The survival skills of Helena Valero
woodfromeden.substack.com
woodfromeden.substack.com
But when you have dense populations where individuals pose more threat to each other than other things threaten them with outside pressure of mildly dangerous environment that forces the population into groups despite that you just bound to end up with self referential highly advanced reasoning.
In such environment there is a selective pressure to develop brains capable of modelling other brains in order to survive and keep your offspring alive. But as your brain gets smarter and more capable so do the brains you are trying to model.
This causes tight (rather pathological in the context of living things in general) feedback loop that doesn't develop when predator and prey are of different species.
So it really wasn't diet, or tool use or verticality, or brain facial air cooling. It was mostly just that murderous species bread to the point of being its worst enemy.
Yanoáma: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians as told to Ettore Biocca (1996, translated from the Italian by Dennis Rhodes)
https://archive.org/details/yanoamastoryofhe0000vale/mode/1u...
This reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston, who had taken a similar approach when studying the history and practice of voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/claimin...
Without memetic viral ideas like civilization we are very close to our other ape relatives like chimpanzees who live similar to this, in that they live very in the moment with a highly volatile social dynamic. It’s not outside the realm of reason that some random tribe/s of humanity didn’t pick up intellectual technologies that we assume are big standard because of how widespread they are in our civilization.
That being said, I’d also not trust this 100% given the lack of sourcing or veracity and how many human opinions are interjected, I just wanted to point out that the story is plausible
An interesting read on this topic is the very book being dissed in the article--Napoleon Chagnon's "Noble Savages". According to this article, Chagnon met the Yanomamo in a state more exposed to our civilization, but even then many of the high-ranking men come across exactly as I described above: charming when they want, but volatile and gratuitously violent. Two episodes from the book stand out in my memory.
- A chief encounters two young men from a rival clan. They are nervous because of this man's reputation, but he calls out to them and offers them food, charms them and puts them at ease. Then he walks behind them and kills them. In his opinion, this is hilarious.
- A man suddenly believes his wife has cheated on him. He drags her out by her hair, punches and kicks her head repeatedly. Chagnon is aghast and almost intervenes. I don't recall whether the woman survives.
It is not at all that clear to me. The thing with psychopathy at least. We have about 15 per cent of psychopaths up there (compared to the societal average of 1 per cent). Contrary to the general myth, even most high-ranking Nazis were paper-pushing conformists rather than psychopaths like Oskar Dirlewanger. Would the Amerindian society fare very differently?
First, the groups are relatively small. 100 to 150 persons at most, not a whole country like Weimar Germany. Given high mortality and the fact that women didn't become chiefs, your purely numeric chance of becoming a chief was reasonably high if you lived to be 35 or so, just from the fact that you lived and had a lot of valuable experience (in an illiterate society, the elders are a vital knowledge source). Also, this was a fission-fusion society: smaller groups separated under their own chiefs, went their own way, then came back and fused for some time again. Which opened some positions of "junior chiefs" to prove themselves.
Too much eagerness to engage in violence will likely get you killed at a younger age. Serious injuries amount to death in the forest, and even many lighter ones. If you really "optimize for max violence", odds are that you will be killed soon. You cannot win every battle, and some of the deaths described by Valero were basically murders from behind.
There was certainly luck involved, but also a mix of other attributes, including your ability to fight. But it is not clear to me that psychopaths would have a decisive advantage. It is fundamentally physically dangerous to be a violent psychopath in a society with zero healthcare.
One of your favorite dogs just died. You need to punish someone for this. Who will it be?
Your options are:
(1) The toddler who fed the dog something that it choked on;
(2) The woman of your household who allowed the toddler to do that; or
(3) Any random person who has absolutely no connection to the events.
All three options look plausible to me, but in particular there's nothing ridiculous about picking (2).
Similarly the article is asking the question "Why did Helena succeed?" Undeniable all the factors they list are true. She was intelligent, perceptive, sociable, made friends, and calculated risks in her life. But the other very important factor is that she was lucky. Perhaps the most important factor. There are thousands and thousand of other alternate histories where we don't hear about her because the jaguar got her, or the poison arrow kills her, or an infection kills her, or Fusiwe hits her on the head instead on the arm and kills her instantly.
I don't think the role of luck is particularly significant. The article's question isn't interesting. It's not difficult for women to succeed in the sense of the article: she lived and had children. I would guess that she was below average for the society, and the modal Yanomamo woman experienced many fewer attempts on her life than Helena did.
> I don't think we have to look that deep into this. Fusiwe was a man with a short fuse and bad decisions. His dog died, he got frustrated and he snapped at someone. Helena was the one who he happened to hit.
I did say that "any random person" was a plausible choice. But Helena is more likely because there is a real sense in which she was responsible for the problem. The fact that she's part of his household also probably makes her a more likely target. Start breaking the arms of random people from your village and you'll see a lot of your political support start to waver.
The only difference is that tribes living in an open forest don't have much "familial secrets": nothing can happen behind closed doors if you live in a place with no doors to begin with. So everybody knew, and in absence of strong taboos to the contrary, such behavior was normalized.
That is not one of the events that put Helena's survival at risk.
Fusiwe absolutely could have caused a mortal injury to her, even though it wouldn't have been immediately fatal.
And I'm saying that it was not a __choice__. A violent man committed one more violent act in a life full of violent acts. Calling it a choice and thinking it in terms of pros and cons makes it sound like a much more deliberative act.
> Start breaking the arms of random people from your village and you'll see a lot of your political support start to waver.
