Does anyone ever thrive on those survival shows

Cafe Society
1

I like to watch survival shows, but what normally happens is a person will go out in the wilderness. They will starve, be dehydrated, get severely sunburnt, be eaten alive by insects and then they count down the days until they get rescued.

Even for the survival experts that seems to be the modus operandi. Hanging out and slowly starving for a few days or few weeks may work when a camera crew is nearby, but everyone who does that would be dead in a few months.

So does anyone ever thrive in these environments? Find a setup where they have enough food, water and shelter to live indefinitely? If so I haven’t seen it.

It makes me wonder how our ancestors did it because they didn’t have the tools or knowledge of germ theory that we have now.

2

Possible death is a great motivator. None of the people on those shows are going to die if they don’t give it their all. I think anyone in those circumstances is going to hit a point where they want to give up or at least put in a little less effort. That’s easier to succumb to when you have a guaranteed “out”; not when it is literally “do or die!”. This doesn’t really answer your question, but it does demonstrate why none of those shows are good at determining survival in the wild when the situation isn’t staged.

3

They had each other. We’re a social animal for a reason. Hunter and gathers doesn’t live alone, and exile is a punishment for a reason.
It’s hard to make it by yourself.

4

I’m currently watching naked and afraid which has pairs, but I’ve seen solo survivor shows.

Shows where people are in pairs still have people struggle to survive. I don’t think any of hte couples I’ve seen would’ve survived for 3 months without dying. Dehydration, overheating, sunburn, starvation, infection, insects, predators, etc. seem to make even going 3 weeks extremely difficult. People literally just sit around starving and counting the days until they get to go home. That wouldn’t be an option in prehistoric times.

Maybe these are intentionally picked as some of the most inhospitable areas on earth. Plus when humans were hunter gatherers, we were more in groups of 50, not 1 or 2.

5

I had a buddy who was seriously into the show Survivor when it first came on. I saw the 5th or so episode. They are on some bucolic tropical island, on a beach. They are given huge jerry cans of rice and however much potable water.

Sweet jumping jesus, the complaints - the white rice is boring, they are always hungry, there was nothing to eat there. Hells freaking bells - you fucking coooko the damned rice in SEA WATER, flavor it with all the damned critters that are caught in the tide pools. If you don’t want to risk figuring out which greenery isn’t toxic, do rice and sea critters. Sheesh. Then a few seasons later, there was a woman who researched out how to friction start a fire, but apparently never practiced it while waiting to go to wherever it was. sigh

Sorry, I did 3 different Outward Bound sessions, and my Dad who had been in the 10th Mountain out of Drum taught my brother and I winter survival [very handy when you live in the Great Lakes weather belt, where we saw more than one blizzard dump 5-6 FEET of snow in a weekend.] Even as handicapped as I am now, I would have very little issue managing to survive at that first season island provided I was close enough to the original beach to get salt water for cooking, and what crustacians I am not allergic to/trapped fish to season my rice. And I know 3 different ways to start a fire without matches, and can flint knap blades and make other neolithic tools. If nothing else, I could ‘grandmother’ the camp and teach the other people how to survive.

6

There are other noteworthy examples but one springs straight to mind. There is an episode of Naked and Afraid that they named Surthrive. Bo Stuart and Debbie Harris killed it. They also both got leishmaniasis from the insect bites. Without modern medicine they would have likely been screwed in the longer term. Still for the duration of the show they were pretty awesome.

It is probably useful to remember that this is not necessarily a valid measure of how our ancestors survived.

Alone intentionally takes a Game of Thrones approach to limiting how long they can survive. The show always starts when winter is coming. That limits the ability to collect and store up food for the winter. Survival for our ancestors was a marathon but the show forces it to be a sprint. The show also adds other challenges. Except for one season that involved pairs, everyone has to do it all alone not in a social group. Loneliness can be tough. The after show for one of the episodes also showed some of the other challenges. There is a whole backpack full of mandatory safety equipment that must be carried whenever you leave camp. Then there are the cameras and tripods …our ancestors were not responsible for ensuring they filmed every moment of their daily routine. Survivalists are also given a designated area they must stay in. It is not tiny but if your skills are better suited to elsewhere you cannot just move.

Naked and Afraid takes a different approach. You start off with a lot fewer tools than most of our ancestors would have had available. On XL there is some leeway to move around a larger area but on the main show you pretty much get what you get from the production team. The long insertions and extractions are also an issue to increase difficulty. The insertion takes time on a day when they need to work on the basics of survival. The extraction is a long challenge that consumes the last day. Occasionally it takes more than one day. Sometimes is takes something like building a raft to not get eaten on the way.

Then there is the issue that no matter how experienced the survivalists on the show are they are far less skilled than our ancestors. Our ancestors were raised by subject matter experts to survive. They did not just have general survival skills they were expert in the ecosystems they lived in. That is vastly different than someone thrown into an ecosystem for the first time in their life and being expected to master it right away.

7

They had a whole lot of knowledge that people now generally don’t have, about how to make tools, what was edible in the areas they lived in, what was dangerous, what could be used to make shelters and how to do that, where and how to find water, et considerably cetera. As DinoR says, they were experts in the particular ecosystems they lived in.

And, as moojja says, they had others to help them.

8

Thorny_locust and others have already said much what I was going to, but I’ll reply anyway.

None of our ancestors lived without tech. They had efficient weapons, tools, containers, cordage, dwellings, and they had societies. They too would’ve been fucked, if left naked and alone, just not as quickly as us. Most importantly, they had pertinent skills and knowledge that the Alone and N&A guys, and even the Bears and Les’ of TV Land don’t have.

The Devil is in the details. I have hunted, gathered and fished most of my life, much of it with primitive tech: handmade wooden bows and arrows, fire-hardened digging sticks, willow-shoot fish traps etc. The difference between wandering across the forest, hungry, and getting a meal is knowing when and where exactly to be for any given resource. This is very location-specific. You can only get a lukewarm, entry-level competence for locations outside the one you spend the majority of your (outdoors) time.

Many of the game animals I hunt have minute-like schedules: If I hide myself along a local game trail so that I am ready at 7:45 PM in mid-October, I’m almost guaranteed a close-range shot, at precisely 7:45 PM or a couple of minutes off. If I’m there at 8:45, I won’t see anything worth a shot.

Now at mid-summer, the local bream feed at 8 to 11 PM. If I’m not at the bream section of the the local river then, with appropriately bated hook, I won’t get fish, even if they are there.

These kinds of scenarios are repeated with most resources, even plants to a lesser extent. It typically takes me around 2 years of active field experience to really start reaping the benefits in a new location, with low-tech equipment.

If those TV guys had spent a couple of years on-location, learning the land, they would succeed way better than they do. In fact, that would be an interesting twist in the genre.

Our ancestors had lived in their local environs their entire lives, learning it as their schooling and profession. Not only that, they had an accumulated knowledge base going back untold generations to draw upon. In comparison, TV experts are like small children, when it comes to their know-how in some random, remote region they’re dropped into. They fare just as well.