Anthropology professor teaching college students to live like early humans
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Also, make sure to read his descriptions where he talks in more detail about these ancient techniques in tool building.
I also, like the student quoted at the end, gained a huge respect for the skills of stone-age hunter-gatherers.
Hey how about living and working without air conditioning near the gulf coast of Texas or someplace like that, rather than expending such significant energy maintaining quite small enclosures in a state of foreign climate simulation?
Sessions of virtually zero energy consumption for other reasons can be rewarding too if you wanted to go a step further.
A bit of that and you might be better prepared for some of the more realistic threats such as hurricanes, floods, power interruption, or whatever there is in the local environment that needs to be adapted to.
It's not that difficult especially when you realize locals lived better adapted for centuries, but people are about as likely to practice applicable survival skills as they are to be taking Neanderthal lessons.
If it gets real bad I expect we'll go downright medieval long before we reach full cave man.
Still I do remember a slower time when 7-11 was the only thing open on Sunday or outside of 9-5 otherwise, naturally it was open from 7am to 11pm.
What I mean is when you see the way that thousands of people across multiple disasters react to complete loss of power for an uncertain period, it depends strongly on the confidence in abilities to survive without very much beyond the bare necessities. Probably just as much as the actual abilities.
To me this makes post-industrial survival exercises as worthwhile as some of the paleo enthusiasts have reported here about their experiences already.
The primitive adaptation to these conditions was to not live in them. Population and economic growth in the South is largely attributed to air conditioning.
Many of the places we settle are not suitable for human habitation without substantial terraforming, energy expenditure, and medical care. Chicago, for example, was built on a swamp. It took a massive Army Corps of Engineers project to make it livable. Other cities had massive baseline casualty rates until a combination of medical research and sewer projects got pathogens under control.
Early universities let out their students in the summer not because they needed to work as farmhands (the origin story for summer breaks in K12) but because they would all die of infectious disease if they lived in such close quarters while it was warm outside.
There are ways to live without modern technology, but it's foolish to try to do so regardless of where you currently happen to be.
To find a suitable site and methods for this experiment, look at where and how the homeless thrive. In particular, places where the temperature regulation problem is more or less nonexistent, like the SFBA.
Is the "of itself" qualification, of itself, a reasonable one?
In essence, it's a tricky ethical question: is having more people with a lower quality of life preferable to fewer people with a higher quality of life? Any immediately intuitive answer to that question leads to some highly unintuitive conclusions.
[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
That is: increasing prosperity leads to larger populations and less to go around (food, resources, etc.). Calamities such as famine, plague, wars, etc., reduce populations and spawn an increase in per-capita wealth.
This is generally, though not universally, seen to apply to pre-industrial civilisations only.
Without domestication or preservation/storage, hunting and foraging may take a while and be unreliable.
Some combination of much higher birth rates, ecological destruction, and centralized governments among other factors made agricultural societies more successful in the Darwinian sense.
You see this in the history of the Europeans vs Plains Indians. Very few military successes for the Europeans, but ultimately the Europeans displaced the original inhabitants of the Great Plains almost entirely. The Comanches never "chose" to become agricultural. They were forcefully pushed out over generations.
That piece also seems to be somewhat unspecific on what exactly "limiting the population" entails; after all, infanticide, a lack of medical care of any kind, and outright murder are no less available to a farming society, if you really are arguing for such a solution to inequality.
A modern incinerator is probably safer and less polluting than a simple garbage fire, though.
https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/burnpits/index.asp
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/12/16751/us-troops-b...
Entropy.