Let’s Build a Well-Developed Human Bit by Bit and See What We Get
We’ll start with basic survival needs and take it from there.
First of all, I want to share with other writers a tip on the Medium search function.
I did a search on Medium’s search engine for this article and got tantalizing results that I’m still sifting. It’s very interesting — I found great articles, people, publications, and tags. Medium has a medium-powerful search function; here’s what I entered:
“human survival”
I entered it just like that, with the quotes but no caps or other punctuation.
Okay now. I’m going to my own source for this beginning part of this article. I will be backed up by other writers and articles, links at end of this essay. I’ve been fascinated by this whole subject of primal living for nearly 60 years now, plus I now live a fairly primal life.
What You Need To Survive: Part I
Food and a safe place to sleep.
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When you strip away everything else, this is what you need — it’s all you need biologically. Some people would add water as a survival need. There are two reasons it’s sort of optional in terms of adding it formally. One is that foods, especially starches, create water in your body in the course of digestion.
The other reason is that water is ubiquitous. Maybe nowadays not so much — safe, clean water is harder to find. Still…
Another question about food and water is how often. The answer is that you can go days and weeks without — if you know what you’re doing.
I remember an article I read about the reindeer people in the Arctic. This one man, a reindeer hunter, decked out in typical primitive clothing and implements, was posing with a reindeer that he’d chased down and killed.
He was about to spend some time, maybe weeks, eating the animal. He had a giant potbelly that could accommodate huge meals. (I don’t remember the details, and I’ve never re-found that article.) I do believe that primal hunter-gatherers favored meat-eating — and that they even cooked the meat sometimes if a fire was handy. But I do have carnivore bias.
Sleeping safe is pretty obvious, but it’s a true complication. We are vulnerable when we sleep. In a primal environment you can’t lock yourself safely away.
Sleeping brings social considerations into the picture. If you’re part of a tribe you’ll possibly have dogs that guard at night, and other members of the tribe who can take shifts watching. Having a crazy old lady in the tribe can be useful: she can be paranoid and worried and not sleep much at night.
In conclusion for this part of building our well-developed human, we’ll stick with food, water, and a safe place to sleep. It seems simple, but think about those things in the late 20th Century and early 21st.
Take my word for this — it’s illegal in most places in the world to curl up and sleep outside your own home or even in wildernesses. I’ve been rousted more times than I’ve managed to sleep the night in certain settings, including 40 miles away from any other people in wildernesses. They find you with satellites and infrared from their helicopters. (Not paranoia — just the facts.)
And the merry-go-round of getting food to eat is insane. In U.S. America you have to make appointments and stand in long lines to get food from food banks. If you alternatively hunt food out in the country you can easily wind up in jail for poaching. It’s lose-lose.
It’s been more difficult to live the hunter-gatherer life for about 15,000 years now.
That said, I could live as a hunter-gatherer here where I live in Panama. I lack the needed hunting skills, but if I could create a small tribe it could be done. Strangely enough I have 1–3 people who read my articles who are interested in such a project. What a rip if 3 of us American expats formed a small tribe here in the semi-wilds of Los Santos.
What You Need To Survive: Part II
You need a tribe. Or to use a modern term, a society.
— — — — — — — — — — — —
Like I promised, we’re building a No-Frills, Well-Developed Human Bit by Bit.
*Food
*Water
*Safe Sleep
*Tribe or Society
What about clothing? Sleeping bags?
I said safe sleep, not comfortable sleep. Sometimes when it’s too cold and you’re at risk of freezing to death the best answer is to curl up under a shrub and sleep, or at least lie there. I’ve spent some (miserable) nights doing just that.
So curling up and sleeping or resting is one survival skill. Another skill, actually the reason Homo sapiens came to dominate the mammalian world is that we evolved to be walkers. You can walk 8–16 hours a day without burning many extra calories and without getting exhausted. I’ve walked 8 hours with a one-mile altitude gain many, many times in the Sierra Nevadas east of Fresno, California. And similar treks in other mountains elsewhere.
It’s strange to know that your caloric needs are about the same if you just hang out somewhere or spend your time walking. But don’t forget: we are evolved to be hunter-gatherer-nomads. Those traits evolved over millions and hundreds of thousands of years. Then 15,000 years ago came the agricultural revolution, and humans began forgetting what their true natures really were.
There is no significant evolution in 15,000 years. We are fully capable of returning to hunter-gatherer status. A good thing as our world collapses on us due to our over-exploitation of natural resources. And before you say, “But wait. There are old people, there are crippled or morbidly obese people who couldn’t walk 16 hours a day,” I need to say that there’s been a suspension of natural selection going on since the industrial revolution. But as a race, we’ll be returning to our roots as the year 2030 approaches, and for sure by 2040 for those of us who are still alive.
In other words, I’m not proposing to kill off the weak or unfit — but Mother Nature still wields the natural selection scythe.
Here’s Some Cool Reading for You:
This article has great information about building healthy and happy humans and survival:
Here’s the social structure we’ll be plugging in once we get our proto-human built and they become healthy, well-nourished, and involved with their environments:
We actually have living hunter-gatherer tribes right now, right here on Earth. This article explores diet, exercise, and our real-live hunter-gatherers:
Well that’s the basics of what I’m thinking. I’m not big on longform stories or writing redundant PDFs. I’ll wait for feedback and maybe clarify points if people have questions. Or who knows — I could maybe write another related article.
I thank you readers and writers. I never feel alone when I’m writing.
… Fred Ermlich
