
A Woman Who Lives 200k Years in the Past - clumsysmurf
https://www.outsideonline.com/2411125/lynx-vilden-stone-age-life
======
cosmodisk
And why not if that's what floats her boat. I remember years ago, under very
unusual circumstances, I met this guy in his mid 70s,who was living in a tent
somewhere in a park or nearby forest in Stockholm.The guy could speak 6 or so
languages,was using his laptop every now and then and had a very sound mind.
Technically,he was homeless. He used to visit a homeless center in the city to
get some food. Apparently the guy just wanted to live this way because he was
sick and tired of the life he had earlier. Fair enough. The main problem with
all these ancient ways of living is healthcare: I could be a Robinson Crusoe
in some forest without issues, however as soon as I get asthma attack, some
nasty wound or a bacterial infection, I'm more or less dead...

~~~
agumonkey
as a kid reading Asterix comics (forest village in brittany) I'd fantasize
about living this way. Saying "I wouldn't miss a single thing about modern
80s.. except the pharmacy"

~~~
cosmodisk
Fond memories reading about them beating Roman soldiers!:)

------
gchamonlive
Can you claim to be living primitively while mounting horses? I believe hose
taming and its use for war and transportation is somewhat a recent technology
(~2000 BCE)

------
ngngngng
> If indeed our lives were better back when we lived in roving bands, would it
> be wise to consider how we might revive aspects of our deep past?

This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop
participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have
acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land
to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.

You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has
to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist
virtually everywhere.

All these modernities come together as if to say "either learn how to exist
like us or you have no right to exist."

~~~
munificent
_> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It
has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that
exist virtually everywhere._

Are you in the US? Most of the US is incredibly cheap and has virtually no
building codes. You don't see it if you never get out of the major metro
areas, but there is like a million miles of undeveloped cheap land.

A quick search reveals a pile of websites that specifically cater to this
offering acres in the middle of nowhere for less than a thousand bucks.

Of course, you're in the middle of fucking nowhere so all of the benefits of
modernity don't go with you. But if your goal is opt out of much of the social
contract, there is plenty of places in the US to do it.

~~~
perl4ever
I seem to remember there are places with little or no property taxes as well.
Nevada, Florida?

~~~
slfnflctd
I did a search on this a couple years ago and found a table of property tax
data (no idea where now). From what I recall, Mississippi, Alaska and Nevada
were all pretty low. There weren't as many low-tax areas as you might expect,
though, and I'm sure a few of those are less than hospitable.

Property taxes really are the hardest part of this idea. You can find ways to
unload almost every other expense (if you have enough time & energy, that
is!). I guess you could be a nomad, moving your campsite around a national
forest every couple weeks-- but you'd still need permits for any kind of
hunting or fishing, and too much gathering might also be frowned upon.

Honestly, this lady was right when she said the only way to really live
completely free in this age is to do it illegally. To be fair, though, there
are probably a lot of places where you could do it & be unlikely to get
caught.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Alaska is an outlier in a lot of ways; they pay you to be a resident. I know a
few military/coast guard folks who went up there -- Alaska is one of the top
requested posts in the Coast Guard, btw -- and retained their AK residency
even after moving elsewhere because of the tax benefit.

------
klyrs
Haha, neat! Lynx is a really awesome person. I met her at a winter survival
workshop. She's kind, generous and extremely observant. Not to mention, a mass
of specialized knowledge that you'll never hear about -- in my experience she
listens hard and says very little.

Folks are posting a lot of baseless, irrelevant and shallow dismissals here.
I'm happy to know she's got better things to do than read that drek.

------
cco
I happen to know a few people in the larger "primitive" community in the
Pacific Northwest, though I am not one myself. I can't speak for them but have
know them for >10 years and am pretty close with some.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I can do my best to answer.

