[WalterBright]

The contestant montage often showed them building things. They clearly had decent skills at sawing and other carpentry. They also clearly did not watch previous seasons and learn :-/

The most consistent failure was in way overestimating their ability to do hard physical labor without food.

It's clear from watching the show that the path to victory, given woodcraft skills, is doing as little physical exertion as possible. Build a minimal shelter, spend all the rest of the effort obtaining food.

P.S. I wouldn't last a week on that show.

P.P.S. Anyone building a shelter out of 8" dia logs is doomed.

[steveBK123]

I wouldn't last a day on that show, but modern man, in our pining for the olden days .. grossly underestimates the % of time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories to survive.

[defrost]

    Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.  They know which fruit and animals are available at certain times, how to gather or hunt successfully and how to store foods. 

https://svacs.libguides.com/c.php?g=933180&p=6746395

How do we know this to be true?

There are still aboriginal people alive today that gather fod in the traditional manner - when I was 20 or so the Pintupi Nine wandered in, some stayed a few left and returned to the desert.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

There are still many people living hybrid lives, using modern metals and traditional knowledge to gather food, eg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

A key point here is 30+ thousand years of getting to know and shaping the landscape - promoting plants and animals over others, learning the movements and habits of animals, seasons of plants, not having closed in winters, etc.

[twelve40]

how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group in particular favorable climate that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia, or some other Asian countries which have been populous for many centuries.

[defrost]

> how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

What infomation do you have on pre European landing famine in Australia?

> my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group

The Swan Valley quote above applied to Western Australian and Central Desert groups prior to being shunted off traditional lands by European settlement (an area comfortably three times larger than Texas) - it continues to apply in areas where traditional practices on traditional lands continue.

https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

> that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

Recent genetics has confirmed what was also the local oral history, that people arrived, fanned out, and stayed where they first settled:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416

This runs contrary to the views espoused for decades by Windshuttle in Quadrant.

> furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia

?? Pre Dutch contact Indonesia ?

I specifically linked to the example of Australian hunter gathers.

You can take it that my earlier comment doesn't apply to Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc peoples of Alaska.

[twelve40]

> time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories

so you are reducing "humans" in the comment you are replying to, to Western Australian and Central Desert groups? that's not the majority of humans, who really did have to fight for calories

[steveBK123]

Exactly. You don't have to go back very far to find a lot of famines even in the "developed world".

Look back in history before the invention of nitrogen fertilizers (only about a century ago).. we spent nearly a century harvesting guano off uninhabited rock islands in order to produce fertilizer & gun powder. We even past laws to encourage it!

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

[WalterBright]

I read an article years ago where archaeologists studied the bones of pre-Columbian Native Americans. They found evidence of repeated famines.

[WalterBright]

For the fauna it's a full time job, too.