It's quite amazing that some one at 72 who grew up malnourished and without access to modern medicine can still be in a good enough shape to survive in one of the harshest environments man has ever lived.
If you die before you grow old, you're probably going to do so as a child. If you survive birth, childhood and are otherwise healthy, you're chances of growing old are pretty good no matter where and how you happen to live.
That's why life expectancy is so high now in the western world, it's not that people are growing far older than they did in the past or elsewhere, children just die very rarely and don't pull down the average.
It's not about life expectancy it's about your body not breaking apart.
She's freaking logging at 70+, look at how quickly she cuts the fire wood with a bow saw try it it's not easy especially in the cold when the wood is frozen solid and the saw gets stuck every time you lose the stroke rhythm.
I've done several "treks" under less extreme conditions with modern equipment and it's bloody hard even basic camp management (Find dry fallen wood, cut it into fire wood drag it to the camp site, go get water from the stream drag it to the camp site (uphill always ;), fish/hunt, prepair your food that's easily 6-8 hours a day even with help, she's doing that and more everyday...) takes most of your day and it's exhausting and this was as a healthy male in his mid 20's, she's full on homesteading pretty much alone in extreme conditions in her 70's while taking care of a 1 legged man her age if that isn't impressive please let me know what is...
I'm definitely impressed and certainly wouldn't be able to keep up.
However I'm not sure whether this is because what she's doing is an incredible accomplishment or I just treat my body horribly. She has probably more than 60 years of experience doing these things and kept in perfect shape her whole life. Just imagine what we might be capable, if we kept our bodies equally well in shape, now and in the future.
Maybe I should feel less impressed and more ashamed at myself or equal parts of both.
What is so impressive about the way she lives? It was considered a normal living 100 years ago. The conditions are not that extreme (Southern Russia, same latitude as Berlin).
She gets regular help from others, and she hasn't been shy to ask for help. Also, she made several trips to nearby towns when she needed medical help.
The climate varies greatly between different places on the same latitude. She seems to live near Abakan, Russia at about 53 deg. N; according to Wikipedia, this has average daily means ranging from -18.3 C to +20.0 C. Compare with Manchester, UK (53 deg 28'N): about +4.5 C to +16 C.
A low of -18 C isn't uncommon, but a daily mean of -18 C across a whole month (day and night) is pretty cold! It's colder than any major North American city except Fairbanks, at least. The other cities I think of as being cold all have significantly higher daily means in their coldest month: -11 C in Anchorage, -10 C in Minneapolis, Montreal, and Ottawa, and -4 C in Chicago.
Sure, it gets cold in the winter there, but, say, -20C is not too cold to get out of the house to get some firewood nearby.
I walked at -20C to school as a kid, and it was ok. I wouldn't go out when it was -30C, but considering the mean of -18C, -30C would be rare, and almost never in the middle of the day.
Bottom line: people have lived just fine for thousands of years in much harsher climates, for example, a thousand miles north from where she lives.
-18 C night and day is not that cold. It does not stop any daily activities - like kids playing outside. Going near -30 C and below - with regular "urban" winter clothing - that starts to modify ones routines. Don't look at the statistics, observe the real effects.
It depends on a few other factors, among which are wind and humidity. -18 C in Munich is lovely for a stroll. 8 C on the west coast of Ireland is omfg.
My dad used to put this as "the older you get, the older you get." At first I thought this was just dad humor (as in, "the more you weigh, the heavier you are") but he explained the that the saying referred to life expectancy going up the longer you survived common "bottlenecks". Obviously at some point the longer you live raises the chances of death but earlier in life, as you get past birth, childhood diseases, the higher risks of adolescence, and work- or war-related injury/death as a young adult, your statistical life expectancy goes up.
Unless you die of kidney failure as the result of your harsh diet, like her two siblings...
According to the Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics, we've seen dramatic improvements in lifespan in just the past few decades: "Under current mortality conditions, people who survive to age 65 can expect to live an average of 19.2 more years,
nearly 5 years longer than people age 65 in 1960."
For the majority of human existence, most people died before their 30th birthday, with life expectancy increasing in the late stone age, alongside all the troublesome unnatural cultural production.
> For the majority of human existence, most people died before their 30th birthday
The average life expectancy was greatly skewed by tremendous rates of infant mortality: mid-19th century, infant mortality was estimated at 340/1000 for US blacks (216/1000 for US whites). So for the majority of human existence 1/3 to 1/2 died before their 5th birthday, the rest had good chances to live into their 40s or 50s.
That's why life expectancy at birth is not a good measure of the kind of age people could reasonably expect to reach. For instance according to wikipedia Paleolithic LEB was 33, but if an individual reached 15 their life expectancy grew to 54. Same story in classical rome or medieval England, LEB in the high 20s but once an initial gap passed, effective life expectancy grew to 50~60 (total)
> So for the majority of human existence 1/3 to 1/2 died before their 5th birthday
Correction: 1/3 to 2/3, early 18th century london had an infant mortality rate of 745/1000.
> Same story in classical rome or medieval England, LEB in the high 20s but once an initial gap passed, effective life expectancy grew to 50~60 (total)
Addition: an english peer (aristocrat) of the late middle-ages (15th~16th century) having reached 21 had a total life expectancy of ~70, LEB for peers was in the low 30s.
