I remember my uncle telling me about them when I was growing up in the 90s. He was an officer responsible for the environmental impact assessment of the Baikonur rocket launches and visited Lykovs a couple of times. They lived really close to the area where Proton rocket boosters are supposed to fall down. Couple of years ago I found out that V. Peskov even mentioned my uncle in his 'Lost in the Taiga' book about the Lykov family.
He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.
A very humbling experience, great videos and great efforts.
I wonder, how many years (centuries) might have gone into inventing, discovering and perfecting even this "primitive" technology.
Not to undermine his efforts, but this guy could do all this "so fast" mostly because he is working in a rather comfortable and secure environment of modern and more civilized times, whereas the real primitives had to look out for predators (lions, tigers, etc), for other human attackers and so on.
Kudos to this guy and more kudos to all those anonymous primitive hackers who created such an incredible technology.
Lesson to take: I should stop complaining about those little inconveniences and discomforts I encounter in my modern life.
The best part about that guy is the total absence of spoken language.
But, then, the source of the iron is also pretty incredible:
Then I collected orange iron bacteria from
the creek (iron oxide), mixed it with charcoal
powder (carbon to reduce oxide to metal) and
wood ash (flux to lower the melting point) and
formed it into a cylindrical brick. I filled
the furnace with charcoal, put the ore brick in
and commenced firing. The ore brick melted and
produced slag with tiny, 1mm sized specs of iron
through it. My intent was not so much to make
iron but to show that the furnace can reach a
fairly high temperature using this blower.
I live in the Yukon - when we are out Moose hunting in the fall we often wonder if we could survive the winter if we flipped our canoe with nothing more than we have with us.
Every time this article comes up, I have two questions I've never found a satisfactory answer to:
1. How did they light fires?
2. How did they cook and boil water? From experience pots and pans fail after much less than 40 years.
Another interesting place, though not nearly as isolated, is Lukomir, Bosnia. It was remote enough during the Yugoslavian war that the war never really made it up there (though there was little reason to probably).
You have to drive an hour and a half from Sarajevo to a small village. From there, Lukomir is another six miles up into the hills at ~2,500 meters elevation. You can now drive up there, but I strongly recommend hiking: you will feel like the IceMan walking around Europe 5,000 years ago, at least I did.
The people there live very simple lives, as you can imagine: shepherding livestock during the day in the surrounding hills, mostly sheep, for instance.
On top of this is the fact that the village is on the edge of a canyon, so has spectacular views from a cliff next to it.
If you're ever in Sarajevo you should check Lukomir out!
If you want remote experiences in Europe, check out Apuseni or Maramures in Romania. Entire remote regions with people mostly living like hundreds of years ago.
Thanks for sharing. Just watched it very interesting.
It was nostalgic seeing the old prayer book in Slavonic, with pages almost brown from being leafed through and used daily. I remembered by grandfather's books, they used to be like that. He tried to teach me some Slavonic, remember at least knowing the alphabet enough to read the words.
Then I like how Agafia explains what it is like to listen to the news about the outside world. The man who came to live next "door" (their relationship seems ...complicated) has a radio, and they listen to it sometimes. She mentions the impression she gets about the outside world from it, just terrible things: people killing each other, mining accidents, terrorist acts. It is as if aliens captured some of our broadcasts and tried to infer what we are like. Not that we are doing stellar job, but the news would make it seem like we are failing even more.
The other interesting comment was from the park ranger how wilderness cleanses people. Nobody is out that far stealing or committing crimes. That far out people are happy to see each other, help each other, hunters in their cabins leave food, matches and firewood.
Had to laugh of course, at her using the mangled test missile crashed nearby to scare the bears away, by hitting it with a stick. It is hard to fathom a more complete mix of Russian stereotypes in one single image: feisty old woman with a stick, wearing a head scarf, bears, soviet military artifact, and Siberia.
If anyone is interested, the Lykovs were part of a group of 'Old Believers' (староверы) a sect of the Russian orthodox church. The primary reason many people who shared their faith fled major cities was because of Communist religious purges (an attempt to solve the problem of 'Religion is the opium of the people')
> The primary reason many people who shared their faith fled major cities was because of Communist religious purges
No, it's because all the Orthodox that existed in cities realised the schism was stupid. Most of the 'Old Believers' moved to whatever remote part of Siberia or Alaska long before the communists existed. And those that do still exist, live in a timewarp, and are more akin to a cult than an Orthodox community. Keep in mind the schism happened in 1666 - nearly 3 centuries before the communist revolution.
