. without build up of lactic acid).
Of course it just one of the mechanism for fatigue. The other one, for example, is the lack of fuel. It is the worst kind -- you could stop and rest for an hour, but it doesn't help. You need to eat and to wait while glucose reaches muscles. Though with the training it comes easier, body learns how to digest food while running, and how to feed muscles, while they are working. If your body have fats, than it can be trained to use them. Mine body doesn't have fats, so if I plan to cycle for a several hours, I need to eat continuously while cycling or after a few hours I'll lose ability to use my legs.
We're physically adapted: sweat pores, bipedal, achilles tendon. Perhaps neccessary, but high calorie ROI seems insufficient for the evolution of intelligence.
It annoys me to no end when fiction portrays humans as a weak, defenseless species without our tools. We're nothing of the sort. We can climb on negative inclines, run an ultra-marathon, lift several times our own weight, deep-dive, heal massive wounds, our immune system is without par, and we perform all kinds of feats of dexterity. It is simply modern humans who have no need for the adaption our ancestors have gifted us with.
As a species we need to stay in groups and take care of our sick. We traveled vast distances by foot and sought out our own kind.
To equivocate, I did hear about ancient ruins of villages in China where unknown strains of plague were unearthed, before this COVID-19 stuff. I assume these then became cursed villages that no one visited.
Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
If a dog eats raw meat within a few hours of it being killed, it's a big difference.
How did I come to this opinion? Try freezing a super market steak a few days before the "expiration date." Then unfreeze it a few days after the expiration date.
You'll notice a rancid smell immediately upon cooking.
> Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
Most beef, at least that you buy locally from a butcher who got the animal from a local farmer, is dry aged in a cooler for 10 - 14 days after slaughter. [1]
I don't know whether that's true for mass-market meat or not. But it's very common to let meat age before eating it.
If you visit a developing country, you'll still see people bathing and washing clothes and cookware in rivers. You'll also see outhouses on stilts along the same river. While there's a high incidence of illness among people who live like this, many people clearly tolerate it well. If I were to do that now, I'd get sick, but eventually I'd probably be able to tolerate it as well (assuming I survived).
It's a common misconception that animals don't get sick from tainted meat or water. They do, and when they're weakened enough, they get eaten. Clearly some have a higher tolerance of certain pathogens (e.g. vultures), but many succumb to intestinal bacteria and parasites at alarming rates. We just don't see it.
First, you or I probably could eat raw meat from a freshly killed wild herbivore with very little risk, compared to raw meat from a modern cow, raised in crowded conditions, handled by dozens of other humans, and pushed through various surfaces.
Also, there's a theory that fire and cooking is part of what allowed hominids to develop their superior brains and leave the trees behind for a fully savannah-based lifestyle.
> It is simply modern humans who have no need for the adaption our ancestors have gifted us with.
I agreed up until this. Of course, I disagreed with my evolutionary biology profs in college, too, on this subject.
These adaptations and others are still operating and still changing. They're not a point in time change to us, they're a bell curve of adaptation over time. We're adapting in some measure right now to things like modern technology, although technology may continue to be a moving target long enough that we'll never finish adapting before it changes again.
Modern humans are just animals in a rectilinear jungle, still evolving, adapting, and changing.
Excuse me, I should have said "many contemporary humans", not "modern". There is a vast difference in time scale between the two and I did think of people who don't get enough exercise, work in an office, and watch TV the rest of the day.
So I have gathered but I don't have sources saying the same. Animal models (read: tests on other mammals) for studying our immune system are rather inaccurate, and auto-immune diseases are very dangerous to humans.
Perhaps other social predators actually are on the same level as us.
I believe persistent hunting also encourages very high intelligence for the tracking aspect as well. You're essentially emulating another creatures brain in order to figure out their likely movements whenever they go out of sight.
That's a great point. I once saw one of those "HFY" threads where someone was speculating that if we became a warrior species in a multiplanetary federation, we'd be feared not just for our tenacity but also our ability to play mind games. Basically, "Never play poker against a human".
