You find yourself in the cretaceous

[Jokodo]

Yes, they were millions of years away. But fierce bipedal predators about our size were a well known threat to small dinosaurs, and I don't think they'd likely consult a taxonomist before running.

All animals have types of threats or food pretty hard coded. Humans are uniquely flexible in this thinking. The biggest mammal they'd ever seen would have been a mouse like creature. I don't think we'd have that much to fear. Even from big lizards. It's the classic, they'd fear us more than we fear them. It's only if they're starving or felt threatened they'd attack.

We've also been designed (by nature) to communicate a lot, and take a lot of what we hear from others for true, unchecked. Other people telling us what berries and mushrooms we should eat and which ones we shouldn't, or showing us how to recognize by their green parts plants with tubers worth digging out when it's off season for berries and nuts, is literally a central part of the environment in which we evolved. The Jamestown colony almost got eradicated from famine, and they were equipped with steel tools, division of labor, crop seeds, and in contact with knowledgeable locals, and in a very similar ecosystem to the one they came from. There is a reason many biogeographers don't differentiate between the Nearctic biogeographical region and the Palaeoarctic one but rather lump them together as one  Holarctic_realm - the differences in flora and fauna are much smaller than those between similar latitudes/climates in South America and Africa, or even Africa and South East Asia.

The communication is an important thing. We've evolved to be in packs. Depression would most likely be our biggest enemy.

The Jamestown colonists arrived in a pack. They didn't starve from depression and a lack of communication for psychological comfort, they starved from insufficient knowledge about edible local wildlife and flora when their crop failed and lack of communication to inform them of possible survival strategies.

 

[Jokodo]

Yes, they were millions of years away. But fierce bipedal predators about our size were a well known threat to small dinosaurs, and I don't think they'd likely consult a taxonomist before running.

All animals have types of threats or food pretty hard coded. Humans are uniquely flexible in this thinking. The biggest mammal they'd ever seen would have been a mouse like creature.

That's (almost - the largest mammals of the time may have reached badger-size) true, but they're not taxonomists, they're forest critters. To any contemporary observer who isn't a taxonomist, a human looks more like a theropod dinosaur that lost its tail in an accident than like a rat-like or opossum-like contemporary mammal. If a chicken sized dinosaur has learnt to run from bipedal predators in the 1-3 metres range, it'll run from us.

 

[Jokodo]

I think we are communicating past each other, and the reason for that is I think you're misunderstanding the OP.

This thread, as far as I can tell from the title and OP, isn't about whether human hunter-gatherers could carve out a niche for themselves in a Cretaceous environment. We seem to agree that they could. The question is what you would bring to the Cretaceous to increase your odds, the you presumably being to an average 20th century Western person with a desk job who knows more about setting up a computer and filing a tax return than about how to identify likely places of congregation or bottlenecks for the migration of small animals where it's worth putting up traps, or how to make fibruous roots palatable.

 

[DrZoidberg]

All animals have types of threats or food pretty hard coded. Humans are uniquely flexible in this thinking. The biggest mammal they'd ever seen would have been a mouse like creature. I don't think we'd have that much to fear. Even from big lizards. It's the classic, they'd fear us more than we fear them. It's only if they're starving or felt threatened they'd attack.



The communication is an important thing. We've evolved to be in packs. Depression would most likely be our biggest enemy.

The Jamestown colonists arrived in a pack. They didn't starve from depression and a lack of communication for psychological comfort, they starved from insufficient knowledge about edible local wildlife and flora when their crop failed and lack of communication to inform them of possible survival strategies.

I think what killed Jamestown was incredibly bad planning. They had also a lot of bad luck. But the incredibly bad planning didn't help.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I think we are communicating past each other, and the reason for that is I think you're misunderstanding the OP.

This thread, as far as I can tell from the title and OP, isn't about whether human hunter-gatherers could carve out a niche for themselves in a Cretaceous environment. We seem to agree that they could. The question is what you would bring to the Cretaceous to increase your odds, the you presumably being to an average 20th century Western person with a desk job who knows more about setting up a computer and filing a tax return than about how to identify likely places of congregation or bottlenecks for the migration of small animals where it's worth putting up traps, or how to make fibruous roots palatable.

