This thread bought this song to mind for some reason
[video=youtube;nU615FaODCg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU615FaODCg[/video]
[video=youtube;nU615FaODCg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU615FaODCg[/video]
without resorting to ; outside help ie. stealing farmed sheep, fishing with a net, calling it off when things get bad, taking advantage of the fact your the only one eating rabbit in all of scotland, not living like somesort of freaky hermit who does nothing else but search for and eat one sort of food (a change for most I understand) buying lots of equipment to aid you ie 1000 fish hooks and alot of line, thinking how long you have to keep it up for, I do not think foraging in the uk is achievable longterm.
My arguments the best, it wins and is the only one there is. So there !
We tend to put an idealistic gloss on the past. Thieving and Rieving was always a reality and part of the survival "game" I can recall learning this verse at school
"The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deem’d it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met an host and quell’d it; We forced a strong position And kill’d the men who held it."
Ive just done this at uni lol, they reckon however long ago that the Hunter gatherer had a far better life than a farmer would have. HG would spend three hours a day apparently (how they work that out i dont know but experts are meant to know what they are doing lol) leaving lots of time for other things, but they reckon climate change forced farming on people in europe etc, as HG became impossible. As the climate is still meant to be warming up, i would say if everything went back to a "wild" state, it would still be impossible, but with the introduction of different plants, removal of wolves etc from britain, and also the help of a gun and what not, it may be possible nowadays for a solo or small group, but nothing like the 20-30 people HG communities lived in. But knowledge would help a lot too. But there are HG peoples out there today, but they are few and far between, so i guess in the right places with the right sort of everything, it must be possible
I'm not sure how climate change fits into the picture - I mean, it obviously impacts the practicality of living that way in Europe somehow, but I thought that ancient people had colonised Europe before or during the last ice age... or was that only neanderthals?
They make one or two that will run paraffin, one of the Exponentent range do but they light so easily from naptha that I personally don't see the point. If you want a solid paraffin stove go pick up a Primus 210 off ebay for less than £30.
All of the generalizations that people assert when it comes to hunter gatherer communities are not worth the paper they are published on. The reality is that in some locations hunting and gathering was easy and you did see people with relatively easy lifestyles, while in other areas whole populations starved to death. Looking at the remains of a small coastal community and then making a conclusion about how hunter gatherer's lived, is a bit like looking at Beverly Hills and concluding that everyone around the world lives in huge houses and has at least two cars.
Realistically, some areas were very productive, and they had to be defended by the people occupying them. Other areas provided very little for survival. There were times in human history where the total population of humanity was reduced to several thousand people. More than once we were an endangered species. I think we tend to look at the past with rose colored glasses and we ignore all the suffering that those people went through.
You've said as much several times. I don't agree; discussing whether something is possible is not the same as deciding it would be easy or desirable. People have suffered under every form of social organisation, which is not to declare the search for better ways of living unmeritorious. Nowadays, we in the developed world export our suffering to the less fortunate.
There are many factors that speak against a hunter gatherer lifestyle - and not least of which being the spread of agricultural societies to encompass almost the entire globe, demonstrating that if the aim is the simple expansion of one's group's population, agriculture provides the best way to do so. Does that mean, then, that there is nothing worth learning from historical or current hunter-gatherer techniques? By no means - at the least, we learn about ourselves, we learn to make do and to improvise, we can develop a direct sense of our connection to nature, and we may learn to appreciate the ease of access to food that we currently enjoy. The circumstances which favour agriculture may not always be guaranteed, and some societies have moved between agricultural and hunter-gatherer modes as circumstances dictate. The latter alone justifies that we discuss these ideas and attempt to develop our knowledge and understanding of foods that can be gathered. Should we have to fall back on those methods alone, undoubtedly we will suffer; but some may survive.
What plant life changed to eliminate large mammals? The main feed crop for herbivores is grass which has evolved the cunning trick of growing from the base not the tip so grazing doesn't kill it. This means that wherever there were grasslands there were masses of animals feeding on them. The extinction of large mammals like the Giant Sloth in the Americas might have been because of human hunting.
Where do you get a need for 5,000 calories a day from? Nearer 2,500 is more likely. After all one may be doing outside work but it is not heavy labour.