If you watch the attenborough documentary linked above it has some clear examples. "The hunters have no tracks at this point and so must imagine the path the Kudu has taken". And later, "The tracks have disappeared again. He imagines being in the mind of the Kudu to deduce the direction it must have fled".
There's also the case that tracks alone need a lot of intelligence to process. "Here they can see the Kudu were running by the spacing of the tracks and the bull is isolated and taking a different track".
I wonder if this is an overly stated aspect of the reason why Humans propelled themselves. I thought the reason why we beat all other animals was because we evolved to have a larger brain size especially the frontal lobe which is used for inventing, mirror neurons (copying), planning and strategy.
Hunting isn't necessary to survive. We can live off of bugs, plants and fruits, etc.
There is a strong correlation between IQ and calorie intake, especially for children (as the brain develops), even today. We might be able to live off bugs and plants in our present state, but could we have evolved to that state by relying solely on those sources?
This all is a bit arbitrary, anyway, because you'd need to draw a clear line in hominid evolution where humans became sufficiently different from other animals before you can say that we "beat them all". Is that before or after behaviorally modern humans evolved, for example?
I feel a profound sadness watching this. Not because of the difficulty of her life. She prefers it her way. But because she is good. And there is so much bad in the world outside. She deserves all the kindness. Edit: We all do, actually. Kindness.
I've followed Agafia's story for a few years, and I have a similar conclusion to yours - she demonstrates the core value of human nature, that it really can survive on a simplicity of needs. I was struck by the realisations of many that visited her, that she was a civilising force in the rugged landscape in which she lived. This seems to be an irrefutable aspect of human nature, given the right ingredients for its exposition. Just the simple act of cutting grass for her goats reveals human kindness at its core.
I also think its pretty neat that she encourages visitors. Altruistic, as in - she wants to share the beauty of the world she's made for herself - or is there some selfish desire for human interaction, unfulfilled, which motivates this act? Either way, she's a beautiful human being.
Surviving in the wilderness for prolonged time is really, really hard. Even more so in a cold place like Siberia. Shows like Bear Grills are fun entertainment, but have little to do with actual survival. The show 'Alone' paints a more realistic picture: most contestants are airlifted because of medical reasons, and the winners end up emanciated in less than 3 months. And bear in mind that these are trained survivalists.
EDIT
Also reminds me of the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier that hid in the Phillipine jungle for 30 years after WWII, not knowing Japan had surrendered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
A big part of that is because we evolved to be social animals. A single man alone in the Amazonian jungle would have a hard time surviving for an extended amount of time. A tribe, though, would have better prospects.
If you are alone in the wilderness, you're presented all the time with insurmountable trade-offs: Build shelter and you won't be procuring food, prioritize food and then you won't have a shelter to protect yourself.
Working in a team means bigger projects can be tackled, that different needed things can be done in the same time.
And this is one of most important things for the evolution of humans, not only the intelligence, or the ability to make and use tools, but also the ability to live in society, to communicate and build a culture.
The homo sapiens is indeed a remarkable species. But what really make us what we are is not the individual per-se, but our society. Homo is great, for sure, but what is really impressive is not the individual Homo, but humanity.
The only way to actually survive is to hunt big game. Fish is too lean. Vegetables have no calories. Small rodents have very few calories. Fatty meat is a necessity.
In alone, they are forced to transport heavy camera equipment. They start out right before winter. The local laws prevent them from actually hunting. The show is a joke. There is no surviving actually done. Just enduring starvation. The optimal way to win is to select fatty food as many of your 10 items as possible, make a shelter, and expend as few calories as possible. But that isn't entertaining to watch, so they won't select you to be on the show.
"Typical examples include tubers and roots, grains, legumes, and seeds."
Yeah, don't go scarfing iceberg lettuce when stuck in the woods, but we've been finding and eating starchy root vegetables for probably millions of years.
We've also spend a tens of thousands of years selectively breeding plants to produce more calories. You won't find such calorie rich wild plants. Foraging for plants is really hard.