I answered that in my first post here. I'd bring camping gear.

Going out into the woods with nothing but a pocket knife and surviving for weeks in the wild, is a fairy common Swedish thing to do. I know many people who have done it. I've talked to them about it. I have not done it.

There's a number of factors at play.

1) These are all very fit and very manly men.
2) They have had military training for exactly this (something which most Swedish men have had).
3) They do it in the summer at a time which is the most favourable.

Me personally, I'd die almost in an instant. I'm very much an indoors guy. I did go hiking for a month in the alps this summer, and compared to most people, since I am Swedish, I'm probably more sporty and outdoorsy than men in general. But... I fucking hate camping. HATE HATE HATE. My psyche would crumble pretty fucking fast. Which I'm pretty sure would be my nemesis.

I think I'd know what to do and how to behave to survive. I just doubt that I'd be able to do it anyway. I don't have it in me. My girlfriend would be kickass. She's like a female Rambo. I am not.

 

[Jokodo]

I think we are communicating past each other, and the reason for that is I think you're misunderstanding the OP.

This thread, as far as I can tell from the title and OP, isn't about whether human hunter-gatherers could carve out a niche for themselves in a Cretaceous environment. We seem to agree that they could. The question is what you would bring to the Cretaceous to increase your odds, the you presumably being to an average 20th century Western person with a desk job who knows more about setting up a computer and filing a tax return than about how to identify likely places of congregation or bottlenecks for the migration of small animals where it's worth putting up traps, or how to make fibruous roots palatable.

I answered that in my first post here. I'd bring camping gear.

Going out into the woods with nothing but a pocket knife and surviving for weeks in the wild, is a fairy common Swedish thing to do. I know many people who have done it. I've talked to them about it. I have not done it.

There's a number of factors at play.

1) These are all very fit and very manly men.
2) They have had military training for exactly this (something which most Swedish men have had).
3) They do it in the summer at a time which is the most favourable.

Me personally, I'd die almost in an instant. I'm very much an indoors guy. I did go hiking for a month in the alps this summer, and compared to most people, since I am Swedish, I'm probably more sporty and outdoorsy than men in general. But... I fucking hate camping. HATE HATE HATE. My psyche would crumble pretty fucking fast. Which I'm pretty sure would be my nemesis.

I think I'd know what to do and how to behave to survive. I just doubt that I'd be able to do it anyway. I don't have it in me. My girlfriend would be kickass. She's like a female Rambo. I am not.

I guess your girlfriend might have an even chance of surviving the winter in Southern Sweden if it was a mast year (more beech nuts but also more mice and boars to catch/trap), less in an off year, a 15% chance to survive the dry season in the African Savannah or the winter in Patagonia were most of the plants and animals are unfamiliar, and slightly (though really only slightly) less in most cretaceous environments to survive winter/dry season.

Surviving in the wild requires specialised knowledge, and "being rambo" is not a substitute for that. Staying in your lokal ecosystem helps because some of that specialised knowledge has entered folk knowledge, like that you can eat strawberries and rose hips but should stay away from yews and nightshade, maybe even that elder berries and beechnuts should be heated if you plan to consume them in large quantities. The cretaceous is not an alien place (the Permian is, kind of, especially as far as plant life is concerned - did you know mammals have been around for longer than flowering plants?), but it's different enough for your present day north central European folk knowledge to be useless - even in other contemporary environments it can be fairly useless.

 

[Jokodo]

All animals have types of threats or food pretty hard coded. Humans are uniquely flexible in this thinking. The biggest mammal they'd ever seen would have been a mouse like creature. I don't think we'd have that much to fear. Even from big lizards. It's the classic, they'd fear us more than we fear them. It's only if they're starving or felt threatened they'd attack.



The communication is an important thing. We've evolved to be in packs. Depression would most likely be our biggest enemy.

The Jamestown colonists arrived in a pack. They didn't starve from depression and a lack of communication for psychological comfort, they starved from insufficient knowledge about edible local wildlife and flora when their crop failed and lack of communication to inform them of possible survival strategies.

I think what killed Jamestown was incredibly bad planning. They had also a lot of bad luck. But the incredibly bad planning didn't help.

They thought they knew what they were doing, and they were in an almost familiar environment.

