For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off from All Human Contact (2013)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
This reminds me of a show I watched on the Science channel when I was young about how humans have evolved. They showed various African civilizations and detailed how they hunt in parties by simply keeping pace with the animal until the animal just collapses. It goes on to say that that is one characteristic of human evolution that has made us drastically more successful at surviving than other species
We're physically adapted: sweat pores, bipedal, achilles tendon. Perhaps neccessary, but high calorie ROI seems insufficient for the evolution of intelligence.
I agreed up until this. Of course, I disagreed with my evolutionary biology profs in college, too, on this subject.
These adaptations and others are still operating and still changing. They're not a point in time change to us, they're a bell curve of adaptation over time. We're adapting in some measure right now to things like modern technology, although technology may continue to be a moving target long enough that we'll never finish adapting before it changes again.
Modern humans are just animals in a rectilinear jungle, still evolving, adapting, and changing.
Is it just lack of use that means we get sick from tainted meat, and such, when other mammals seem to stay healthy?
It's a common misconception that animals don't get sick from tainted meat or water. They do, and when they're weakened enough, they get eaten. Clearly some have a higher tolerance of certain pathogens (e.g. vultures), but many succumb to intestinal bacteria and parasites at alarming rates. We just don't see it.
Also, there's a theory that fire and cooking is part of what allowed hominids to develop their superior brains and leave the trees behind for a fully savannah-based lifestyle.
There's also sushi and sashimi.
As a species we need to stay in groups and take care of our sick. We traveled vast distances by foot and sought out our own kind.
To equivocate, I did hear about ancient ruins of villages in China where unknown strains of plague were unearthed, before this COVID-19 stuff. I assume these then became cursed villages that no one visited.
Lots of grocery store meat that you buy "fresh" was killed x number of days ago.
If a dog eats raw meat within a few hours of it being killed, it's a big difference.
How did I come to this opinion? Try freezing a super market steak a few days before the "expiration date." Then unfreeze it a few days after the expiration date.
You'll notice a rancid smell immediately upon cooking.
Most beef, at least that you buy locally from a butcher who got the animal from a local farmer, is dry aged in a cooler for 10 - 14 days after slaughter. [1]
I don't know whether that's true for mass-market meat or not. But it's very common to let meat age before eating it.
Do we have a better immune system than other primates and other animal groups?
Perhaps other social predators actually are on the same level as us.
> We can climb on negative inclines,
Can you?
> run an ultra-marathon,
Have you ever?
> lift several times our own weight,
Can you?
> deep-dive,
Have you ever?
> heal massive wounds,
Unless we die from them, yup.
> our immune system is without par,
Meaningless claim.
> and we perform all kinds of feats of dexterity
And birds can can't, but they can fly. Elephant's can't but they've got long noses. etc. So?
Human exceptionalism (from a human, I assume)
There's also the case that tracks alone need a lot of intelligence to process. "Here they can see the Kudu were running by the spacing of the tracks and the bull is isolated and taking a different track".
Another persistence hunter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNbqvqf3-14
Cooking made a big difference for vegetables because heat quickly breaks down some hard to digest fiber.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes...
You know I've thought about this, and if you look at it a certain way, I think you can say life is no different.
We still wake up as a group. We still "hunt" except the payoff is money convertible to food. We still eat together. We still sleep together (just across from one another in houses).
It's neat to think about.
It's certainly a hypothesis I've long held but never had chance to test.
Citations for support/contradiction welcome, thanks.
But, I don't think it matters much. It doesn't help, but it's a small surface area.
It was interesting that while most wild animals can outrun humans, they're not very good at endurance, something humans excel at.
It's funny because when I see a wild animal I'm usually thinking "No way I can catch that." But apparently it's not as unlikely as I might think.
Outside of migration and other factors, they seemed to belive that the success rate for a hunt, provided they found the animal, was pretty high.
Attenborough followed a koala Hari bushman pursuing an antelope — video on YouTube.
And Larry Niven wrote a short story about it, “The Hunting Park”
Hunting isn't necessary to survive. We can live off of bugs, plants and fruits, etc.
This all is a bit arbitrary, anyway, because you'd need to draw a clear line in hominid evolution where humans became sufficiently different from other animals before you can say that we "beat them all". Is that before or after behaviorally modern humans evolved, for example?