Not to say there isn't nutritional benefits to wild wheat and carrots and whatever (I've no idea to be honest), but I don't think the nutritional value was at the front of their mind when our ancestors began understanding agriculture. If it stopped them being hungry I think that's all that mattered, because it was the wilderness and that's basically all wild animals think about. I can definitely see it being a supplement to hunting initially, in order to reduce the number of hunts required, and only afterwards as we made improvements to our techniques and crops would the nutritional requirements from the crops become a focus point.
I don't know shit about this topic though, I'm just trying to put myself in their shoes (or feet as the case would be).
I think optimal strategy was to be overweight to start, and to have a good mental plan to persevere.
The Patagonia season made it apparent that people were finally preparing mentally to stick it out. And what happened? 2 contestants removed for being to skinny, and the chunkiest guy won. I really liked him, not knocking him, but if they were all the same body fat % to start I'm not sure he'd have been the winner. The girl who got 2nd was absolutely not prepared to quit.
> most contestants are airlifted because of medical reasons
I've watched the first 4 seasons, I think? And I would say this absolutely was not the case. Most contestants just tapped out. Nearly all of them. Some contestants were pulled out for medical reasons (too skinny because no calories), but not "airlifted" as in "emergency medical."
One guy broke his ankle or something, as far as I remember he was the most urgent medical case.
> And bear in mind that these are trained survivalists.
This part is also blatantly wrong. The vast majority of the contestants were not "trained survivalists." I think the closest to that were some who taught some bushcrafting classes--and those people fared pretty well on average, just tapped out for mental reasons.
I agree with your overall point. Surviving in the wild is incredibly difficult and virtually none of us have the required skill set anymore. Including nearly everyone on the Alone show.
> The rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop
Think of how long they watched this little shoot of rye grow... that must have been a really scary period.
I've always enjoyed this article - I lived in the Yukon for 4 years and we would go on ~10 day moose hunting trips in the fall where we wouldn't see a person, or even signs of people (roads, power lines, fire pits) the whole time. It would be below freezing overnight, and sometimes chunks of ice would come down the river.
We always wondered if we could survive a winter with just what we had.
Anyway, but biggest questions from this article are how did they light fire, and how did they boil water? I assume steel pots, but what would they have done once those were damaged?
I think the article mentioned using birch bark containers when their pots wore through. To heat water in them, they probably heated rocks in the fire and dropped them into the bark bowls full of water. I'm not sure how they made fire, but it was probably tedious so maybe they kept it going constantly--no shortage of wood.
> I'm not sure how they made fire, but it was probably tedious so maybe they kept it going constantly--no shortage of wood.
From experience, I know it's a full time job when the temperature drops to -40. You don't want to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch. One mistake and you're in big trouble at those temperatures.
In the video linked elsewhere in the thread, the hiker explains (and shows) that the riverbed he's hiking up is littered with flints and these red iron-containing rocks. So possibly they can be struck for sparks?
Things started to get a lot harder when their metal items started to fall apart. Metal smelting and forging are always the part of those primitive technology youtube channels where things get really complicated.
> ... , and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
The article mentions how the children died of kidney failure. One thing I remember reading was that their bodies had adapted to the lack of salt, so it was the salted food they ate after contact that killed them.
135 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadHumans are marvelous, fascinating creatures.
I believe it's really more about fear(of death/hell) than devotion. Most religions have pretty effective rituals/routines to keep you in that kid of state. Once hooked-in it's hard to get out.
I disagree. Religion isn't about being afraid, it's about learning to cope. Rituals are important because rituals are rote. You can fall back on them when life is spiraling out of control and find a foothold.
I think one of the big problems that modern Christianity faces (since that is the tradition I am part of) is that it has shifted to focus too much on the feminine side of things. There is a reason churches are predominately filled with women. The things the church focuses on appeal to women.
The church and religion have a place for men too, but broadly what men need from religion is not what is being delivered.
