Looking for pottery with words scratched into them isn’t a great way of searching either. It presumes that pottery and working clay are necessary. Just because the Mesopotamians did it that way doesn’t translate to everyone else. The example I gave of knotwork would’t survive in most climates. We only have paper scrolls from the middle east because they were hidden in desert caves and they had papyrus to write on and animal hides (vellum). In ancient China, there were tortoise shell divinations.
If for example, some large tribe covering part of north america discovered making paper from softwood trees and used it for writing 8,000 years ago, we’re extremely unlikely to find any evidence of it. Likewise in most places of the world.
But the thing about writing is that it’s versatile. If you can write on paper, you can also paint letters on pottery or carve letters into wood or stone buildings, or into tools. Cultures with writing don’t just write on a single medium, they write everywhere.
You can outfish a river quite easily. There is evidence that Native Americans outfished the entire Chesapeake Bay. Piles of shells of extinct bivalves have been found. There may have been similar evidence found in California, I don’t recall the details. Native Americans managed the land though. They thinned forests to make it easier to hunt game and preserved hunting grounds away from their settlements. Native Americans had moved well past the hunter gatherer stage when the Europeans invaded. They don’t really provide a good example of primitive society.
If writing increases the pace of accumulation of cultural innovations, we would expect that culture from 90 000 years ago to have outpaced the others technologically.
Not quite the most primitive but wouldn’t modifying your hunting grounds be as much of a halfway point between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist as pastoralism is? It’s unlikely hunter-gatherers suddenly switched from one to the other. A gradual transition would result in fewer disruptions in food availability and it wouldn’t have taken much of a disruption to kill them early on.
In the article I linked above, David Graeber (Prof. of Anthropology at LSE) and David Wengrow (Prof. of Archaeology at UCL) come to the same conclusion, based on recent research:
In fact, hunting and gathering was never entirely superseded even in the most developed agricultural societies. Up to very recent times, hunting wild deer, rabbits, birds, etc, fishing, collecting shellfish, gathering wild berries, hazelnuts, chestnuts, mushrooms, etc. added a significant component to the diet of most people.
Yes. My point that I didn’t clearly state was that more modern versions of HGs that were heading into pastoralism or agriculture probably don’t represent the ancient ‘natives’ and the ‘tribes’ that they didn’t form but existed already as they evolved. I’m sure there were other mid-points on the way to the development of the original full blown agriculture, but by then HG life would also have been more developed than the life of the earliest hominids ‘descending from the trees’. I think we might see modern wolves as a better example to compare to then people with tools far more developed than the pointy stick.
Returning to the OP, has anyone survivor TV guy tried surviving in a place longer term? I reckon even a lone human could survive most places fairly well once they have everything set up.
I think 87 is the record. Typically it goes like this, you lose a person in the first day or two when they realize that nature can be scary. You then lose a few people in the first week when they realize how boring simply surviving can be. Then you’ll lose someone after a month or so because they really just can’t get enough food. After that, the remaining three or four people pretty much just plug along until they get so lonely that they have to tap out. Sometimes the long-termers do run into calorie problems, but a lot of it is just loneliness. The last few episodes of the series generally involve a lot of tears and thinking about how long they’ve been gone from their family and whether the prize money is worth it.
I’ve given some thought to trying out for it, but there are two major issues. The first is that they plop you down someplace that you don’t know anything about. The native flora likely have nothing in common with anything that I have experience with. The second is that I think the loneliness would get to me. I’m an introvert and I like my me-time, but I’ve spent time in the woods alone and even after a short amount of time, you miss human company. I think the kinds of people that can spend years alone either have a mental problem or are extreme ascetics in pursuit of some sort of higher truth.
It takes about two weeks for some to crack, and two months for others.
But yes, as senoy pointed out, you lost one or two the first week as they just can’t handle the wilderness, they hear noises in the nite, etc.
There’s only been a couple of medevacs, one for a deep cut and another as he went into starvation mode and was hoarding food, not eating it, and he lost too much body weight, hurting his heart.
True. NA’s were probably not the best example since your right, they had moved beyond just hunter-gatherer.
They had also killed off the mastodons and the giant tree sloth. Their also is some evidence they had thinned down the buffalo herds quite a bit as some of the earliest Spanish explorers didnt see the massive herds reported later on.
But, as said, people will scratch their initials, penises, and limericks on anything they can get their hands on. Whether they had paper or not, if they also have clay, they’re still going to write stuff on the clay.
That’s the silly thing humans think in modern times. That ‘advanced’ ancient cultures had fantastic weapons or modern like technology. No, they were just slightly more advanced than their neighbors and/or had technology their neighbors lacked, like Greek Fire, better ships, better building techniques and the like. The ancient Egyptians figured out refining gold and making wire - to the point of being able to weave metal cloth - long before their neighbors.
There doesn’t seem to be pottery from North America of this age (though we have found clothes and leathers from that far back), but there’s no indication of writing on anything we have found and that is probably unlikely.
I don’t believe that anyone would argue that it’s likely that writing existed in the Americas before 3000 years ago and, even if it may have in some select locations, it didn’t among the majority of the people here. We would expect to see stone carvings, wood carvings, paintings, pigment on cloth, or something else indicating the ability to write - and we don’t.
Whereas, once we see one group start to write, you start to find other groups starting to write, radiating out from the original location, making it seem far less likely that somehow there was just oodles and oodles of writing happening for millenia earlier than we currently believe, that we just happened to lose all archaeological record of.
For me, I get lonely after only a couple of days. It’s not overwhelming loneliness, but a lot of it is that when I’m out on my own, I tend to get overly introspective and there’s not a lot of entertainment. There’s only so much fishing, staring at a campfire and meditating on God and nature you can do before you’re ready for something else. People talk about being surrounded by the beauty of nature and I get that - although I think that I’ve spent so much of my life in nature that I don’t feel the same ‘awe’ that other people do, but I liken it to looking at the same painting. One of my favorite paintings is “La Danseuse” by Renoir, but I can’t stare at it for two days straight. Eventually, my mind wanders and I just crave the stimulation of being around someone else. Even when I’m just home alone and the wife and kids have left for a few days, the first day is great, the second day is fine, by the third day, I’m wondering what they’re up to and by the fourth day I’m counting down until they get home. I don’t know that I want to be around random people, but I do like to be around ‘my’ people. It does help some if you have a dog with you, although my best friend dog died a few years ago and the one we have now isn’t the same. He’s more the wife’s dog, so I don’t even bother taking him with me.