A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.
They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days.
They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent.
Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste.
No health consequences.
As for fasting. I fast sometimes, but I would not try fasting on a long hike in mountains like Pyrenees. Probably not even Tatras.
Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.
> Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate.
And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.
There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them.
That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery.
Miles and miles of undersea construction off India, on seabed last exposed more than 7000 years ago.
The very oldest known stone construction, in both Egypt and Peru, used the very biggest chunks of rock, often 50 tons and more, (apparently) before even pulleys. Blocks get progressively smaller and clunkier in later work.
Egyptian sculpture made of basalt and granite, smoothed to a satin finish. Basalt boxes, 50 tons and more, with perfectly right-angled and smooth interior cuts, without tool marks.
I'm not saying it's aliens, because... why the hell would aliens care about rocks? But people were doing things that we don't understand, and cannot reproduce with the tools they should have had.
There is a great deal more to learn about the prehistoric past than we have even begun to get a handle on.
Even experts sometimes screw this up. I've seen my share of cropmarks and straight "walls" on imagery that turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. My first field season was particularly memorable. I spent days sitting in a muddy trench, convinced I had found a posthole. A few feet below was the remains of a collapsed rabbit warren. Archaeology can be hard.
"It is a common assumption that stone drilling originated during the Upper Paleolithic, but gained the features of a well-developed technology only during the Neolithic. The comparatively archaic method of two-handed drilling was replaced by the more efficient bow drill (Ibid.: 62). The process of stationary drilling, i.e., with the help of the bow drill, did not leave signs of drill vibration. These progressive features have been noted on the Denisova bracelet. It constitutes unique evidence on an unexpectedly early employment of two-sided fast stationary drilling during the Early Upper Paleolithic. All of the other known Paleolithic implements with signs of drilling bear features suggesting relatively slow drilling with a considerable drill vibration."
1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis.
2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones.
3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.
Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this:
> Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa
Did that happen without any societal involvement. Did humans just carry seeds like birds might, or was there an organized effort to spread agriculture like this?
> ... it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles."
I hope that we'll continue to learn more.