I’d want some citrus fruits maybe, and you can keep the dogs (a wolf cub can be raised as a dog right off the bat, sometimes).
But other than societal problems, it would be do-able. I could do it.
Offhand, with 4,000 knives and 200 steel axes, I think there’s the ability for felling trees for better shelters, skinning animals for leather clothing and straps for structure supports, tools and weapons, whittling wood for tools and containers and even shaping stone tools (like pickaxes and shovels), and creating simple machines like pulleys and screws. There’s some real long term prospects for jump-starting agricultural yields within two generations.
I’m guessing the dogs are meant to be hunting companions. But that’s just another fast-breeding omnivore in close proximity and competing for food supplies to me, though I suppose they might be useful protectors, or turned into work pack animals and good for cleaning up the occassional mammoth remains. There are risks: there’s a good chance a few packs will escape from our village and turn feral within a few generations and become scavengers who pose a threat to our villagers. Who knows? They might even be proto-wolves.
I notice there’s no medical provisions other than first aid advice from the manuals. I’m shocked there’s no medicinal seed. Willow seeds give you aspirin for headaches, body pains and regulating heart problems. Hemp gives you a plant for cloth, heat, building materials and medicinal marijunana. Aloe gives you something for burns, for a purgative and some say mosquito repellant. So yeah… I’m still think there’s too much discounting of disease, because I don’t get where you guys think that diseases, bacterial infection and parasites won’t be an issue.
You seem to have given a lot of thought to food and food storage, with the exception of no nut bearing plants, which could provide an alternate protein source. Peanuts would grow well and give you oils to process for all kinds of purposes.
Lactose intolerant? Not that big a deal. It’s a recessive gene trait.
All this discussion is, of course, academic as we all know their descendants will be wiped out in the flood right? 
Seven times.
That seems to be the number of times in all of Dog History that it happened, according to DNA studies of all breeds. Perhaps as few as three.
Wolves don’t make good dogs. They are inadequately socializeable, and extremely cowardly. The unique character that makes dogs successful at adopting human pack behavior is much more complex than just getting a wolf pup, and raising it. It takes an uncommon wolf cub, and a gifted domesticator.
Tris
Aha! I have found the past threads I mentioned:
Rebuilding the Society of Today in the Past
How Long to Restart Civilization?
Count me in as a pessimist. Unless you start with a lot of people, a lot of tools, seeds for modern cultivars of domestic plants, and breeding stock for appropriate domestic animals, most everyone is doomed and the few survivors will be living in stone age hunter-gatherer societies with interesting oral mythologies about ancestors with magical abilities within a few generations.
Give me anything moderately sweet or a basic cereal grain and I can make alcohol for you, I’m relatively sure there were wild yeasts at that time. And lye is easy to make, all you need is wood ash. You end up with potassium hydroxide, which isn’t great for making hard soaps, but makes great liquid soap.
Willow bark, although indeed the basis of aspirin, is crap as a medicine by itself as it tears the crap out of your stomach. Be that as it may, there’s plenty of willow around in the wild. We will need a good herbalist in that group, I agree, and an MD who has had experience with medicine in the “bush”.
There’s also plenty of native nuts in Europe- Hazelnut, Acorns, Pinenut, Chestnuts, & maybe walnuts.
http://www.soupsong.com/fnuts.html
We really don’t need seeds, if we have a couple of survivalists/herbalsist there, familiar with native european plants. True, it’ll take a while for decent grain, but acorns make an adequate “grain” for many purposes. Until the population gets 'city" sized, hunter-gatherers will work just fine. We don’t need domestic animals, either. Hunting & fishing will be phat. Modern seeds *will * make things much easier, I admit.
“A lot of them didn’t make it through the winter three years ago,” he said, “and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set off on a raft. History says that they must have survived …”
Stranger
Strongly disagree. Remember, absent the rythm method, these people are going to have no contraception whatsoever available, and abortions will be difficult and dangerous, with a very high risk of infection. They will also have extremely limited entertainment. I think we can expect a population explosion.
With 2000 people, would the gene pool get smaller, or would it get larger, as all people are supposed to be related (albeit very distantly) anyway?
Well, I won’t need it.
I expect it depends on what kind of society gets set up. If the women can, I expect they’ll avoid pregnancy by simply refusing sex. If not, they’ll just be beaten into submission as breeding slaves. I can’t imagine many modern women breeding themselves to death unless reduced to slavery.