 

[untermensche]

Maybe you can, maybe you can't.

Who said you needed to?

That also would add to the totality of matter/energy in the universe.

You can't add matter now and you can't do it in the past either.

Same universe.

"Same universe" is actually a pretty good argument that your talk about "adding matter" is void since you're only moving it around, but whatever.

No it isn't.

Same universe means same rules apply to it. If you can't add energy to this universe you can't add it to any prior configurations of this universe.

Even if we accept the absurd notion that the past is out there, a notion that has zero evidence supporting it, that does not mean you can change it.

To change it would require acting upon it. Which would mean projecting energy into it.

Which would mean adding energy to it.

 

[Jokodo]

Maybe you can, maybe you can't.

Who said you needed to?

That also would add to the totality of matter/energy in the universe.

You can't add matter now and you can't do it in the past either.

Same universe.

"Same universe" is actually a pretty good argument that your talk about "adding matter" is void since you're only moving it around, but whatever.

No it isn't.

Same universe means same rules apply to it. If you can't add energy to this universe you can't add it to any prior configurations of this universe.

Even if we accept the absurd notion that the past is out there, a notion that has zero evidence supporting it, that does not mean you can change it.

To change it would require acting upon it. Which would mean projecting energy into it.

Which would mean adding energy to it.

Since you're here, have you published your revolutionary paper that demonstrates that all of modern prophylactic dentistry is a huge scam since there's 0 atomic turnover in the enamel?

Why should anyone take you word for what can't be when you've made plainly false claims about what isn't?

 

[untermensche]

No it isn't.

Same universe means same rules apply to it. If you can't add energy to this universe you can't add it to any prior configurations of this universe.

Even if we accept the absurd notion that the past is out there, a notion that has zero evidence supporting it, that does not mean you can change it.

To change it would require acting upon it. Which would mean projecting energy into it.

Which would mean adding energy to it.

Since you're here, have you published your revolutionary paper that demonstrates that all of modern prophylactic dentistry is a huge scam since there's 0 atomic turnover in the enamel?

Why should anyone take you word for what can't be when you've made plainly false claims about what isn't?

Tooth enamel does not turnover during life and, for teeth enamel radiocarbon content was found to be close to the atmospheric level at the time of tooth formation.

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/227839.pdf

Not my claims.

But you are absurdly claiming to be able to change the past.

How do you do that without working on the past?

How do you work on the past without projecting energy into it?

How do you project energy into the past without adding to the totality of energy in the universe in the past?

Your idea of time travel is a childish absurdity.

Not science in any way.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I think we are communicating past each other, and the reason for that is I think you're misunderstanding the OP.

This thread, as far as I can tell from the title and OP, isn't about whether human hunter-gatherers could carve out a niche for themselves in a Cretaceous environment. We seem to agree that they could. The question is what you would bring to the Cretaceous to increase your odds, the you presumably being to an average 20th century Western person with a desk job who knows more about setting up a computer and filing a tax return than about how to identify likely places of congregation or bottlenecks for the migration of small animals where it's worth putting up traps, or how to make fibruous roots palatable.

I answered that in my first post here. I'd bring camping gear.

Going out into the woods with nothing but a pocket knife and surviving for weeks in the wild, is a fairy common Swedish thing to do. I know many people who have done it. I've talked to them about it. I have not done it.

There's a number of factors at play.

1) These are all very fit and very manly men.
2) They have had military training for exactly this (something which most Swedish men have had).
3) They do it in the summer at a time which is the most favourable.

Me personally, I'd die almost in an instant. I'm very much an indoors guy. I did go hiking for a month in the alps this summer, and compared to most people, since I am Swedish, I'm probably more sporty and outdoorsy than men in general. But... I fucking hate camping. HATE HATE HATE. My psyche would crumble pretty fucking fast. Which I'm pretty sure would be my nemesis.

I think I'd know what to do and how to behave to survive. I just doubt that I'd be able to do it anyway. I don't have it in me. My girlfriend would be kickass. She's like a female Rambo. I am not.

I guess your girlfriend might have an even chance of surviving the winter in Southern Sweden if it was a mast year (more beech nuts but also more mice and boars to catch/trap), less in an off year, a 15% chance to survive the dry season in the African Savannah or the winter in Patagonia were most of the plants and animals are unfamiliar, and slightly (though really only slightly) less in the the cretaceous.