Which is exactly what happened with him.
> I don't think the role of luck is particularly significant.
Only lucky people think that. :)
Perhaps, if you just didn't bother reading my comment.
We have someone who was very badly suited to her culture and achieved results that were well below average.
She didn't die, which is the article's metric of success.
Women who fit into the culture better, a large majority of Yanomamo women, also didn't die, and this is unsurprising because our case study didn't die even after screwing up in major ways several different times.
This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed. Success is nearly guaranteed, and therefore there isn't a role for luck to play in it.
Luck could have made the difference between Helena succeeding and failing - she might have been eaten by a jaguar. But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.
I assure you I did read your comment. Carefully and multiple times.
I disagree with it as I wrote. Doesn't mean that I didn't read it.
> This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed.
I really don't understand your reasoning here. She was lucky. Random things turned out well enough for her so she could tell her story and let us hear it. That is where the luck is significant. You can't argue from the fact that she was lucky, that luck wasn't significant.
If she wasn't lucky and the jaguar eat her, if she wasn't lucky and the poisoned arrow killed her, if she wasn't lucky and the chief she mocked have executed her we would not know about her.
She didn't survive because she was so careful with things. She didn't survive because her environment was free of dangers. She survived because she rolled the darwinian roulette wheel (multiple times) and things happened to work out randomly well enough for her to survive. Therefore the role of luck is significant.
You are basically saying "well it worked out okay, so what is the fuss about it". But some of these things only worked out for her due to luck. I read your comment (multiple times!) and still confused how can you can think that the role of luck is insignificant. Especially when you agree that the jaguar could have killed her.
> But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.
Ok? Two things. One: What do we care? We are talking about Helena and the significance of luck in her life. Even if the normal Yanomamo woman were 100% impervious to jaguar attacks wouldn't change anything about Helena. The jaguar is a danger to her. Avoiding it is up to luck for her.
Two: how do you know? Do you have some good data source on the relative probabilities on jaguar attacks on the normal Yanomamo woman? Or just making assumptions? For all we know it might be danger to everyone living in that environment.
It is common display of power, to force everyone to have to accept a post facto explanation for something either directly or indirectly violent. The actual explanation doesn't have to make sense, it exists solely to project power. It's not too far from several contemporary political events.
It so happens that in this case there was a long-time cocaine abuser and addict who I believe also might have traumatic brain injury. Cocaine and traumatic brain injury have a severe impact on the inflammatory response in the central nervous system – increasing inflammation – which is also behavior-modifying, increasing aggression. Environmental stress also has a similar effect on the brain and behavior.
It’s easy to notice multiple examples of severe head injury in the story. Social and environmental stress is severe as well. (I don’t think cocaine is involved; I mention cocaine in the context because it’s something that’s available in our modern enviroment which causes brain inflammation, cognitive impairment, and violence. These effects are provided by other things in the story.)
In the story I also recognize the violent and “dream logic”-like elements from the onset of dementia. I’m sure that hardships such as these people live in will bring about dementia-like effects and alterations. Bodies wear out, and the brain is part of the body. It is not the fundamental nature of the brain to wear out in silence and grace.
These behaviors are all in our nature. All of them. It’s just a question of latent tendencies, of impairment, and what sort of survival mode is brought about by which sort of environment.
(There is science on the claims I make here. There are papers out on this. Google Scholar suggestions: neuroinflammation + aggression + cytokine, cocaine + tbi + cytokine, cocaine + neuronflammation. Interleukin-6 (IL-6) in particular is an interesting cytokine with profound roles.
There are also parallels with malignant narcissism and the lack of object constancy. “Lack of object constancy” is specific and almost technical. Haphazard take on that: Reasons for senseless actions are not necessarily derived from the grounded reality of memory. Rather, sometimes with humans the reasons for violence are on-the-fly ad-hoc justifications fully experienced as memories by the person, generated “live” by, say, fear and anger and the hunger for power and dominance.
My apologies for not supplying actual citations. I wish I had the oomph. I appeal to your curiosity.)
Anecdote : your comment striked me, as I was in almost the same situation (but with dead chicken, instead of dog) and my family member, very intelligent, highly respected engineer screamed at the child and hit the mother because "It was their fault". And this was one of the more "sane" reasons for their abuse.
Interesting meta-claim.
>> Fusiwe located the Pishaanseteri and promised to kill the first man he encountered. That man turned out to be an old friend of his, a young man who had brought Fusiwe's family a lot of game in the hope of marrying some daughter that any of the wives would give birth to. The young man had parted with Fusiwe in grief when the group split. Nonetheless, Fusiwe chose to kill his former friend, because he happened to be the first Pishaanseteri he saw.
Add being a psychopath in addition to severely mentally challenged and you got the perfect combination.
Ancient mythologies all around the world are full of stories of heroes whose oaths have turned on them. Heck, even Tolkien included the Oath of Fëanor in his mythology, and Fëanor and his sons were no morons.
Boasting or tempting fate seems to be a common disease of males everywhere, and in a premodern society, your word is basically your only property and value. Breaking it is bad, similar to getting thrown into Alcatraz and having all your property confiscated bad.
>> Ancient mythologies all around the world are full of stories of heroes whose oaths have turned on them
First those are dreamed up facts and not the real world, are you aware? Secondly, the "heroes" in that ancient world are a lot closer to "much muscle little brain" typology than such as Euclid and Einstein.
And who the fuck is Fëanor? Some made up fantasy guy? Yeah, that definitely proves your point!