One of my favorite hymn lines is "Learn from Jesus Christ to die". To me, that is what the church offers that appeals most directly to me. How to face mortality, failure, and uncertainty. Several years ago when my father was dying of cancer, it's something I leaned on heavily. When you are too devastated to think clearly, you fall back on the rituals that you can perform without thinking and take solace from the wisdom within them.
It's no wonder that we become religious when we are most vulnerable. Giving up control gives us comfort. Religions have a ready answer for everything but don't be mistaken, they always double down on fear because fear sells well. "All" the religions threaten with hell in this life and the afterlife if you dare to dissaffiliate. Not to mention that deep down you know that without religion you are doomed to face a harsh reality. I used to believe that religions serve a therapeutic need but unfortunately they've been twiested in so many ways , they try to be so many things that I can't see them more than some tales of wisdom like the Greek mythology. I belive it's a red and blue pill choice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
In the linked article, the table of the "main" differences are shockingly trivial from my perspective and include:
1) How "Jesus" is spelled 2) How to hold your fingers when making the sign of the cross 3) Procession direction (CW vs CCW) 4) etc.
That either side was willing to kill or die over these things is something I simply can't understand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
And in fact, the reforms were about making things more like what the Greek church was doing at the time. Russian traditions, meanwhile, were based on old Greek ones, and basically better conserved. It went above and beyond matters of dogma and ritual, even down to stuff like clothing and hairstyles.
Tsar Aleksei was also a Grecophile, and to him this was less abstract than just church issues - he was seriously eyeing Constantinople as a potential "Orthodox Reconquista", with himself as the new Constantine -the emperor of the Orthodox faithful. Military feasibility aside, this all is a lot easier if tsar's take on Orthodoxy itself is more consistent with what the Greeks see as such.
It is just difficult to see in own case.
I suspect hated of religion may have blinded you, making you ignorant of facts.
For example in the Koran believers are told, in unabrogated verses, to kill anyone who isn't Muslim (paraphrasing: 'strike down non-believers wherever you find them').
In the New Testament believers are told to love everyone, including foreigners and non-believers and are given a specific edict to pray for their enemies.
Buddhism seems to me to be most pacifist of the major World religions. In contrast Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism all have warring as central elements of their doctrine; modern followers may have 'workarounds' for those.
These are not trivial differences.
But also:
>34 Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ‘A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.…
To remain consistent to the message of the text it seems Jesus must have been speaking figuratively in your quote and I don't think any stretch is needed there? His immediate disciples appear to have acted consistent with that after his death.
In contrast, but with similar consistency, when Mohammed says strike down unbelievers, that is also what he did - he was a successful warlord who besieged and put to the sword entire cities (according to Islamic sources: Koran and Hadith). IMO his transition to allowing opposing fighters to live, if they convert; then allowing Christians and Jews to live if they pay jizya; were the principle elements that allowed early growth - he turned cities in to golden geese, rather than razing them to the ground.
His immediate followers of course also killed non-believers (and all the rest that we associate with mediaeval war).
It's worth noting that where I am in the UK, there are many Muslims and quite a few are amongst my friends; none of them appear to follow Mohammed or the Koran in this aspect.
People are not religions. There are examples of Buddhists being extremely violent for example, that doesn't mean Buddhism is bad; adherents who act malevolently didn't negate the worth of a particular doctrine. And vice versa: doctrine that is malevolent doesn't negate the worth of supposed proponents.
Do you have a source that you've found convincing on those surah being abrogated?
Presumably sources that say that was only for Mohammed necessarily would condemn his warring (making him not a paragon, and destroying a central premise), and what of the caliphs that followed Mohammed. I'd be interested in a mainstream condemnation of Islamic military expansion, if there is one?
Even the "righteous" caliphs did all kinds of things contradicting the Sunnah, so I don't think that's a very useful yardstick. But overall, given that the Caliphate had plenty - indeed, early after the initial conquests, the majority of its population - following different religions, it's pretty obvious that the commandment wasn't taken quite so verbatim even then. And, on the other hand, consider the ultimate fate of the Kharijites, who kinda took it to heart.