Essentially, for most of human history life expectancy was highly bimodal, a large part of the population would die extremely early, and most of the rest would make it to (what is now qualified as) middle to late adulthood.
Re: kidney failure. Doesn't it seem odd that they survived for decades, then died just after modern contact? There's evidence that modern processed foods have a terrible effect on people accustomed to traditional diets. Just the sudden increase in nutritional value might be difficult to adjust to.
Average, yes. But that reflects high infant mortality. Generally speaking if you survived to 20 you would probably make it to 60 barring misadventure or war.
This summary written by an anonymous in the imdb site: "The story follows an underground weapons manufacturer in Belgrade during WWII and evolves into fairly surreal situations. A black marketeer who smuggles the weapons to partisans doesn't mention to the workers that the war is over, and they keep producing. Years later, they break out of their underground "shelter" --- only to convince themselves that the war is still going on."
I was actually listening to the sound-track for the last week (Thanks to Goran Bregovic)
This was worth watching. It was really weird tho (spoilers ahead. Stop reading if you care)
Documentary crew travels 300 kilometers by boat to meet two hermits living alone in the taiga. These two neighbours have a long history in harsh enviroment but they seem to live pretty normal life in the woods. Documentary crew soon realises they have a boring story to tell so they start asking awkward questions about sexual relationships in the past.
Both neighbours have a different story to tell. Incest and rape is mentioned. Old wounds are open again and that is when the crew decides to leave saying they did not start the conversation.
Old Believers are actually not the members of any sect. It's religion, and it's just old, no any fundamentalism there. And it's called that way because of Russian Orthodox Church splits and reforms in 17th century.
Peskov, the guy who found the family, used to put together expeditions once a year during summers to visit the family with a helicopter full of food and supplies. He'd write about it in Komsomolskaya Pravda every once in a while. I remember reading KP when I was 10 (20 years ago) and being totally fascinated by these stories.
Agafia was probably the inspiration for a set of (ostensibly true) novels by a Siberian that started a strange kind of romantic "back to nature" movement in Russia. Her alter ego in the books is called Anastasia.
You know, I'll never forget a quote of the father after their discovery. He said "Living without salt was a special kind of hell" and that has affected me pretty profoundly for such a tiny thing. I've tried to spend my days not taking things for granted, especially here in the developed world, and this man's experience (and subsequent comment) is something I remember every time I see or use table salt. It's become a kind of central theme in my impossible goal of not taking things (and people) for granted.
Actually if you see ?no-ist at the end of the URL, this is their anti-adblock measure. Short for 'no-interstitial' means they didn't get to show you an ad, so don't show the article either. If you simply delete this part of the URL, it will load properl.
After spending a few years in the Yukon, I wonder how they a) lit fires and b) cooked on those fires.
We once forgot to bring anything steel for cooking on a fire during a week-long sheep hunting hike. After much thought, I managed to boil water for coffee and food :)
That's rough - mother staved her self to death to ensure food for her kids, 3 out of 4 of those died of pneumonia after geologists visited. Makes you appreciate the comforts of urban life.
You guys should really expand on what 'gratifies intellectual curiosity' means, in the guidelines. Stuff like this article is interesting, but all too often people claim how they are really intellectually gratified by an article calling Trump a doody-head troglodyte or some such thing.
I would suggest that one such metric is if you learned something interesting from an article, rather than having the article simply confirm your own beliefs.
> all too often people claim how they are really intellectually gratified by an article calling Trump a doody-head troglodyte
I almost never see that. There's isn't much controversy around what counts as "intellectually interesting" here. People spend more effort trying wrongly to narrow the scope of HN, e.g. claiming that it's only about startups and tech, flagging all non-technical posts, etc., all of which is against the spirit of the site (and bad, in my opinion, for technical creativity too).
The standards are better established de facto than de jure—the last thing we want is legalistic arguing about rules. So I think the traditional description suffices:
A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting. What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, perhaps it could be.
Edit: but if there's something we could do to get more high-quality links posted about historical topics, arts and letters, geography, anthropology, etc.—the myriads of interesting stories outside HN's couple of core grooves—I would love to hear about it. They are particularly welcome and we rarely have enough of them.
You take such a mature and balanced approach toward content on the site. The content is interesting and thought provoking. It's why HN is my primary source of daily news. Please keep it up!
A metaphor just occurred to me: Hacker News is like a better Internet version of what the Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel used to be in their golden days (back when MTV played music videos, before reality TV). HN is much better than that, since those were still TV, and did not cover business and leadership, but that's the best analogy I can come up with at the moment. I get far more out of reading HN-provided links and comments for hours than I ever did TV.
I do miss the content of old, which was 1/3 general interest, 1/3 hacker interest, and 1/3 business development. I'm not really a business guy, but it was interesting reading about how to do things like measure retention, or A/B test things with customers, or how to read your market. These days it seems that the only business-related things are either puff pieces or people talking about salary and job interviews.
Wikipedia is not blocked in Russia AFAIK. There was threats from Roskomnadzor to block it, but they finally gave up. And it was specifically about russian wikipedia domain: http://ru.wikipedia.org
It's quite amazing that some one at 72 who grew up malnourished and without access to modern medicine can still be in a good enough shape to survive in one of the harshest environments man has ever lived.