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For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

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Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I guess they did not know/had not rediscovered tanning, because > A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. they did not replace their kettles by a leather cauldron.

Would they have had tannin available?

If they didn't have tannin from tree barks, they could have used brain tanning (from the brains of the animal they killed) or made rawhide (which doesn't require tannins).

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#92
There were 4 children, and one died. I have often wondered why the world's homo sapien population did not grow faster during the period 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC. In his book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall has argued that fully modern homo sapiens took shape around 200,000 BC and left Africa around 150,000 BC. http://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/08133...

The growth of the population was very slow. Someone suggested that at their peak there were 100 million bison worldwide, but it seems to have taken most of human history to catch up with the bison -- we seem to have hit that number only when we began agriculture. As late as the year 1300, the historian Fernand Braudel estimates a world wide population of only 500 million people. We became one of the most successful species in the history of the planet, so why wasn't there faster growth, for such a long time?

That question interests me, so it also interests me that a family, living alone, with fanatic Christian fundamentalist beliefs and no access to contraceptives, still only ends up having 3 surviving children -- not a whole lot in excess of the replacement rate.

Something similar to this must have been going on for many thousands of years.

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#93

As a boy there was a common game that friends would play, which was -- if Newton were to come back today, what technology would he be most shocked about. I found this quote interesting, and I think shows how hard it may be to predict such things: "What amazed him most of all," Peskov recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!'"

My grandfather was born in Abakan, and published several books on the history of the region. He visited Agafia several times by helicopter with my uncle, after the other members of her family had passed.

When I was around 15, he showed me a video of their first encounter with her, and to this day I cannot get the image of the pure terror on her face out of my mind. She had multiple visitors before, but something about this visit scared her so much that she hid inside for hours.

It turned out that this was the first visit where someone in the crew had brought video equipment (one of those big shoulder-mounted VHS cameras), and Agafia would later tell my grandfather that she thought this thing would 'steal her soul.' She wasn't shocked in amazement at the new technology, this was pure fear.

Reminds me of one of the early silent film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station [1], which allegedly was so realistic that people ran out of the movie theater screaming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LArriv%C3%A9e_dun_train_en_gare...

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I guess they did not know/had not rediscovered tanning, because > A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. they did not replace their kettles by a leather cauldron.

Would they have had tannin available?

They're readily available in bark and some leaves, though you'd need to know how to extract it.

A simpler alternative is "brain tanning", there's an old saying that each animal has enough brain to tan its hide which is probably true enough for basic purposes. Brain tanning is still the way native americans do their tanning (colonists brought vegetable tanning to the americas, and modern mineral and chemical tannings arose during the 19th century)

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#96

There were 4 children, and one died. I have often wondered why the world's homo sapien population did not grow faster during the period 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC. In his book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall has argued that fully modern homo sapiens took shape around 200,000 BC and left Africa around 150,000 BC. http://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/08133... The growth of the population was very slow. So…

[deleted]

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#97

> Old Karp was usually delighted by the latest innovations that the scientists brought up from their camp, and though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had set foot on the moon, he adapted swiftly to the idea of satellites. The Lykovs had noticed them as early as the 1950s, when "the stars began to go quickly across the sky," and Karp himself conceived a theory to explain this: "People have thought something…

It makes me a little jealous of the quality of sky they must have had.

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#98

How did they tell their kids about the birds and the bees? Must have been very awkward as a teenager.

How so? Humans survived for quite some time indeed without the concept of hiding sexuality from children. I would imagine in prehistory, the birds and the bees was explained through visual observation of your elders or just by figuring it out when the urge arose. Sex doesn't really need to be explained or defined unless you have a need to put it into context of cultural acceptance (which doesn't matter in this case).

In this case, with the people being heavily religious (and not knowing much about their religion), it may have been handled differently. It just didn't need to be.

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#99

There were 4 children, and one died. I have often wondered why the world's homo sapien population did not grow faster during the period 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC. In his book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall has argued that fully modern homo sapiens took shape around 200,000 BC and left Africa around 150,000 BC. http://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/08133... The growth of the population was very slow. So…

They were also at times barely surviving. They might not have had much interest in sex. Even if they did, the mother's reproductive processes may have been reduced due to lack energy/nutrition. You also don't know how many stillbirths they had. It's probably not something they would readily talk about, (and not something that the geologists were eager to discuss).

Re: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

#100

There were 4 children, and one died. I have often wondered why the world's homo sapien population did not grow faster during the period 200,000 BC to 10,000 BC. In his book Extinct Humans, Ian Tattersall has argued that fully modern homo sapiens took shape around 200,000 BC and left Africa around 150,000 BC. http://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/08133... The growth of the population was very slow. So…

Poor nutrition reduces fertility.
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