It would be easy to imagine, if you had experience of collapsing from fatigue. Try to get on the roof of a skyscraper by stairs, you'll get all the needed experience. For more realism, you could run for a several floors, then rest for a few minutes, and to repeat it as needed. For even more realism find a person who is better than you at marathons, give him/her a stick and tell him/her to move slowly up by the stairs (1-2 steps per second, I believe, will do) and to beat you with the stick when he catches up with you. At some point you will prefer stick to moving further. It could be done without stairs on the plains, but it would take more time, up to a few hours.
I couldn't give you experience, but I could give you some theory. Moving animal needs to absorb oxygen, to oxidize glucose into ATP. If animal tries to move faster than some limit based on the ability to absorb and utilize oxygen, then some of glucose metabolizes only halfway to H2O+CO2 and lactic acid. Muscles start to accumulate lactic acid. If concentration of lactic acid in muscles is high enough, animal feels it painful to strain muscles. The more concentration is the less strain is needed to feel pain, the higher level of pain at the same strain level. At some point even the slightest straining feels painful. Cells in muscles could die from too much acidity, but it hard to do because of pain. (Though a heart could be damaged this way, for this one needs to force his heart to work at ~180+ beats per minute for a ~10+ minutes, it doesn't feels like pain in the heart, so be careful when pushing your body to its limits).
To get rid of lactic acid animal needs oxygen. Muscles could metabolize lactic acid to get energy, or the liver could do it. But in any case it needs oxygen, animal need to stop and to rest, or at least to run at lesser power, to have enough spare oxygen in a bloodstream.
If animal have no time to stop and rest for long enough time, then lactic acid concentration continue to grow. It feels like overwhelming fatigue, pain in muscles, and all you want is to take a break. If you try to work your muscles through it, at some point they just stop working. But it is hard to get to this point, because of a pain and a loss of motivation to continue.
So you are going into a debt, when your power output is higher than your aerobic abilities allow. While it is a free debt, interest rate is zero, there is a limit how much lactic acid your body could contain without harm to itself. It is oxygen debt: the more lactic acid you have, the more oxygen you owe to your body. To repay this debt you need to lower your power, to run slower than you could run indefinitely (i.e. without build up of lactic acid).
Of course it just one of the mechanism for fatigue. The other one, for example, is the lack of fuel. It is the worst kind -- you could stop and rest for an hour, but it doesn't help. You need to eat and to wait while glucose reaches muscles. Though with the training it comes easier, body learns how to digest food while running, and how to feed muscles, while they are working. If your body have fats, than it can be trained to use them. Mine body doesn't have fats, so if I plan to cycle for a several hours, I need to eat continuously while cycling or after a few hours I'll lose ability to use my legs.
Pretty much the only animals that can outrun a well-trained human over marathon distances are sled dogs - and only in very cold weather.
The other strategy is a quick surprise coup de grace, like lions. We have lions/pumas here but they're hard to spot and I've never seen one hunting but I assume it's like a scaled up version of a house cat, or big felines seen on TV.
Edit: Wait, nvm. This is probably the west coast of North America, and by lions you mean mountain lions. I was thinking the ones with the manes right away.
I can't imagine what it would be like to grow up in that environment.
Humans are amazing... one of my favorite lines from the article:
The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”
> [...] old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when “the stars began to go quickly across the sky,” and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
Especially the last part: “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.”
EDIT Also reminds me of the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier that hid in the Phillipine jungle for 30 years after WWII, not knowing Japan had surrendered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
The homo sapiens is indeed a remarkable species. But what really make us what we are is not the individual per-se, but our society. Homo is great, for sure, but what is really impressive is not the individual Homo, but humanity.
In alone, they are forced to transport heavy camera equipment. They start out right before winter. The local laws prevent them from actually hunting. The show is a joke. There is no surviving actually done. Just enduring starvation. The optimal way to win is to select fatty food as many of your 10 items as possible, make a shelter, and expend as few calories as possible. But that isn't entertaining to watch, so they won't select you to be on the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_food
"Typical examples include tubers and roots, grains, legumes, and seeds."
Yeah, don't go scarfing iceberg lettuce when stuck in the woods, but we've been finding and eating starchy root vegetables for probably millions of years.
