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Comment by andrelaszlo | Hacker News Reader

In my part of Sweden, young women used to be alone with the cattle in the forest all summer (http://www.hhogman.se/summer-pasture.htm)

An ancestor of mine, something like a great-great grandmother, woke up to see a family of very small, about knee-high, people driving their flock of very small cattle.

This wasn't very unusual. Everyone knew about småfolk (little people) and they were usually described in similar ways. On Sundays they could be seen on the forest pathways leading to church, wearing traditional Sunday clothes.

This fascinates me. Of course I don't think there's a parallel society of tiny humans living in the Swedish forests but I don't think that most people were lying either. I wonder what makes you experience something like that.

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I remember, about 25 years ago when I was in the military, marching at night after a week of sleep and food deprivation, that I started seeing things. Just over the tree silhouettes I saw a circus tent, and I heard circus music and ruckus.

The mind does strange things when you are tired, bored, or stimulated to (eg flicker-induced hallucinations).

I also firmly believe tales of gnomes and such are a way to explain what cannot otherwise be explained. "I don't know what caused this, gotta be the rascal tomte again." Reasons have always been invented even when the invented reasons themselves raise more questions than what they should explain.

It’s even weirder when it’s shared. Also in the military, we stopped for an MRE break and my buddy’s MRE flew out of his ruck, held by some glowing creature and flew off into the woods. We both looked at each other and said, “did you see that?” His MRE was gone, we couldn’t explain it without seeming crazy and never spoke of it again.

This made me recall trip reports from erowid back in the day, apparently tripping on several grams of fresh ground nutmeg similarly was noted to result in hallucinations shared between tripping partners.

I suppose it's possible it was a very bold owl.

One time when I was camping late at night I took a piss out at this fence line facing a wide open field under a full moon. This freakin' huge owl flew right past a couple meters to one side of me, scaring the crap out of me. It was completely and utterly silent; no wing flapping noise. In the moonlight it did look like it was glowing.

That is certainly possible. We just dismissed it as being tired, hungry and seeing shit. I didn’t even remember it until being reminded of my own impossible military ruck experience.

Hahaha! On the topic, my wife did her thesis in Rwanda, researching the behaviour of monkeys living close to humans and how that affects eg food-gathering behaviour.

One night, when they were camping in tents out on the savanna, she had to go pee. There was no toilet of course, but a bucket. So she went, and as she sat there, she flicked the flashlight around and was met by the reflection of two eyes, wide apart enough and at a height that it certainly was no small animal. Probably a hyena.

They also had a hippo casually stroll through the camp. Hippos are really dangerous - fast, strong, aggressive. Kinda scary, but fun story!

those long periods of isolation and limited novel stimuli that were presumably common in pre modern times probably had a similar effect as the various mild hallucinations you experience during a long meditation session. Also, I don't have a source for this due to Google's fuzzy keyword matching and my efforts limited to about 90 sec but IIRC even Nietzsche had pondered if miracles were previously more common due to dietary deficiencies causing hallucinations.

I do agree though that it is interesting and even with a simple materialist explaination, the fact that people would see similar diminutive mythical people across cultures is fascinating. Hawaiians had menehune, etc etc. I tend to think of that in the Joseph Campbell collective unconscious sort of way.

Grain getting in infected with ergot has been blamed for hallucinations.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/botanical-origin...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism

Good call. I can't imagine that it wasn't responsible to some degree. I wonder if cultures that grew rye/wheat/barley had a higher rate of attributable phenomena than those that didn't grow cereals that support Claviceps purpurea

Assuming the effects of ergot are similar to those of LSD (to which it is closely related) - it just doesn't work like that.

There are some drugs that cause you to literally see things that aren't there (Datura springs to mind) but most hallucinogens merely distort perceptions. There is a degree of pareidolia but the hollywood depiction of people tripping and seeing pink elephants is very far from the actual experience.

The amount of Ergot tainted grain you would need to consume to have hallucinations would mean you would be very sick. It wouldn't be an otherwise healthy person hallucinating, but a very ill delirious person.

People in solitary confinement start having hallucinations, it's actually very common. After a summer in the woods with nobody but cows for company you might have similar effects

Sending kids into the woods for a summer by themselves to watch over livestock is a cool idea though, I wish I could have experienced something like that.

Sometimes, when my mind is tired, it switches to a state where it interprets things that are large and far away as being small and nearby. I wonder if that phenomenon could explain why so many people see little people doing the same things regular people do.

I have a similar effect with Cannabis. I can see things and recognize their distance but my mind distorts it and says "Hey, wait a second, these 10cm might also be 10m, you never know!"

All while I can clearly see it not being 10m. I know it's 10cm but my mind doesn't "accept" it. I wonder if the drug triggers pathways that might be triggered in 'natural' situations as well, such as fatigue.

Probably was caused by Alice in Wonderland syndrome, Lilliputian hallucinations or something similar

Could just be midgets (I hope that term is not mysteriously offensive, if so, sorry), but who felt shunned, intermarried, thus strengthening the genes.

Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?

> Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?

Search for photos of the shortest humans, they are proportionally as small as small vs big dogs.

Photos only go back 150 years, and were very rare.

In terms of adult human size, no way. There are little dogs, smaller than domestic cats, and dogs as big as an adult human male. EG, almost 200lbs, 5 to 6 feet on hind legs.

Have you seen many human adults, smaller than a baby?

Dogs needed a mutation for that, cats for example did not have that and are all roughly the same size. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00209-0

It's not just the one mutation that causes the size range of dogs. That's probably a factor, but I feel comfortable saying that we would have a much wider variety of cat sizes if they had had as much selective breeding for size and type as dogs.

There's evidence that the structure of the dog genome makes it easier to breed for various characteristics – the "slippery genome" theory [1]. It looks like the science isn't fully settled, however [2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17437958/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy201098

Thanks for the links. I'll read through them when I've got the time.

Having not read any of your references, I'd like to point out that the variation in domestic horses is right up there with dogs. You go from Shires to Miniature Horses, Arabians to Clydesdales. It's a huge spectrum because they were bred for specific tasks. I feel like even domestic rabbits and chickens see more variation than cats.

Maybe cats are just that stubborn or maybe we don't have many jobs for them besides pest control and snuggling.

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