For example, with the fingers, the original two-finger crossing gesture was said to represent the dual but inseparable nature of Christ. This is particularly important for Christianity, because of the heavy debates on christology in the early centuries of the Church resulting in several major schisms. I mean, even the Nicene creed - which is still the standard creed for most major Christian denominations - specifically addresses it.
(And since the Oriental Orthodox churches produced by those schisms never went away, neither did the importance of emphasizing the theological differences with them. So the accusation of monophysitism was still a serious business especially in the wider Orthodox community.)
The official explanation was that three fingers stood for the Trinity - but non-trinitarian Christian denominations were already so obscure at that point, it was seen kinda like declaring that water is wet, i.e. not controversial at all. Thus, doing away with two fingers and replacing it with three, sounded to many believers like the Church leaders were suddenly reluctant to criticize monophysitism. From which there's an obvious step to believing that the Church leaders are secretly harboring that heresy themselves.
The stories about the Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific islands for decades still thinking they were at war with the Allieds are right up there with this one.
Then this comes along. Humans really, genuinely are remarkable creatures.
This bloke hiked up to Agafia's and filmed it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_NOkOLUQQ
What was really interesting was the observation, towards the end, that once he'd hiked for 4 days and then arrived at Agafia's place and been there for a day, he felt like he'd arrived in civilisation!
One wonders what the plan for the area is, once Agafia leaves this mortal coil. She's not alone at the moment - it seems she gets regular visitors - but would this be enough of a settlement to form the basis for a new township to be founded? I confess, the idea of moving to that valley is very attractive these days, if but for the harsh environment I clearly know nothing about ..
I can't imagine what it would be like to grow up in that environment.
Humans are amazing... one of my favorite lines from the article:
The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”
> [...] old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
Especially the last part: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species
You know I've thought about this, and if you look at it a certain way, I think you can say life is no different.
We still wake up as a group. We still "hunt" except the payoff is money convertible to food. We still eat together. We still sleep together (just across from one another in houses).
It's neat to think about.
But, I don't think it matters much. It doesn't help, but it's a small surface area.
It's certainly a hypothesis I've long held but never had chance to test.
Citations for support/contradiction welcome, thanks.
Cooking made a big difference for vegetables because heat quickly breaks down some hard to digest fiber.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009lwhq
https://www.chrismcdougall.com/born-to-run/
The other strategy is a quick surprise coup de grace, like lions. We have lions/pumas here but they're hard to spot and I've never seen one hunting but I assume it's like a scaled up version of a house cat, or big felines seen on TV.
Edit: Wait, nvm. This is probably the west coast of North America, and by lions you mean mountain lions. I was thinking the ones with the manes right away.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-24953910
It would be easy to imagine, if you had experience of collapsing from fatigue. Try to get on the roof of a skyscraper by stairs, you'll get all the needed experience. For more realism, you could run for a several floors, then rest for a few minutes, and to repeat it as needed. For even more realism find a person who is better than you at marathons, give him/her a stick and tell him/her to move slowly up by the stairs (1-2 steps per second, I believe, will do) and to beat you with the stick when he catches up with you. At some point you will prefer stick to moving further. It could be done without stairs on the plains, but it would take more time, up to a few hours.
I couldn't give you experience, but I could give you some theory. Moving animal needs to absorb oxygen, to oxidize glucose into ATP. If animal tries to move faster than some limit based on the ability to absorb and utilize oxygen, then some of glucose metabolizes only halfway to H2O+CO2 and lactic acid. Muscles start to accumulate lactic acid. If concentration of lactic acid in muscles is high enough, animal feels it painful to strain muscles. The more concentration is the less strain is needed to feel pain, the higher level of pain at the same strain level. At some point even the slightest straining feels painful. Cells in muscles could die from too much acidity, but it hard to do because of pain. (Though a heart could be damaged this way, for this one needs to force his heart to work at ~180+ beats per minute for a ~10+ minutes, it doesn't feels like pain in the heart, so be careful when pushing your body to its limits).
