It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a reason people don’t normally pan for metal with bark bowls: metal bowls are a lot more efficient and effective.
As for food, should we imagine that fully 10% of those 100,000 people are capable hunter/gatherers at the very beginning of the trip? If so, those 10,000 people will each be responsible for feeding themselves and 9 other people each during the beginning of the trip, in addition to walking 5-10 miles a day in a specific direction. And we’re not talking about feeding people a sedentary diet, either: everyone is going to be spending more calories than they’re used to spending. And they’re competing with one another for resources: they’re trying to gather food for themselves and 9 other people in an area where 9,999 other people are doing the same thing.
Not exactly easy.
What may help is that, while cans and boxes are gone, the food they contained may not be. Grocery stores may be replaced by dirt fields with huge piles of dry cereal, mounds of rapidly rotting canned fruit, heaps of cookies, etc. THose may help folks make it through the first few days.
Some of you are getting daunted by the enormity of the task. Survival is a day to day thing, but you have a huge amount of knowledge and manpower at your disposal, so you don’t have to do everything yourself.
Assume a small group of say…100 people. You have representative population and to make things easier, you don’t have any handicapped people, or those with serious medical conditions. There are ten children, 6 teens, and 12 seniors. Assume further that we find ourselves near the coast in a semi tropical environment.
Day one will be spent securing emergency shelter, making fire and comforting each other. Day two you round up your group and elect a leader whose job is to make decisions based upon the advice of the experts in your group. You spend day two finding a good homesite near freshwater with access to the coast. We will assume again, that you are able to locate a site within the day. Day three you send the children out under the supervision of a senior and a teen assistant to gather shellfish, seaweed, small crustaceans, etc… which they can bring back in dilly bags made from large leaves. Adults begin construction on a semi- permanent shelter based upon found materials. Teens are set to collecting firewood and any useful stones or other materials /foodstuffs they may find. Seniors are given the task of weaving simple in/out over/under mats from palm fronds to provide basic material for making mats, crude clothing, bags and other sundries. Rinse, repeat, changing the roster as necessary to reflect changing needs; (such as adding adults to the gatherers if the children are unable to return with adequate shellfish for a communal stew). In a few days of concentrated labor of fifty plus adults, the longhouse like structure should be complete enough to move into. From that point on, divide your labor force into securing greater amounts of food, and begin working more advanced tools.
None of this is easy, but it is certainly attainable. Timelines will vary with weather, group discipline, and natural obstacles, but even given some setbacks, a group of that size should be functioning well within a month at the most.
To keep things consistent also where there was a supermarket, when the aliens did their trick, you’d find left behind stacks of fruit, vegetables and other salvageable food, lying around on the ground (all the packaging disappears).
The land between Perth and the stirling ranges is farms, as in full of tamed and domesticated cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens that don’t need to be fricken hunted. They are just milling around waiting to be fed.
So our convoy from Perth gathers all the livestock they come past and herds them with them (they have horses and dogs remember?) Horses can be ridden bareback by plenty of people, lack of saddle and stirrups is not that big a deal.
No clothes? True, but in the Australian summer you would walk through the night and sleep in the shade during the day. Again the lack of clothes would not be a big deal for 8 months or so until the winter and that’s plenty of time for people to make skins.
Walking barefoot is tough, but your feet do harden up quickly when needed.
Curious–how often do folks ride horses literally bareback, as in Lady Godiva bareback? No saddle is one thing, no crotch protection is another entirely. And if horses are trained to the saddle and reins, how well do they make the adjustment? Are the livestock going to be easily herded alongside 100,000 humans? Will horses trained to the saddle and reins be useful as herd animals immediately, or will it take significant time to retrain them? Will the sudden absence of their barns throw off their behavior? Will a single botched slaughter (done, remember, with sharp rocks) cause a deadly stampede?
There’s a great potential for things to go wrong at nearly every moment.
Do they harden up quickly enough to avoid infected blisters from the rapid pace you’re setting? And it’s at night, meaning it’s a lot likelier folks will suffer puncture wounds. If someone gets crippled, do you kill them and move on, or do you devote more resources toward carrying them?