I don't know shit about this topic though, I'm just trying to put myself in their shoes (or feet as the case would be).
The article suggests the family did not hunt big game for the first 20+ years:
> It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins
So they apparenrly survived for 20+ years without hunting
The Patagonia season made it apparent that people were finally preparing mentally to stick it out. And what happened? 2 contestants removed for being to skinny, and the chunkiest guy won. I really liked him, not knocking him, but if they were all the same body fat % to start I'm not sure he'd have been the winner. The girl who got 2nd was absolutely not prepared to quit.
I've watched the first 4 seasons, I think? And I would say this absolutely was not the case. Most contestants just tapped out. Nearly all of them. Some contestants were pulled out for medical reasons (too skinny because no calories), but not "airlifted" as in "emergency medical."
One guy broke his ankle or something, as far as I remember he was the most urgent medical case.
> And bear in mind that these are trained survivalists.
This part is also blatantly wrong. The vast majority of the contestants were not "trained survivalists." I think the closest to that were some who taught some bushcrafting classes--and those people fared pretty well on average, just tapped out for mental reasons.
I agree with your overall point. Surviving in the wild is incredibly difficult and virtually none of us have the required skill set anymore. Including nearly everyone on the Alone show.
This bloke hiked up to Agafia's and filmed it:
What was really interesting was the observation, towards the end, that once he'd hiked for 4 days and then arrived at Agafia's place and been there for a day, he felt like he'd arrived in civilisation!
One wonders what the plan for the area is, once Agafia leaves this mortal coil. She's not alone at the moment - it seems she gets regular visitors - but would this be enough of a settlement to form the basis for a new township to be founded? I confess, the idea of moving to that valley is very attractive these days, if but for the harsh environment I clearly know nothing about ..
Think of how long they watched this little shoot of rye grow... that must have been a really scary period.
Humans are marvelous, fascinating creatures.
In the linked article, the table of the "main" differences are shockingly trivial from my perspective and include:
1) How "Jesus" is spelled 2) How to hold your fingers when making the sign of the cross 3) Procession direction (CW vs CCW) 4) etc.
That either side was willing to kill or die over these things is something I simply can't understand.
For example, with the fingers, the original two-finger crossing gesture was said to represent the dual but inseparable nature of Christ. This is particularly important for Christianity, because of the heavy debates on christology in the early centuries of the Church resulting in several major schisms. I mean, even the Nicene creed - which is still the standard creed for most major Christian denominations - specifically addresses it.
(And since the Oriental Orthodox churches produced by those schisms never went away, neither did the importance of emphasizing the theological differences with them. So the accusation of monophysitism was still a serious business especially in the wider Orthodox community.)
The official explanation was that three fingers stood for the Trinity - but non-trinitarian Christian denominations were already so obscure at that point, it was seen kinda like declaring that water is wet, i.e. not controversial at all. Thus, doing away with two fingers and replacing it with three, sounded to many believers like the Church leaders were suddenly reluctant to criticize monophysitism. From which there's an obvious step to believing that the Church leaders are secretly harboring that heresy themselves.
And in fact, the reforms were about making things more like what the Greek church was doing at the time. Russian traditions, meanwhile, were based on old Greek ones, and basically better conserved. It went above and beyond matters of dogma and ritual, even down to stuff like clothing and hairstyles.
Tsar Aleksei was also a Grecophile, and to him this was less abstract than just church issues - he was seriously eyeing Constantinople as a potential "Orthodox Reconquista", with himself as the new Constantine -the emperor of the Orthodox faithful. Military feasibility aside, this all is a lot easier if tsar's take on Orthodoxy itself is more consistent with what the Greeks see as such.
It is just difficult to see in own case.
I suspect hated of religion may have blinded you, making you ignorant of facts.
For example in the Koran believers are told, in unabrogated verses, to kill anyone who isn't Muslim (paraphrasing: 'strike down non-believers wherever you find them').
In the New Testament believers are told to love everyone, including foreigners and non-believers and are given a specific edict to pray for their enemies.
Buddhism seems to me to be most pacifist of the major World religions. In contrast Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism all have warring as central elements of their doctrine; modern followers may have 'workarounds' for those.
These are not trivial differences.
