Survival Knowledge as a Legacy

Throughout human history, until the late 19^th century, the fastest way for a man to travel was on the back of an animal or on a drawn chariot. Within a few decades of the first automobiles and trains, we were soaring through the sky at ever increasing speeds. At the same time, due mostly to industrialization, families began to leave the rural farms across the land and swelled the cities. Within two generations, the ancient knowledge that man had passed from father to son for more than 100 thousand years was mostly lost. After World War II, people continued to flock to the cities and for the first time in known human history, we raised an entire generation of humans that lacked the knowledge to feed themselves. My Grandmother, who was born in 1924, cooked poke weed when I was a child. Poke weed is a wild plant similar to spinach that is poisonous if not prepared correctly. She learned to identify and prepare poke weed from her mother, yet failed to pass the skill to my mother. My grandmother now while healthy for her age, lacks the eye site to identify the plant. Fortunately, I have chosen to pick up a mantel that would otherwise be lost to my family forever. This example is not an isolated incident. Every child learns the fact that you can start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, but very few are taught the methods, which are very complicated. In this blog, we will discuss the rule of three. The rule of three states that you can live three minutes without oxygen, three hours when exposed to extreme low temperature, three days without water, and three weeks without food. What we discuss further, however, is that under the right conditions, without the warmth of a fire, you can be on the road to death and completely incoherent in less than twenty minutes. The number one killer of individuals that get lost, even for a short time, is hypothermia. The ability to produce fire is by far the most important skill that ancient man possessed. We will cover the skill of fire and many others in this blog in detail over time. I will attempt to cover every skill needed to survive. I want to stress also that this blog is not only a survival site, but also an attempt to shed light on the value of ancient knowledge and asks the following question: Why would we as a society give up the most important knowledge that man has every possessed, the knowledge of nothing less than survival itself? I don’t want you to think early on that I am opposed to technology, because I am not. Humans have made some great discoveries and because of this we enjoy very comfortable lives. There is very little in life that I like better than to sit in my easy chair at home and pop in a good DVD on my big screen. Add to this a bag of microwave popcorn with a ton of butter and I am in heaven. I then have to work off the butter on the treadmill the next morning because I work at a desk and have little opportunity for real exercise. I am also not suggesting that we all become hunter gatherers again either, because that is a very hard life style with a high mortality rate. What I am suggesting, however, is that we can retain just a few minimal skills from our forefathers so that in the rare case of an emergency, we are prepared and we know how to survive. The common thought is that these skills are an anachronism and that modern man has no use for them, yet people get into these situations very often. For now it is sufficient to say that you can find yourself in a survival scenario quicker than you think. I know that you have heard these stories on the news, a story about a couple of lost hikers or a story about someone that ran their car off the road in a remote area and survived on their own for a few days. The point is that these things happen and they can happen to you. This simple knowledge discussed in this blog took thousands of years to develop but is fading so fast. You and you alone have the responsibility to gather as much of this knowledge as you can and pass it on to your children. Don’t let it die so quickly. So many of our ancestors gave their lives to give us this gift of knowledge, don’t be so quick to throw it in the trash pile. As a final note, I offer this: Our society as we know it may not stand forever and our children’s future survival may depend on the knowledge passed down through the ages. Whether in 100 years or 1000 years, history shows us that we will face disasters, natural or otherwise, that will put our technology to the test. There are many great civilizations that have risen and fallen throughout time that left a period of technological darkness in their wake.


-Richard