People are the most ill-equipped animals(for wilderness survival)

Humans are amazing endurance runners compared to most other animals. Tribes of humans chased down entire herds of animals, sometimes for days, until they animals died of exhaustion and the humans (not humen :() could get their catch. At least that's what I heard on the discovery channel (on a scientific program, not a quack one). I would be fine with a few of my friends, but most of humanity would not be.
 
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Enmos said:
Great example. You mean to ourselves, right ? :rolleyes:

It would be funny to see the lot of you trying to make tools from scratch :D
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where in the world do you think we got technology from? what did we dig it up? no we made it from scratch.
 
fedr808 said:
where in the world do you think we got technology from? what did we dig it up? no we made it from scratch.
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Technology has to be built from the bottom up. Do you know how long it took for us to advance from sticks and stones to more advanced technology ?
 
Bad teeth started with agriculture.

A lot of our current apparently slack physical abilities are consequences of agriculture. The Cro-Magnons were six feet tall, muscular, long-lived barring violence, with a mouthful of healthy teeth and much more chance of being killed by another human than any bear. Bears were prey. So were elephants. To this day the smallest, weakest, least technologically advanced people on earth hunt and kill elephants for food.
 
Oniw17 said:
I can produce at least 25 pretty hard punches in 10 seconds, and most predatory animals seem to have a nose similar to a dog's(and dogs noses are very vulnerable). I can swim and scurry up a tree pretty fast as long as there are branches within jumping distance of each other. I can hold things and pick up a rock and throw it fairly accurately. I can communicate with other people. I can pivot, which I haven't seen many animals do, and I'm much more flexible(and can move in more different ways) than most mammals. I can see and hear pretty well, I'm good at hiding. I can stand on two legs and duck. I can figure things out quickly and formulate elaborate plans. Taking all this into account, I can't think of a way that I'd go about killing a deer without any tools, and the only animal that I've ever had to fight is a dog, so I'm not sure how I'd match up against most animals. The biggest dog I've ever had to fight looked about 100lbs., but I'm pretty sure that I could take a dog my size(50 lbs. heavier) with a few well-placed nose punches or throat kicks.

What do you guys think? Is it fair to say that a humans are the most ill-equipped to survive in the wilderness? Even if they were primarilly vegetarian/scavengers?
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Why do you limit yourself to not using any tools? You might just as well ask a lion to hunt without its claws or teeth. It is our ability to make and use tools that makes us the dominant species on this planet. Even if you were dropped naked into a forest, you could soon enough make a spear or some such tool to facilitate the hunting/killing of the deer.
 
I'm making a bow and arrow and using Enmos' teeth for arrowheads.

And its not hard at all to make a fish trap. The only wilderness I don't think I could survive in is Sahara dessert, open ocean, or the arctic circle.
 
Orleander said:
I'm making a bow and arrow and using Enmos' teeth for arrowheads.

And its not hard at all to make a fish trap. The only wilderness I don't think I could survive in is Sahara dessert, open ocean, or the arctic circle.
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How could you tell what the water is? Is the watyer good to drink or bad, how do you determine that in the wildreness?
 
cosmictraveler said:
How could you tell what the water is? Is the watyer good to drink or bad, how do you determine that in the wildreness?
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If animals are drinking it, I'm drinking it. I'd prefer rain water or moisture from anilmals/plants but I'll drink dirty water if my only option is dehydration.
 
cosmictraveler said:
How could you tell what the water is? Is the watyer good to drink or bad, how do you determine that in the wildreness?
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In general it will be safe to drink if it's fast-flowing. But you can always boil it (in your self-made clay pot, I guess). Even smelting metal isn't that complicated, if you can find it. It would mostly just be trial and error to figure out what works.
 
Orleander said:
I'm making a bow and arrow and using Enmos' teeth for arrowheads.

And its not hard at all to make a fish trap. The only wilderness I don't think I could survive in is Sahara dessert, open ocean, or the arctic circle.
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My teeth ? :D
 
Humans managed to survive on the moon (be it briefly and we never went back) so I don't know what your talking about! humans survive in a wider range of habitats than any animal on earth! Sure the human body is built like shit (and evolving to be increasingly shittier) and has many detriments and no exceptional capabilities, other then a brain capable of advance language and sound modulating systems to implement that capabilities, also the capability of sentient thought and hands for which it implements its diabolical ideas, those are about it, everything else is shit, but dam the exceptional features are so incredible that humans have completely dominated this planet, and to great horror possibly will take over other worlds as well! Sure most humans could not live without the technology of theres, but so what?
 
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Orleander said:
I don't think small mammals, fish and carrion are hard to come by in the winter.
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It sounds like this discussion is not about the fitness of Homo sapiens as a species for wilderness survival. Our ancestors were so skilled at it that they actually began to modify the environment to suit them.

If you're talking about the ability of a dweller in modern civilization to survive if he were dropped off in a wilderness with no training, no physical conditioning and only Stone Age tools, that's a different issue. I don't know why anybody would care about that. We've spent the past eleven thousand years building a world that's more to our liking and we're very adept at flourishing in it. With the tools ("technology") we've invented, we have become the apex predator despite the existence of tigers, bears, alligators and sharks; we have marginalized or extinguished species with whom we didn't care to share our space; we have enslaved others for food, work and sport and made second-class citizens out of others for sheer frivolous companionship; we have re-shaped the face of the planet, turning forests into farmland, fields into shopping malls and rivers into hydroelectric generators.

In other words, we didn't much like living in the wilderness, so we abolished it. To say that we could no longer survive in the wilderness is simply to acknowledge the unique nature of our species: our survival skills are not merely instincts honed by parental training, but elaborate systems crafted over thousands of years. We've chosen to suit ourselves to the world we made.

People who care about wilderness survival skills put great effort into learning them and apparently they become very good at them. As far as I'm concerned this proves that our species has not lost its natural ability for wilderness survival, merely that we no longer teach our children to exploit it.

Which brings me back to Orly's remark. Orly, are you a resolute outdoors enthusiast? Have you bothered to learn how to hunt and fish? Could you build a trap to catch small mammals? Few of us Americans have.

I wouldn't last a week in the wilderness because I've never learned to do any of those things. But I can play a bass guitar, write publication-quality text, drive a car, play go and teach algebra and three languages. Those are the skills I value. I would not want to live in a world where I could not use them so my inability to survive in that world is by definition of no importance to me.
Nasor said:
But I can pretty much guarantee you that 10k years ago people weren't living to an average age of 75.
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Actually, at the close of the Mesolithic Era in 9500BCE the life expectancy of an adult human who had survived the rigors of childhood (no mean feat, to be sure) was in the low 50s. The cause of death for the majority of them was violence, since the inability of a hunter-gatherer "economy" to generate surplus food made every tribe an enemy of every other tribe during hard times.

It wasn't tooth decay that brought us down; it was, ironically, agriculture. After the invention of the technology of farming, the burgeoning human population quickly adopted a grain-based diet, which is woefully deficient in many key nutrients. By the Roman Era, that same adult had a life expectancy of about 23.
eddie23 said:
I dont hunt,fish,or spend time out in the wilderness, but I could if I had to.
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That's easier said than done. I hope you don't ever have to test that hypothesis.
 
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