~~~
zemvpferreira
Thanks! I’m curious to know how they handle health problems, big and small. Do
they use modern medicine as indiscriminately as one of us would?

~~~
cco
Definitely not as indiscriminately. Interestingly a large number of these
people went down this path initially because of chronic health problems, e.g.
autoimmune issues; things that our modern medical system is not great at
diagnosing or treating but sometimes radical diet changes or the like can
alleviate symptoms. For most run-of-the-mill things they'll just use natural
remedies which, if you have no experience with them, can be surprisingly
effective. Aspirin was derived from willow bark, chewing that bark gets rid of
a headache just as well.

With that said when things get serious and/or acute, the people I know do
still use modern medicine as a backstop. If someone were to break their leg
and have a piece of bone sticking out of their skin, I'm certain they would go
to a hospital. Or for instance if they couldn't breath because they caught
covid-19, I'm sure they'd go to a hospital and use a ventilator. There are
probably diehards who wouldn't, but those exist in cities too ;)

~~~
natmaka
Pandemics (COVID-19 included) aren't possible in an usual tribal zone, where
population density remains low (because there is not industrial ways to
produce food) and people travel much more slowly and rarely than we do
(because there is no vehicle).

Many (maybe even most(?)) our modern thingies, respirators included, are only
useful/necessary because we live as we do.

IMHO the bottom line is: are we more happy and fulfilled to live as we do than
to live like 'Lynx' (the woman subject of the article) does?

~~~
masonic
Even tribes trade and combat between themselves. European diseases traveled
quite readily between native populations in the Americas.

~~~
natmaka
They don't combat and trade as intensively and effectively as we do.

European diseases traveled because Europeans traveled.

~~~
int_19h
If you adjust the number of homicides per capita, tribal wars are far more
destructive that anything more modern (including WW1&2). It's hard to get the
right perspective on it, because hunter-gatherer societies are so small, the
death toll from warfare isn't just a large and impersonal number, but specific
people's stories. So then we compare it to our nameless millions of dead, and
proclaim ourselves to be monsters. But:

"Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and
nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of
25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s
easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject
to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than
murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults
murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term
information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading
cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau
people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about
their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named
several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went
like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband
was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That
husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his
murder.” Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and
contributed to the acceptance of centralized authority as tribal societies
grew larger."

~~~
natmaka
As far as I know all this is controversial. Some tribal zones are under nearly
constant low-intensity warfare, other know rare but rather sever episodes. In
many other areas war is sporadic and each conflict is, by convention, halted
after a rather limited event (first wound, first blood, or first death). In at
least some cases neighboring tribes intervention forbids escalation (as they
have members coming from the tribes at war, or want to avoid unpleasant side-
effects, for example arson).

Someone unhappy can escape from a tribal zone, and (albeit not easy) it is
much more easy than to escape from our civilization.

In the same vein escaping a tribe or tribal war may not be easy, but one may
have major problem showing to me that escaping modern society or modern war
(or, worse, a full-blown world war, or nuke war) is more easy.

In our very own towns there are very violent subcultures, composed of a rather
high amount of people. Many women living in gang zones have life paths
(companions killed, maimed, overdosed, in prison for life...) similar to the
ones of the New Guinea’s Iyau women. One may also check the lumpen
proletariat, living and dying in IMHO appalling conditions. Is this
representative of our civilization? Are those Iyau's women representative of
tribal life (in each and every tribe)? Are those last less able to escape than
gangzone women?

Each civilization has zones of extreme occurrences of nearly any type of event
(here of violence), and at least partially locks people into their present
situation.

Studies about the amount of violent deaths in the past are difficult to
assess. Some tribe members invented stories in order to satisfy their audience
(anthropologists).

What an individual is living (or really able to do) in a given culture is very
difficult to understand and represent in another context, as illustrated by
Horace Miner's Nacirema 'study'. Not to mention than cultural relativism and
moral relativism heavily taint all this. Moreover various forms of 'biases' in
studies, some extreme, are known (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Tribe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Tribe)
).

A fundamental question is to me "is someone born in a random tribe more free
than we are to chose his lifepath?"

The excerpt you quoted comes from Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel..." book.
This author opinion is quite different from some "tribal life is too violent,
we are more happy" motto (
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/jared-
diamon...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-
tribal-life-anthropology) )

------
cortesoft
> Our wild history is presented as a time before the world was scarred by
> borders, before politics, before race, before even the concept of identity
> carved out its demarcations of who belongs and where.