Surviving in the wild requires specialised knowledge, and "being rambo" is not a substitute for that. Staying in your lokal ecosystem helps because some of that specialised knowledge has entered folk knowledge, like that you can eat strawberries and rose hips but should stay away from yews and nightshade, maybe even that elder berries and beechnuts should be heated if you plan to consume them in large quantities. The cretaceous is not an alien place (the Permian is, kind of, especially as far as plant life is concerned - did you know mammals have been around for longer than flowering plants?), but it's different enough for your present day north central European folk knowledge to be useless - even in other contemporary environments it can be fairly useless.

I highly doubt it'd be us snacking on Scandinavian boars. Rather the opposite. Without serious firepower boars are pretty safe from humans They are amazingly hard to kill. I've come across plenty over the years. It's like a little tank on legs. An angry little tank. If you don't kill them with the first shot, you've just annoyed them.

The problem with the Scandinavian winter is exposure. Not food. There's food everywhere, all over Sweden (below the treeline). All year round. If we get to bring warm clothes, it'd be a breeze. And a light source. Life's no fun when you only have 3 hours of sunlight per day.

That would perhaps be the way to survive the Cretacous. Head up north where cold blooded creatures can't survive? That's pretty much a mammals secret weapon. Our ability to endure extreme temperatures (compared to lizards)

 

[untermensche]

You could create a computer simulation knowing everything we know and test your theories somewhat.

But better to make a game where you get to shoot T-Rexes attacking you with a gun that makes them explode.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I think what killed Jamestown was incredibly bad planning. They had also a lot of bad luck. But the incredibly bad planning didn't help.

They thought they knew what they were doing, and they were in an almost familiar environment.

I recently listened to this radio documentary on it. It has the best named show on utopian projects ever, "Nice Try"

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/nice-try/jamestown-utopia-for-whom/

They run through all the bad ideas they had.

I have no idea how well researched it was.

 

[Jokodo]

I guess your girlfriend might have an even chance of surviving the winter in Southern Sweden if it was a mast year (more beech nuts but also more mice and boars to catch/trap), less in an off year, a 15% chance to survive the dry season in the African Savannah or the winter in Patagonia were most of the plants and animals are unfamiliar, and slightly (though really only slightly) less in the the cretaceous.

Surviving in the wild requires specialised knowledge, and "being rambo" is not a substitute for that. Staying in your lokal ecosystem helps because some of that specialised knowledge has entered folk knowledge, like that you can eat strawberries and rose hips but should stay away from yews and nightshade, maybe even that elder berries and beechnuts should be heated if you plan to consume them in large quantities. The cretaceous is not an alien place (the Permian is, kind of, especially as far as plant life is concerned - did you know mammals have been around for longer than flowering plants?), but it's different enough for your present day north central European folk knowledge to be useless - even in other contemporary environments it can be fairly useless.

I highly doubt it'd be us snacking on Scandinavian boars. Rather the opposite. Without serious firepower boars are pretty safe from humans They are amazingly hard to kill. I've come across plenty over the years. It's like a little tank on legs. An angry little tank. If you don't kill them with the first shot, you've just annoyed them.

You can trap them in a pit too steep for them to climb out and and repeatedly stab at them from a safe distance using a long pole with the help of gravity to make the impacts more powerful, no gun needed.

I wasn't suggesting you should wrestle them to death.

The problem with the Scandinavian winter is exposure. Not food. There's food everywhere, all over Sweden (below the treeline). All year round.

Can we be more specific? Here's a typical situation: It's late winter (February or early March, before spring breaks) and it's been three years since beeches and oaks properly carried (they tend to do that). There is no fresh snow to allow you to follow tracks easily. What's your menu for the week?

(Finding a farm and checking if they missed any potatoes during the fall's harvest doesn't count!)

If we get to bring warm clothes, it'd be a breeze. And a light source. Life's no fun when you only have 3 hours of sunlight per day.