To get rid of lactic acid animal needs oxygen. Muscles could metabolize lactic acid to get energy, or the liver could do it. But in any case it needs oxygen, animal need to stop and to rest, or at least to run at lesser power, to have enough spare oxygen in a bloodstream.
If animal have no time to stop and rest for long enough time, then lactic acid concentration continue to grow. It feels like overwhelming fatigue, pain in muscles, and all you want is to take a break. If you try to work your muscles through it, at some point they just stop working. But it is hard to get to this point, because of a pain and a loss of motivation to continue.
So you are going into a debt, when your power output is higher than your aerobic abilities allow. While it is a free debt, interest rate is zero, there is a limit how much lactic acid your body could contain without harm to itself. It is oxygen debt: the more lactic acid you have, the more oxygen you owe to your body. To repay this debt you need to lower your power, to run slower than you could run indefinitely (i.e. without build up of lactic acid).
Of course it just one of the mechanism for fatigue. The other one, for example, is the lack of fuel. It is the worst kind -- you could stop and rest for an hour, but it doesn't help. You need to eat and to wait while glucose reaches muscles. Though with the training it comes easier, body learns how to digest food while running, and how to feed muscles, while they are working. If your body have fats, than it can be trained to use them. Mine body doesn't have fats, so if I plan to cycle for a several hours, I need to eat continuously while cycling or after a few hours I'll lose ability to use my legs.
Pretty much the only animals that can outrun a well-trained human over marathon distances are sled dogs - and only in very cold weather.
We're physically adapted: sweat pores, bipedal, achilles tendon. Perhaps neccessary, but high calorie ROI seems insufficient for the evolution of intelligence.
Is it just lack of use that means we get sick from tainted meat, and such, when other mammals seem to stay healthy?
As a species we need to stay in groups and take care of our sick. We traveled vast distances by foot and sought out our own kind.
To equivocate, I did hear about ancient ruins of villages in China where unknown strains of plague were unearthed, before this COVID-19 stuff. I assume these then became cursed villages that no one visited.
Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
If a dog eats raw meat within a few hours of it being killed, it's a big difference.
How did I come to this opinion? Try freezing a super market steak a few days before the "expiration date." Then unfreeze it a few days after the expiration date.
You'll notice a rancid smell immediately upon cooking.
Most beef, at least that you buy locally from a butcher who got the animal from a local farmer, is dry aged in a cooler for 10 - 14 days after slaughter. [1]
I don't know whether that's true for mass-market meat or not. But it's very common to let meat age before eating it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_aging
It's a common misconception that animals don't get sick from tainted meat or water. They do, and when they're weakened enough, they get eaten. Clearly some have a higher tolerance of certain pathogens (e.g. vultures), but many succumb to intestinal bacteria and parasites at alarming rates. We just don't see it.
Also, there's a theory that fire and cooking is part of what allowed hominids to develop their superior brains and leave the trees behind for a fully savannah-based lifestyle.
There's also sushi and sashimi.
I agreed up until this. Of course, I disagreed with my evolutionary biology profs in college, too, on this subject.
These adaptations and others are still operating and still changing. They're not a point in time change to us, they're a bell curve of adaptation over time. We're adapting in some measure right now to things like modern technology, although technology may continue to be a moving target long enough that we'll never finish adapting before it changes again.
Modern humans are just animals in a rectilinear jungle, still evolving, adapting, and changing.
> We can climb on negative inclines,
Can you?
> run an ultra-marathon,
Have you ever?
> lift several times our own weight,
Can you?
> deep-dive,
Have you ever?
> heal massive wounds,
Unless we die from them, yup.
> our immune system is without par,
Meaningless claim.
> and we perform all kinds of feats of dexterity
And birds can can't, but they can fly. Elephant's can't but they've got long noses. etc. So?
Human exceptionalism (from a human, I assume)
Do we have a better immune system than other primates and other animal groups?
Perhaps other social predators actually are on the same level as us.
