Status Updates From The Art of Tracking: The Or...

Trackers need a huge amount of information about the local wildlife, and ecology. A deep mental image of how animals spend their time is necessary, and especially lots of deep information about feet and running and daily habits.

This big chapter attempted to give all that information for the animals in the tribes of the Kalahari, but you can see how learning all this well enough to be able to USE could take decades.

Now to the meat of it; tracking knowledge.

Though... I'm not too impressed with tracking elephants.

There are actually some solid principles to tracking that can be easily understood, though they would take years to master.

The hunter-gatherer tribes also have mystical, religion, and non-scientific beliefs. Of course.

An interesting fasit of their religions is they never fear anything religious in nature. They are only afraid when there is good cause: like lions.

I love this book. I think it's too technical to reach the broader audience it deserves.

A fun exploration of the thought processes of trackers compared to modern science. They compare amazingly well. Trackers are able to collect data and formulate hypotheses that match the data. The hypotheses grow and change as new data is collected on a hunt. Trackers debate the merits of the data and ways to interpret it.

Spoor of an animal lying in the shade can give a good estimate of the age of the spoor. Knowing how old tracks are is hard, but the most important bit is to know when they are fresh, do you can become stealthy before finding the animal.

Smarter people are better at hunting, and it takes years to learn the information and skills necessary. Hunters judge the quality of their information sources, and are skeptical when a scientist would be.

Okay, I have learned a lot about what and how the people of the Kalahari hunt, but not about tracking yet. Still, interesting.

Okay, here we go. Time to start reading about the stone age hunting tribes of the Kalahari. I have been waiting for this for like a decade.

Most people trace the foundations of modern scientific reasoning and critical thinking to things like early Greek philosophers. But modern hunting tribes use complicated data collection, and complicated hypothetico-deductive reasoning. They display critical thinking, form hypotheses, and test them.

A thesis of this book is that it is likely early humans used these same complicated "scientific" approaches in hunting

Have you ever heard a hunter yammer on with a long story of a hunt? This kind of low-key social interaction serves as indirect education on hunting. That would be a useful adaptation for humans, which provides an evolutionary basis for both art and communication.

Neanderthals probably were only good at simple tracking in the winter, and ~43k years ago there was a warm period that was hard for them to survive. But modern tracking is complicated enough it seems plausible it didn't exist until modern humans existed.

There are good reasons to believe tracking evolved first in arid semi-desert or semi-tundra conditions. Both of these allow for simpler forms of tracking, which almost certainly came before more advanced tracking techniques.

We have finished the evolution of humans and are now on to the evolution of tracking. Sooon.

This book starts out with some evolutionary biology. Which is fine. But I'm just here for the tracking.

Kind of dull recitation of human evolution and anthropology.

I came here for the tracking, you know?

Okay, we're going to start with a review of human evolution. Sure, fine. I haven't had this since college anyway. It's all fresh to me.