I remember watching frontier house on PBS and even with 1850s technology like saws, nails, grain, rice, sugar, guns, etc. the experts said at least one of the three families wouldn’t survive the winter, I think they actually said two of the three wouldn’t survive the winter. So if a family taht prepares for months and has access to multiple technologies can’t survive the winter how did prehistoric man do it? did he just not live outside the equator?
Habitation here in southwest Wisconsin has been reliably dated to at least 10,000 years ago. Limestone caves are common in our beautiful hills, in which the natives lived during the winter, subsisting mainly on white-tail deer. Cave paintings, clay art, and piles of cracked white-tail deer bones have all been found from those times. During the spring and summer the cave-dwelling small family groups would join together at the rivers, feast on fish, shellfish, game, plants, etc., and bury into communal burial mounds the bundled remains of loved ones who did not survive the winter.
WAG, but the hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems like it would be well suited to surviving the winter. While some wild game and flora may go dormant in the winter, they’re still there. A band of hunter-gatherers well heeled in knowing how to spot warrens, identify vegetation with nutritious roots/tubers, etc. would have a good shot at maintaining substenance-level nutrition.
Although capable of supporting exponentially more people per acre than hunting/gathering, one of the pitfalls of the advent of agriculture is that it opened up the possiblity of massive famine, a condition virtually unknown to hunter-gatherers. Agricultural peoples were slave to the yearly cycle of sow, grow, reap and store, and any wide-spread interruption to that cycle (drought, flooding, long winter, locusts, etc) could severely impact a population heavily dependent on crops. Similar conditions would make life difficult for the hunter-gatherer, but their more varied diet, wider range and lower population density largely prevented the mass die-offs that have periodically aflicted settled agricultural peoples until recently.
Yeah but these things did not factor in on ‘the frontier house’. All that really matter(ed) was avoiding freezing to death and having enough food for the winter. If people who could buy 100 lbs of beans and sugar to store for the winter and live in a house made out of wood couldn’t do it how could someone who lived in a cave and only had deerskins to cover himself up do it?
I think freezing to death is the bigger factor in surviving winter. Here in Bloomington it gets to be 10 below with the windchill. I have no idea how prehistoric man survived those kinds of temperatures.
Shelters and skins suffice as long as there are enough food calories. It comes down to hunting, and to a lesser degree fishing.
I think you’re underestimating the insulating properties of dearskin – after all, it seems to work for deer.
In my area, northern Ontario, Canada, it was extremely rare for traders, trappers or settlers to not survive a winter. In fact, I can’t think of any who froze or starved to death.
One thing to remember is that a lot of prehistoric men (women too, presumably) didn’t survive the winter. Human population growth was almost a flat line up until the 20th century.
If two out of three didn’t survive the winter, at that rate, there were no survivors in a matter of a few years. So, there must be something wrong with your premise.
Doh! Deerskin, not dearskin! The point I was trying to make, though, is that animal fur is remarkably good at retaining heat. Into modern times, the Inuit managed to live in some of the coldest, most inhospitable territory known to man with nothing but fur for clothing.
FEMALE deerskin!
There seems to be some confusion about this. Do you mean the experts said that 2 out of three families living in the 1850’s wouldn’t survive, or that 2 out of three families on this “frontier house” show wouldn’t have survived if they were put through a real winter with the preparations they’d made?
Pretty simple. The modern city (or farm) people on such shows have just about zero experience surviving for real long-term with old or no technology. Going on a 2-week camping trip every winter is not the same thing as living there year-round. Neither is having a few uncommon handy skills up your sleeve like knowing how to tan a hide or use a scythe.
Without a lifetime of experience actually doing it, sending such people out to “rought it” seems to me like sending a mechanic out onto the stock floor with the advise “buy low sell high” and expecting him to come back with more money than when he left. It’s reality TV, and a big part of that is watching untrained people fail. They wouldn’t have many viewers if they picked a few Australian aborigines and filmed them surviving in the bush - there’d be no drama (those shows have already been done and we’ve all seen them).
Seems a little simple, but pre-historic people survived winter (and summer/fall/spring) because they knew how to… and it’s really about all they knew. The tools/techniques/patterns they used to do so are fairly well documented. The brains to know how to use them correctly simply came from being born into the lifestyle and eventually dying from it.
Might it have been, two out of three families lost at least one person during the Winter? That still seems a bit high but it’s more reasonable.
Haj
The families on a “frontier house” show lack the necessary motivation to work, since they won’t starve to death in the winter, no matter how little they produce.
Where is this place that attracts and then kills of people like flies?
Judging by my repeated experiences in the Vally of the Mammoths, they don’t.
I’m pretty sure they said 2 of the 3 families would not make it. But yeah that does seem irrational as hell because how would people have populated the area if 70% died each year?
I am pretty sure you are misunderstanding the show’s commentator’s statement. He meant that if the people on the show did the same preparations in the real year 1850 as they did on the show, two out of the three families wouldn’t have made it.
The same thing was said on Colonial House: that if REAL 1600s settlers to Maine has done as little work as the TV families did, they would have starved to death within a few months. But that doesn’t mean that 2/3 of the people who actually lived in 1600s main starved to death.