But also:
>34 Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn ‘A man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.…
To remain consistent to the message of the text it seems Jesus must have been speaking figuratively in your quote and I don't think any stretch is needed there? His immediate disciples appear to have acted consistent with that after his death.
In contrast, but with similar consistency, when Mohammed says strike down unbelievers, that is also what he did - he was a successful warlord who besieged and put to the sword entire cities (according to Islamic sources: Koran and Hadith). IMO his transition to allowing opposing fighters to live, if they convert; then allowing Christians and Jews to live if they pay jizya; were the principle elements that allowed early growth - he turned cities in to golden geese, rather than razing them to the ground.
His immediate followers of course also killed non-believers (and all the rest that we associate with mediaeval war).
It's worth noting that where I am in the UK, there are many Muslims and quite a few are amongst my friends; none of them appear to follow Mohammed or the Koran in this aspect.
People are not religions. There are examples of Buddhists being extremely violent for example, that doesn't mean Buddhism is bad; adherents who act malevolently didn't negate the worth of a particular doctrine. And vice versa: doctrine that is malevolent doesn't negate the worth of supposed proponents.
Do you have a source that you've found convincing on those surah being abrogated?
Presumably sources that say that was only for Mohammed necessarily would condemn his warring (making him not a paragon, and destroying a central premise), and what of the caliphs that followed Mohammed. I'd be interested in a mainstream condemnation of Islamic military expansion, if there is one?
Even the "righteous" caliphs did all kinds of things contradicting the Sunnah, so I don't think that's a very useful yardstick. But overall, given that the Caliphate had plenty - indeed, early after the initial conquests, the majority of its population - following different religions, it's pretty obvious that the commandment wasn't taken quite so verbatim even then. And, on the other hand, consider the ultimate fate of the Kharijites, who kinda took it to heart.
I believe it's really more about fear(of death/hell) than devotion. Most religions have pretty effective rituals/routines to keep you in that kid of state. Once hooked-in it's hard to get out.
I disagree. Religion isn't about being afraid, it's about learning to cope. Rituals are important because rituals are rote. You can fall back on them when life is spiraling out of control and find a foothold.
I think one of the big problems that modern Christianity faces (since that is the tradition I am part of) is that it has shifted to focus too much on the feminine side of things. There is a reason churches are predominately filled with women. The things the church focuses on appeal to women.
The church and religion have a place for men too, but broadly what men need from religion is not what is being delivered.
One of my favorite hymn lines is "Learn from Jesus Christ to die". To me, that is what the church offers that appeals most directly to me. How to face mortality, failure, and uncertainty. Several years ago when my father was dying of cancer, it's something I leaned on heavily. When you are too devastated to think clearly, you fall back on the rituals that you can perform without thinking and take solace from the wisdom within them.
It's no wonder that we become religious when we are most vulnerable. Giving up control gives us comfort. Religions have a ready answer for everything but don't be mistaken, they always double down on fear because fear sells well. "All" the religions threaten with hell in this life and the afterlife if you dare to dissaffiliate. Not to mention that deep down you know that without religion you are doomed to face a harsh reality. I used to believe that religions serve a therapeutic need but unfortunately they've been twiested in so many ways , they try to be so many things that I can't see them more than some tales of wisdom like the Greek mythology. I belive it's a red and blue pill choice.
We always wondered if we could survive a winter with just what we had.
Anyway, but biggest questions from this article are how did they light fire, and how did they boil water? I assume steel pots, but what would they have done once those were damaged?
From experience, I know it's a full time job when the temperature drops to -40. You don't want to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch. One mistake and you're in big trouble at those temperatures.
As for fire, I would assume they never let it go out, or else they learned friction fire.
With daytime highs in the -40s, you have to heat snow and ice to make it liquid. You can't drink it if you don't.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=For%2040%20Years%2C%20This%20R...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=comments%3E0%20For%2040%20Year...
I also think its pretty neat that she encourages visitors. Altruistic, as in - she wants to share the beauty of the world she's made for herself - or is there some selfish desire for human interaction, unfulfilled, which motivates this act? Either way, she's a beautiful human being.
The stories about the Japanese soldiers marooned on Pacific islands for decades still thinking they were at war with the Allieds are right up there with this one.
Then this comes along. Humans really, genuinely are remarkable creatures.
Interesting!
Prescient for somebody who doesn't even know what a soundstage is.