This is just flat wrong. Tribal politics are brutal, and any ancient community
would have a very strong sense of identity, and about who belonged and who
didn't. Life was way harder for people who didn't fit into the role assigned
by their tribe; if you didn't conform, and were kicked out, you would die.

~~~
Thorentis
Came here to say this. This writer is clearly projecting her own opinion of
what an ideal society looks like into the past. People usually do this as a
way to convince people of why their world view is correct ("this is how people
used to do it!"). In this case though, it is blatantly wrong.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Agreed. Most of these ancient societies would be completely alien to us. Even
pre-US Civil War would be different enough to make the average USA-ian
uncomfortable.

------
pascalxus
I've been on long hikes through the woods where few people tread. One thing
I've noticed, is the apparent scarcity of food: at least food that we
recognize as "food". There's no animals to hunt for, no bird's nest, no wild
animals, even after a 4 hour long hike. No berries, no blueberries or anything
fancy like that.

What there is quite a bit of is edible greens: dandelions, oxylis, purslane,
amaranth, lots of edible green plants and weeds. I can only imagine that our
ancestors must of lived off greens.

Modern day studies of wild human tribes in africa that really do live the way
people lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, actually mainly subsist on
greens. They've been studied, and the researchers have noted that they
basically graze on leafy green vegetables all days, lucky to find anything
else.

As, the article alluded to, hunger was the norm, pretty much all day,
everyday. This day and age, people think of hunger as an anomoly, a problem,
something you can't experience for more than a few minutes without going
crazy.

~~~
drewnick
Fair point, but it depends on where you live. Many places have lots of smaller
animals like squirrels and rabbits. Even some deserts have rabbits and field
mice, etc.

~~~
pascalxus
But, those animals are trained to stay away from humans. You won't see them
out in the wilderness, at least not for long. And, you won't be able to catch
up to one in the brushes where there's thorns, bushes, and all kinds of stuff
that can stick you.

~~~
veggieburglar
You won’t see them while you’re hiking, because you’re making lots of noise
and likely not out at the right times. Hunting , especially primitive hunting,
is usually either lots of traps and snares or lots and lots of waiting.

------
freepor
LOL. With inherited wealth allowing her to enforce her property rights with an
armed government, with a log cabin built with modern technology, with fuckin’
running water. She lives 110 years in the past, not 200,000.

------
starpilot
This is really just big LARPing

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-
playing_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game)

that is for-profit by running classes. It talks about how she goes to bars,
and the local library to check her email, and flies to other countries.
Article is a bit of an advertorial for her programs (which do sound cool),
similar to another one from Outside on this guy's group dirt bike trips:
[https://www.outsideonline.com/2410685/wilderness-
collective-...](https://www.outsideonline.com/2410685/wilderness-collective-
men-outdoor-therapy)

Overall takeaway is that organized wilderness travel is something that appeals
to techies heavily.

~~~
samatman
It's not LARPing, it's creative anachronism.

There's a difference.

------
subsubzero
If you like stuff like this you may like this article,
[https://www.businessinsider.com/adrain-chessers-photos-of-
hu...](https://www.businessinsider.com/adrain-chessers-photos-of-hunter-
gatherer-americans-2014-5#jp-hartsong-finisia-madrano-and-their-group-live-
nomadically-and-travel-according-to-the-seasons-1) it follows a band of hunter
gatherers who travel through the great basin desert (Nevada, Utah, and Calif)
and has some amazing pictures of a way of life that I didn't think existed
anymore. They aren't as strict as the OP's article (they have facebook pages)
but really fascinating nonetheless.

------
divbzero
I wonder when in (pre)history commerce first developed. 200,000 years ago
could Lynx have offered classes in return for food, shells, or an early form
of debt? ( _e.g._ , “Teach me to fish and I will share half of my first year’s
catch with you.”)

------
colinmegill
We would be out of deer the first week.

~~~
greedo
There's over 30 million deer in North America. And moose, and antelope, and
bear, beaver, elk, geese, ducks, quail, pheasant. I think there's plenty of
wildlife to feed us.

~~~
Google234
I think you need to think some more. Search how many people there are in North
America. 1 deer might feed one person for 1 week so basically that’s enough
food to Feed everyone for a day?

~~~
greedo
That's why I included all the other wildlife, not to mention fish. And deer
breed like rabbits.

~~~
Google234
Dude I think 95% of the human population would die if we went back to hunter
gatherer culture. Modern agriculture is what sustains our population.