The persecution actually began under Peter the Great. By the time Communists came into power most old believers had already fled.
The main reason for persecution was the old believers distrust of state power. They didn't accept rule by it and they didn't take any part in it. They were similar to the Amish people in the US.
There was an interesting short follow up from the Siberian Times a year after the Smithsonian piece - the last surviving member was seeking help, or maybe just tiring of isolation, in her 70s.
"I am all alone, my years are big, my health is bad, I keep
getting ill," Agafia said in the letter cited by the
newspaper. "There is a lump on my right breast, and my strength
is going. There is a need for a person, a helper, assuming
there are kind people in the world, as the world has always had
kind people."
The thought of the elderly Agafia facing such a harsh winter is
tough. But not all locals are sympathetic -- she has been
offered a winter home in a local village before, the Siberian
Times reports, but has refused it.
"She is being a little cunning," Vladimir Pavlovsky, editor of
the local paper Krasnoyarskiy Rabochiy, told the Siberian
Times. "She has no hunger. She wants to attract more
attention. She has enough cereals, bags of them lie on her
porch, and everywhere. And she has enough potatoes."
That editor sounds a bit heartless. She's clearly gone about as far as anyone can be expected to go, living virtually her whole life in isolation, and now she's 70 years old and is having a hard time taking surviving in one of the harshest environments on earth.
After a while, your body starts to break down, and some cereal and potatoes aren't going to cut it. She needs things like firewood and water. Even simply cooking will eventually be impossible to do when one gets old enough, especially under those primitive conditions.
Besides, she's probably lonely. Many elderly people suffer from depression and take their own lives because of their isolation. How hard can it be to have some sympathy for that?
Another article about this family said they died of kidney failure not because of their harsh diet, but because of the reintroduction of salt [citation needed]. Similar but not as unavoidable. Then again they craved salt but it's plausible their body couldn't handle it.
The three siblings are believed to have died from pneumonia.
Yerafei expresses doubt, saying "how could they get infected from us if they never took anything? For a long time, they didn't take our water, our food. If anything, Agafia should have gotten sick. Why? Well, I once grabbed her and kissed her."
Kissing facilitates the exchange of microbiota[0] and that exchange can strengthen the immune system. Might be that kiss saved her life.
Because the difficult landscape, these villages were isolated and kept the culture and some of the language. Funny to see the motifs on my mom's table cloths or the ornaments on my far relatives' main gatein Transylvania are exactly the same.
[+] [-] jedmeyers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|9 years ago|reply
He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.
[+] [-] tmptmp|9 years ago|reply
I wonder, how many years (centuries) might have gone into inventing, discovering and perfecting even this "primitive" technology.
Not to undermine his efforts, but this guy could do all this "so fast" mostly because he is working in a rather comfortable and secure environment of modern and more civilized times, whereas the real primitives had to look out for predators (lions, tigers, etc), for other human attackers and so on.
Kudos to this guy and more kudos to all those anonymous primitive hackers who created such an incredible technology.
Lesson to take: I should stop complaining about those little inconveniences and discomforts I encounter in my modern life.
[+] [-] T0T0R0|9 years ago|reply
But, then, the source of the iron is also pretty incredible:
[+] [-] betolink|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|9 years ago|reply
Every time this article comes up, I have two questions I've never found a satisfactory answer to:
1. How did they light fires?
2. How did they cook and boil water? From experience pots and pans fail after much less than 40 years.
[+] [-] jjallen|9 years ago|reply
You have to drive an hour and a half from Sarajevo to a small village. From there, Lukomir is another six miles up into the hills at ~2,500 meters elevation. You can now drive up there, but I strongly recommend hiking: you will feel like the IceMan walking around Europe 5,000 years ago, at least I did.
The people there live very simple lives, as you can imagine: shepherding livestock during the day in the surrounding hills, mostly sheep, for instance.
On top of this is the fact that the village is on the edge of a canyon, so has spectacular views from a cliff next to it.
If you're ever in Sarajevo you should check Lukomir out!
[+] [-] oblio|9 years ago|reply
Apuseni: http://szelmob.com/viatori/images/Blog/transylvania/Apuseni-...