Sure people will die along the way, or be left behind to fend for themselves but so what? It doesn’t really matter if it takes 2 or 3 weeks to reach their destination. Why kill them? , just leave them to straggle along as best they can behind the main group.
You have to remember the area in question has a huge amount of excess livestock as most of it is raised for the export market, so there is way more than is needed to support the population in question. Pigs, chickens, cattle, goats and sheep can all forage as they go. Yes they’ll lose some livestock along the way that wander away from the herd during the day when they are left to forage but again so what? There are millions of head of cattle and sheep in the area they are walking through.
Well, our little community of survivors sure doesn’t have to look far if they need some goalposts moved.
You were talking about how hard it is to make a wooden bowl, not about finding the creek you use it in. And I said I didn’t know how to make a perfect Clovis point, but I bet I could find or make something sharp enough to cut through a half inch of bark.
I was pointing out how difficult the initial part of taking the first step in gathering the iron that you would need to make steel would be.
It took human beings two thousand years to go from the bronze age to the iron age the last time. You guys are figuring it’ll take you about a week. And you’re not starting in the bronze age. You’re not even starting in the stone age.
Well, yes. But you’re taking “the first step” and calling it a goal. The goalpost is still way down there at the other end of the field, brocks. All those other steps to the goal remain.
There’s a reason why ancient people took all that time to learn the skills to make a decent flint edge: it’s because ultimately it saved you a lot of time. Sure, you might be able to saw through a half-inch of bark with some sharp rock you find, but that’s time you’re not spending gathering food. And if your hand slips while you’re doing this, because you’re using a very dull knife to cut something whose entire purpose is to not be cut, then that wound you get is highly likely to get infected. Unless Mr. Dibble has enough moldy oranges ready to go in his sterile seaweed pottery jars, you’re out of luck.
But yeah, you could probably get that bark bowl going, after a shit-ton of work, if you’re willing to risk going hungry for the day in order to do it. You’ve just made the first step toward your steam engine.
Simple–I braid my hair into a bridle, and use the excess hair to build a cell phone. My buddy is busy using kangaroo scat and a eucalyptus tree root to establish a satellite link for our phones. Honestly, guys, this isn’t as difficult as you think.
No, it wasn’t. Read the post you quoted in its entirety: it begins with “And even the first step…” It’s totally appropriate for the poster to mention the followup steps in his response to you.
Most goals in life can be construed as a step in a larger process. The “And even” part of that sentence implies he has discarded the subsequent steps as unnecessary to his argument of how difficult it is to do the simplest things without any tools.
The guy overextended his argument; simple as that. He had the idea that the only way to make a bowl is by carving it out of a foot-thick tree trunk, and it isn’t.
Another interesting step along the way to think about…
You’re in a field in the wildnerness, naked, with no clothing or tools. Also in the field is… a domesticated cow. Eat the cow before you starve to death.
How do you do it?
For one thing if its a modern dairy cow you can milk it, squirting the milk straight into your mouth, and live just off that for several weeks with little ill effects. Dairy cows produce up to 4 litres per day and need to be milked, the thing will come to you to be milked as it’s painful for it to walk if it’s not milked.
So you’ve got two weeks to build some cutting tools. Even without those, I can hit it on the head with a big rock to kill it, and use sharpened sticks to cut open the carcass. It will be messy and lots will be wasted but it will work. If I haven’t figured out how to make fire in two weeks then I can eat the meat raw if I have to.
The raw meat can be dried in the sun to make jerky and will last for weeks. The leather will make a great skin for sleeping on and keeping me warm. If I don’t know how to cure a skin, well I have read enough to know that I scrape as much meat off the skin as I can with a rock, then piss on the hide and leave it to dry in the sun. It will stink to high heaven but it will keep me warm. The large thigh bones would be useful as clubs to kill the next cow or protect me from any humans with bad intentions and I’d try and make a pouch out of the stomach. It might not work on the first attempt, but hey there are plenty of cows. That’s all from one cow and remember there are cattle ranges in this area with herds of 100’s of thousands of cows. Livestock outnumbers people by probably more than 10 to 1 in this area.