~~~
greedo
Oh definitely. HG culture is hard! The skills aren't easily learned, and
depend on knowledge specific to a region. What would really kill most of us is
water issues.

~~~
int_19h
It's not just about skills. The point, again, is that there is simply not
enough game (or edible plants, for that matter) to sustain out present
population levels. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Look at some of the most successful historical hunter-gatherer societies, the
ones that lived in areas that are naturally abundant with food - e.g.
temperate rainforests with bountiful rivers, like Japan or American PNW. But
even then, we're talking about the largest communities consisting of several
hundred people, maybe a thousand - nowhere near our present population
density.

------
munk-a
Ah, those domesticated horses seem to be helping quite a bit.

~~~
starpilot
Not to mention established hiking trails built by state trailworkers.

~~~
EL_Loco
Or the rifle she uses to hunt sometimes.

------
every
I bet I can guess which browser she uses...

------
cortesoft
I really can never understand this desire to get away from it all and live
primitively. It sounds so miserable. I love modern conveniences and
technology.

------
JKCalhoun
I kind of just want to live 50 years in the past. The 70's feel like a
different planet now.

I want turn to off my laptop and phone, turn on my CB...

------
mnw21cam
Ben Fogle has gone round and made quite a few TV programmes about people who
have escaped to the wild like this.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Fogle:_New_Lives_in_the_Wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Fogle:_New_Lives_in_the_Wild)

------
abeppu
On the one hand, this sounds cool.

On the other hand ... my understanding is the U.S. took so much land through
violence and lying, and often with some rhetoric about how the native people
that didn't farm or settle and live on specific parcels weren't "civilized".
There was an assumption that Americans establishing farms and towns and
whatever was inherently superior to the way Native Americans occupied the land
they had been on since time literally immemorial.

So it's cool, it's kinda bad-ass what she's doing. But isn't it also fucked
up? Isn't it deeply hypocritical to occupy land that was taken from people in
part using the justification that the way they lived wasn't civil or modern or
productive enough, and then try to live on it in a "wild" way?

I don't know anything about the specifics of the history of interactions of
the tribes of the Okanagan area, where Twisp is. But I'm guessing that their
inheritance didn't give them the freedom to choose how they wanted to live, or
how they wanted to relate to a changing world. And I'm disappointed that
absolutely none of that is even mentioned in passing in this article.

~~~
georgeoliver
Not to discount your comment which I largely agree with, but to the article's
credit there is at least passing mention:

>Some suggest that the primitive-skills community can run the risk of
appropriating indigenousness. Practitioners of bushcraft draw liberally from
the world’s traditions but are themselves typically white people, often
endowed with at least some degree of privilege. “There is an inherent
colonialism built into the primitive-skills idea,” says Kiliii Yüyan, a
photographer, survival expert, and one of Lynx’s occasional collaborators, who
is a Chinese-American descendent of the Nanai people of Siberia. “Part of the
idea is that you can be air-dropped into anywhere and survive off the land.
Indigenous literally means ‘of a place’—survival is almost the exact opposite
of that.”

~~~
abeppu
I guess what I think is absent is a recognition that Lynx is able to do what
she does in part because she is a beneficiary of a history which specifically
prevented others from living on the land. "Appropriation" of skills from
traditional practices to me reads as a distinct harm from the very physical
appropriation of actual territory.

------
aquarin
If you want to live like 200k years in the past, do not use language and
money.

------
lihaciudaniel
Ted Kaczynzksi would be rolling in his gr... Prison cell, not everyone has the
ability to live like that.

------
reeeeee
The journalist writes that she "drives through the electric moss of the North
Cascades". What does that mean?

~~~
kyleblarson
Also likely a reference to the fact that you drive through Newhalem on the way
over the pass, which is a company town owned by Seattle City Light for hyrdo
operations. I live in the next town over from Twisp and see Lynx and her crews
out in the mountains and in town once in a while. The town I live in,
Winthrop, has a Western theme and I always wonder if the summer tourists might
think they're just part of the Western act.

------
aazaa
What's interesting is what this article doesn't mention. Take, for example,
antibiotics.

It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've
had them for fewer than 100 years. Take one wrong step, make one bad food
decision, or cut yourself building something and it could be game over.

For example, take Calvin Coolidge Jr.:

> ... while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds,
> sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his
> right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of
> a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin,
> Jr. was dead within a week.

[https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-
context-...](https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-
calvin-jr-s-untimely-death/)

Lincoln's son, William, died from typhoid fever. I bring up these two cases
because the children of well-to-do, powerful men dying from these diseases
today would be a scandal. But not long ago, it was to be expected from time to
time.