That would perhaps be the way to survive the Cretacous. Head up north where cold blooded creatures can't survive? That's pretty much a mammals secret weapon. Our ability to endure extreme temperatures (compared to lizards)

In the present day, dinosaurs like the penguins have colonised habitats where literally no mammal survives. We don't have a very clear idea of how cold tolerant non avian dinosaurs were, and which species were warm blooded, but we have no reason to assume they didn't colonise their whole world (especially given that that world was warmer than ours).

 

[Politesse]

Not only could dinosaurs survive cold weather, many theorists these days believe that doing so was one of the selective pressures leading to the development of feathers over scales in the avian coelurasaurs.

 

[Politesse]

On the nuts and fruits question, the situation may not be as sunny as it might first appear. Scurvy was one of the first problems I thought about when pondering the scenario, actually. Some Cretaceous fruiting plants that would have occupied North America and are still either around or have closely related descendants include

A. gigantea
P. nigrum
C. occidentalis
Magnolia spp.
W. nobilis
M.glyptostroboides
G. biloba

One thing almost all of these plants have in common is that their raw fruits or nuts are not edible to humans without extensive processing that would be hard to arrange in a primeval context. Magnolias have edible (and tasty) blossoms, but only bloom two months out of the year and were probably never common sights. So that leaves really just the black pepper and maybe a few biloba berries to eat before you get sick off them.

There were probably plenty of other theoretically edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts, but if you aren't dealing with plants you recognize, determining toxicity is a difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous game.

In this situation, I think I would be taking a risk and trying to go for fish. There's some dangerous competition for them in the Cretaceous, but I have a hard time seeing how certain nutrients could otherwise be got reliably, especially out of season. Beetles would also be an option, and as primary pollinators, were pretty abundant during this time period and often contain the same vital plant nutrients. But they are also frequently toxic in the modern world, so you'd have to be nearly as careful with unknown insect species as with the plants themselves.

 

[skepticalbip]

Which direction will you travel to move into the past?

That is a question someone in the 19th century would ask. In the very early 20th century there was a revelation that we live in a 4D universe of spacetime. Until the 19th century people easily moved along the X and Y axis but had difficulty moving along the Z axis to any extent. The early 20th century brought us the means to much more easily move along the Z axis and the understanding that there was a T axis to spacetime (until then, people thought space and time were unrelated).

So to answer your question, we would move in the negative direction along the T axis.

 

[Jokodo]

There were probably plenty of other theoretically edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts, but if you aren't dealing with plants you recognize, determining toxicity is a difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous game.

If you're lucky, you come out not only knowing which fruits are good to eat, but also which ones give you a high.

If you're unlucky, one of those highs comes with an irresistible craving that makes you eat stuff you actually know already to be unhealthy.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

On the nuts and fruits question, the situation may not be as sunny as it might first appear. Scurvy was one of the first problems I thought about when pondering the scenario, actually. Some Cretaceous fruiting plants that would have occupied North America and are still either around or have closely related descendants include

A. gigantea
P. nigrum
C. occidentalis
Magnolia spp.
W. nobilis
M.glyptostroboides
G. biloba

One thing almost all of these plants have in common is that their raw fruits or nuts are not edible to humans without extensive processing that would be hard to arrange in a primeval context. Magnolias have edible (and tasty) blossoms, but only bloom two months out of the year and were probably never common sights. So that leaves really just the black pepper and maybe a few biloba berries to eat before you get sick off them.

There were probably plenty of other theoretically edible fruits, berries, roots, and nuts, but if you aren't dealing with plants you recognize, determining toxicity is a difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous game.

In this situation, I think I would be taking a risk and trying to go for fish. There's some dangerous competition for them in the Cretaceous, but I have a hard time seeing how certain nutrients could otherwise be got reliably, especially out of season. Beetles would also be an option, and as primary pollinators, were pretty abundant during this time period and often contain the same vital plant nutrients. But they are also frequently toxic in the modern world, so you'd have to be nearly as careful with unknown insect species as with the plants themselves.

How about eggs to get some nutrients? (boiled , since one can bring some things).

 

[Elixir]

It seems to me that your best odds of survival are to get as high as possible.

That sounded so promising!

But then:

A predator is not going to climb up high to a mountain top when it has so many prey down in the valley to choose from.

Damn. Guess I'd just bring an iPad loaded with movies and watch them until I got eaten.