There's also the case that tracks alone need a lot of intelligence to process. "Here they can see the Kudu were running by the spacing of the tracks and the bull is isolated and taking a different track".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
Another persistence hunter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNbqvqf3-14
It was interesting that while most wild animals can outrun humans, they're not very good at endurance, something humans excel at.
It's funny because when I see a wild animal I'm usually thinking "No way I can catch that." But apparently it's not as unlikely as I might think.
Outside of migration and other factors, they seemed to belive that the success rate for a hunt, provided they found the animal, was pretty high.
Attenborough followed a koala Hari bushman pursuing an antelope — video on YouTube.
And Larry Niven wrote a short story about it, “The Hunting Park”
Hunting isn't necessary to survive. We can live off of bugs, plants and fruits, etc.
This all is a bit arbitrary, anyway, because you'd need to draw a clear line in hominid evolution where humans became sufficiently different from other animals before you can say that we "beat them all". Is that before or after behaviorally modern humans evolved, for example?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=For%2040%20Years%2C%20This%20R...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=comments%3E0%20For%2040%20Year...
I also think its pretty neat that she encourages visitors. Altruistic, as in - she wants to share the beauty of the world she's made for herself - or is there some selfish desire for human interaction, unfulfilled, which motivates this act? Either way, she's a beautiful human being.
EDIT Also reminds me of the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier that hid in the Phillipine jungle for 30 years after WWII, not knowing Japan had surrendered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
The homo sapiens is indeed a remarkable species. But what really make us what we are is not the individual per-se, but our society. Homo is great, for sure, but what is really impressive is not the individual Homo, but humanity.
In alone, they are forced to transport heavy camera equipment. They start out right before winter. The local laws prevent them from actually hunting. The show is a joke. There is no surviving actually done. Just enduring starvation. The optimal way to win is to select fatty food as many of your 10 items as possible, make a shelter, and expend as few calories as possible. But that isn't entertaining to watch, so they won't select you to be on the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_food
"Typical examples include tubers and roots, grains, legumes, and seeds."
Yeah, don't go scarfing iceberg lettuce when stuck in the woods, but we've been finding and eating starchy root vegetables for probably millions of years.
I don't know shit about this topic though, I'm just trying to put myself in their shoes (or feet as the case would be).
The article suggests the family did not hunt big game for the first 20+ years:
> It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins
So they apparenrly survived for 20+ years without hunting
The Patagonia season made it apparent that people were finally preparing mentally to stick it out. And what happened? 2 contestants removed for being to skinny, and the chunkiest guy won. I really liked him, not knocking him, but if they were all the same body fat % to start I'm not sure he'd have been the winner. The girl who got 2nd was absolutely not prepared to quit.
I've watched the first 4 seasons, I think? And I would say this absolutely was not the case. Most contestants just tapped out. Nearly all of them. Some contestants were pulled out for medical reasons (too skinny because no calories), but not "airlifted" as in "emergency medical."
One guy broke his ankle or something, as far as I remember he was the most urgent medical case.
> And bear in mind that these are trained survivalists.
This part is also blatantly wrong. The vast majority of the contestants were not "trained survivalists." I think the closest to that were some who taught some bushcrafting classes--and those people fared pretty well on average, just tapped out for mental reasons.
I agree with your overall point. Surviving in the wild is incredibly difficult and virtually none of us have the required skill set anymore. Including nearly everyone on the Alone show.
Think of how long they watched this little shoot of rye grow... that must have been a really scary period.
Prescient for somebody who doesn't even know what a soundstage is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374973
Interesting!
We always wondered if we could survive a winter with just what we had.
Anyway, but biggest questions from this article are how did they light fire, and how did they boil water? I assume steel pots, but what would they have done once those were damaged?
As for fire, I would assume they never let it go out, or else they learned friction fire.
With daytime highs in the -40s, you have to heat snow and ice to make it liquid. You can't drink it if you don't.
From experience, I know it's a full time job when the temperature drops to -40. You don't want to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch. One mistake and you're in big trouble at those temperatures.