Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)

#22

Post by pmoriarty »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #12

A fascinating story from 2013. There was an interesting short follow up from the Siberian Times a year after the Smithsonian piece - the last surviving member was seeking help, or maybe just tiring of isolation, in her 70s. http://www.businessinsider.com/agafya-lykova-asks-for-help-2...

  "I am all alone, my years are big, my health is bad, I keep
  getting ill," Agafia said in the letter cited by the
  newspaper. "There is a lump on my right breast, and my strength
  is going. There is a need for a person, a helper, assuming
  there are kind people in the world, as the world has always had
  kind people."

  The thought of the elderly Agafia facing such a harsh winter is
  tough. But not all locals are sympathetic -- she has been
  offered a winter home in a local village before, the Siberian
  Times reports, but has refused it.

  "She is being a little cunning," Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor of
  the local paper Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy, told the Siberian
  Times. "She has no hunger. She wants to attract more
  attention. She has enough cereals, bags of them lie on her
  porch, and everywhere. And she has enough potatoes."
That editor sounds a bit heartless. She's clearly gone about as far as anyone can be expected to go, living virtually her whole life in isolation, and now she's 70 years old and is having a hard time taking surviving in one of the harshest environments on earth.

After a while, your body starts to break down, and some cereal and potatoes aren't going to cut it. She needs things like firewood and water. Even simply cooking will eventually be impossible to do when one gets old enough, especially under those primitive conditions.

Besides, she's probably lonely. Many elderly people suffer from depression and take their own lives because of their isolation. How hard can it be to have some sympathy for that?

Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)

#26

Post by rangibaby »

quakeguy wrote: post #25
andrewvijay wrote: post #21

Found them gave them pneumonia and killed them.

Is your comment necessary?

It's basically the fate of "discovered" people everywhere. Various native groups around the world would probably have beaten off conquistadors etc if it wasn't for the diseases they brought with them.

Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)

#28

Post by shostack »

T0T0R0 wrote: post #14
narrator wrote: post #4

Primitive Technology is really interesting. This guy is super good at it : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.

The best part about that guy is the total absence of spoken language. But, then, the source of the iron is also pretty incredible: Then I collected orange iron bacteria from the creek (iron oxide), mixed it with charcoal powder (carbon to reduce oxide to metal) and wood ash (flux to lower the melting point) and formed it into a cylindrical brick. I filled the furnace with charcoal, put the ore brick in and commenced…

The really impressive feat is how humanity figured that out to begin with.

Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)

#29

Post by 13of40 »

T0T0R0 wrote: post #14
narrator wrote: post #4

Primitive Technology is really interesting. This guy is super good at it : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.

The best part about that guy is the total absence of spoken language. But, then, the source of the iron is also pretty incredible: Then I collected orange iron bacteria from the creek (iron oxide), mixed it with charcoal powder (carbon to reduce oxide to metal) and wood ash (flux to lower the melting point) and formed it into a cylindrical brick. I filled the furnace with charcoal, put the ore brick in and commenced…

Sometimes you can find it just lying around on the ground:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2909898/Befor...

Post reply on HN