I'd be curios whether Lynx has ever had to go to the hospital for an
infection, or maybe childbirth.

~~~
evjim
President Garfield died from blood poisoning too. But interestingly, they
think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who
fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them and no
healthcare to remove it. But Garfield being president had all sorts of
excessive medical attention before proper sanitation procedures were common in
US medical practice. By the way I've just read Candice Miller's book on him
and find her writing style great.

~~~
watwut
> But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have
> survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with
> bullets still inside them

Many of those poor soldiers died - including from infections.

~~~
simonh
Nobody is saying they didn't, that isn't the point being made.

------
codecamper
Looks all the 30+ year olds died out.

------
ctdonath
Check out Primitive Technology on YouTube for similar.

------
NathanRampersad
This is quite an interesting article!

------
peter303
"Into the Wild"

------
markdown
> a 54-year-old British expat

Immigrant. She isn't an expat.

~~~
Nursie
She's both, expat is just a term used (mostly by brits in my experience) to
refer to people of British origin living abroad. It refers to migrants.

~~~
markdown
I see. In my part of the world, an expat is someone who took a job in another
country. This country where they are currently resident isn't their home; they
are merely there for the duration of their contract.

------
donio
> It’s hard to be a hunter-gatherer these days.

It's the opposite. Today if things go really bad, let's say you or someone you
care about gets injured, really sick or run out of food you can fall back to
civilization instead of just dying.

Maybe there are people who play in hardcore mode but they won't be the ones
you hear about.

~~~
chongli
That’s assuming you can make it back to civilization. If you live in a remote
area, that may be difficult or impossible.

Hunter-gatherers of the past, on the other hand, had friends and family to
take care of them. Sure, they didn’t have access to modern medicine, but at
least they had someone to feed them and keep them warm while they attempted to
heal.

~~~
tathougies
If that family could manage to acquire the resources needed to heal. More
likely, they would just die after a long and painful death and their family
would mourn and hope they could birth another baby to take your place.

~~~
chongli
Depends on what type of injury it is. There are lots of injuries that don’t
require medical attention, such as minor sprains and hairline fractures, that
you could survive as long as you had someone to feed you and take care of you.

I don’t think you can say you’re “more likely” to just die just because you
don’t have access to a doctor.

~~~
tathougies
Literally no one needs to go to the doctor for a sprain.

~~~
tonyarkles
Ehhh... depending on the severity, an X-Ray isn’t a bad idea to confirm that
you haven’t messed something up in there.

------
tathougies
No the issue is that people like your acquaintance rely on other people living
life in a way they don't want to in order to subsidize their preferred way of
life. I'm all for homesteading by yourself away from society, but the moment
you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the
rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts
to matter.

~~~
gerbilly
> the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the
> people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid
> my opinion starts to matter.

I'm not sure it matters that much.

The number of people doing this is so vanishingly small that I'd characterize
your opinion on the matter as peevish.

Insisting that people be consistent and that everything always be fair a
regressive trait.

~~~
koheripbal
Actually, you would be surprised.

In New York City, there are thousands of "street homeless", despite there
being tens of thousands of bed available in shelters.

~~~
cosmodisk
Most Western countries could eliminate homelessness in one day if it was just
about the beds in shelters. People opt for a straet instead of a shelter
mainly because: it may not be safe there ( drugs, alcohol, aggressive
behaviour) or they are on the other side of the spectrum, such as drug
addicts, mentally ill and etc. Usually a holistic approach is needed.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Yeah if it was just about having enough beds somewhere then we wouldn't have
issues. But there is a lot of mental health, addiction, and trauma -- often
feeding off each other, e.g. people with metal health issues turn to drugs to
self medicate -- and that requires more than just a place to keep them.

In a lot of cases it's more about harm reduction (to themselves, and to the
local community) then getting them fixed in a home. Cuz you're not going to
rehab some of these people.

The tiny handful of people who are homeless because "they don't like the
rules, man" are statistically irrelevant.

------
JetBen
I don't like how she is referred to as a "woman", as by now, we all know that
there is no such thing as "gender". Why can't it just be called a "person"??
Seriously people, this is the 20th century, ok.

~~~
Thorentis
Actually it's the the 21st century right now. And no, there's nothing wrong
with referring to her as a woman.