I think most people in this thread are vastly underestimating the challenges the OP poses. No tools. Think about that. But we can make alcohol to use as an antiseptic! Oh really? In what containers? How precisely are you going to store this alcohol? You have no handy bottles around, you know. Perhaps someone in the random 2000 people has some idea of how to build a kiln and fire pottery from scratch, but this is no trivial undertaking. To be worthwhile, we need some sort of glaze to seal these hypothetical ceramics. We need to build a kiln with no tools. We need to collect a shitload of firewood, again with no tools. Or perhaps some crude stone axes, if anyone can figure out how to knap flint (assuming a source of flint can be found).
And food. Man are you all being optimistic. Once the ammunition runs out, we’re pretty much fucked. Hunting mammoths with pointed sticks. Or, optimistically, with crude stone-tipped spears. Oh, sure, it can obviously be done, because it was done, but none of us have the skills required, and the learning curve is likely to involve a lot of broken bones and such, which may well be fatal in the absence of modern medicine. With no agriculture, there’ll be no food surpluses, no chance of supporting specialized trades, and no real chance of sustaining our modern knowledge base.
If we’re really, really lucky, enough people might master the skills required to live as stone-age hunter-gatherers quickly enough that the group won’t vanish entirely, but there will be virtually no chance of passing on any modern knowledge to subsequent generations, and any civilization will have to wait till agriculture is re-invented by the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the unlucky 2000.
To make this work, you’d need to (1) give people some extensive tools, (2) give them seeds and domestic animals, and (3) choose people with very specific skills. About 90-95% of your people should expect to be agricultural labourers, and have various basic trades skills (carpentry, smithing, animal husbandry, pottery, and the like) on the side. The remaining 5% should be experts in things like geology (to be able to find valuable deposits of things like copper, iron, etc), primitive mining/metallurgy techniques (to have some hope of maintaining the group’s tools), the manufacture of paper and ink (because we have only a few years to get masses of knowledge into written form before it’s lost), medicine, botany, etc, etc. Even then the group wouldn’t have much chance, but it would have some. The challenge is to produce enough surplus food to support enough people who will be free from food production that they’ll be able to maintain some level of technology and scientific knowledge. Frankly I doubt that 2000 is anywhere enough people to pull it off unless you give them a huge stockpile of tooling and resources at the start.
No. IMO, the main issue would be food. People would have to turn into hunter/gatherers. I suspect the “gatherer” part wouldn’t turn up much food. Even if people knew what plants are edible, they probably wouldn’t know, for instance, the best way to preserve them. As for hunting, it would be an issue as well. Guns are fine and dandy, but most people would be unable to use them efficiently to hunt. And anyway, ammunitions are going to run out in quick order. And then… what do they do? They probably won’t be very skilled in making bows and/or snares and in using them. Finally, they’ll have to split up in little groups. Hunter/gatherers would typically live in group of around 30 people, so to have enough food available within a reasonnable distance.
And forget about farming. Without modern farming technics (for instance during the middle ages) the crop yield used to be ludicrously low, despite people relying on plants carefully selected for several milleniums for their large production of grain. Using the wild version of these? And with much of them not knowing anything about farming? Well… they’ll be lucky if they get back as much grain as they planted the previous year. In all likehood, grains will be part of the “gathering”.
So, IMO, this population is going to die of starvation, for the most part. I assume some will survive. Good luck to them…
Are you sure all these originated in Europe, rather than being imported during human history?
Plus, acorns aren’t edible without being prepared in some specific way (I don’t remember how, except th
Well, as sure as memory and a few minutes doing a Google search can do. Walnuts is the maybe, they were around in ancient times, but perhaps not prehistoric, some say they originated in Persia.
Acorns need (well, most of them) to be leeched. It’s not hard, but time consuming. Many hundreds of thousands of indians lived off acorns and not a lot more. However, pigs looooove acorns, and ancestors of the modern pig can be caught and fattened on acorns.
You think fattening up prerefrigerated pork is a good idea?
Well, we used to, didn’t we? With smoking, salting, and not killing the pig unless there’s an R in the month, it’s doable. And at the very least, you can have a huge blow-out when you kill the porker, and convert subcutaneous swine fat into subcutaneous human fat to see you through the hungry months.
Would these 2000 people have access to General Questions? that would help a lot.
Yes, very much so. Bacon and ham isn’t hard to make and keeps without refrigeration. It also provides protiens and fats.
Undomesticated pork types are much too dangerous to deal with to do anything other than spear them, shove an apple in their mouth, and put on the fire. Moreover, the people are going to have to split into small groups and become mobile if they’re going to survive as hunter-gatherer types. H-G lifestyle only supports a very, very low population density. And once you have small groups wandering about, the energy they can sink into a sustained project like domesticating pigs is going to be pretty slim.
I’m going to wager that with 2000 people in the OP’s scenario, you’d have 80% casualties by the 5th year, fewer than 5% surviving after 20, and the entire group dying out within 50.