Maramures: http://romaniatourism.com/images/maramures/maramures-barsana...
[+] [-] Inthenameofmine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixhero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aresant|9 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 years ago|reply
It was nostalgic seeing the old prayer book in Slavonic, with pages almost brown from being leafed through and used daily. I remembered by grandfather's books, they used to be like that. He tried to teach me some Slavonic, remember at least knowing the alphabet enough to read the words.
Then I like how Agafia explains what it is like to listen to the news about the outside world. The man who came to live next "door" (their relationship seems ...complicated) has a radio, and they listen to it sometimes. She mentions the impression she gets about the outside world from it, just terrible things: people killing each other, mining accidents, terrorist acts. It is as if aliens captured some of our broadcasts and tried to infer what we are like. Not that we are doing stellar job, but the news would make it seem like we are failing even more.
The other interesting comment was from the park ranger how wilderness cleanses people. Nobody is out that far stealing or committing crimes. That far out people are happy to see each other, help each other, hunters in their cabins leave food, matches and firewood.
Had to laugh of course, at her using the mangled test missile crashed nearby to scare the bears away, by hitting it with a stick. It is hard to fathom a more complete mix of Russian stereotypes in one single image: feisty old woman with a stick, wearing a head scarf, bears, soviet military artifact, and Siberia.
[+] [-] aws_ls|9 years ago|reply
Edit: On HN, you occasionally see can't forget articles, every once in a while. This is one of those..
[+] [-] unixhero|9 years ago|reply
I really wish there was a curated Hacker News archive.
I encounter so many new things which are exciting, thought provoking and amazing stuff on HN.
Or if they would extend HN with a Categories section.
[+] [-] paulvs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielmorozoff|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
[+] [-] Mikeb85|9 years ago|reply
No, it's because all the Orthodox that existed in cities realised the schism was stupid. Most of the 'Old Believers' moved to whatever remote part of Siberia or Alaska long before the communists existed. And those that do still exist, live in a timewarp, and are more akin to a cult than an Orthodox community. Keep in mind the schism happened in 1666 - nearly 3 centuries before the communist revolution.
[+] [-] DominikR|9 years ago|reply
The main reason for persecution was the old believers distrust of state power. They didn't accept rule by it and they didn't take any part in it. They were similar to the Amish people in the US.
[+] [-] rusanu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|9 years ago|reply
There was an interesting short follow up from the Siberian Times a year after the Smithsonian piece - the last surviving member was seeking help, or maybe just tiring of isolation, in her 70s.
http://www.businessinsider.com/agafya-lykova-asks-for-help-2...
[+] [-] pmoriarty|9 years ago|reply
After a while, your body starts to break down, and some cereal and potatoes aren't going to cut it. She needs things like firewood and water. Even simply cooking will eventually be impossible to do when one gets old enough, especially under those primitive conditions.
Besides, she's probably lonely. Many elderly people suffer from depression and take their own lives because of their isolation. How hard can it be to have some sympathy for that?
[+] [-] zizzles|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
Forget being unaware of WWII. Try being unaware of what a car or phone or airplane or office building is, let alone the idea of a "world war".
Look how primitive they behave.
https://imgur.com/gallery/tWY1o
Imagine taking one of these tribesman on a tour through Times Square NYC.
[+] [-] stormbrew|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hownottowrite|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 205guy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kharms|9 years ago|reply
Yerafei expresses doubt, saying "how could they get infected from us if they never took anything? For a long time, they didn't take our water, our food. If anything, Agafia should have gotten sick. Why? Well, I once grabbed her and kissed her."
Kissing facilitates the exchange of microbiota[0] and that exchange can strengthen the immune system. Might be that kiss saved her life.
[0 - Shaping the oral microbiota through intimate kissing](https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186...)
[+] [-] aries1980|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anniviers or http://archive.worldhistoria.com/the-hunnic-swiss-valley-val...
Because the difficult landscape, these villages were isolated and kept the culture and some of the language. Funny to see the motifs on my mom's table cloths or the ornaments on my far relatives' main gatein Transylvania are exactly the same.
[+] [-] harryjo|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10125523#10126308
[+] [-] voidz|9 years ago|reply
Approximately
[+] [-] ivan78|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rizumu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crocal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dikeert|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samirillian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewvijay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhemao|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quakeguy|9 years ago|reply