5 Ancient Survival Skills We Have Forgotten

Modern life consists of personal vehicle transportation, public services, and the ability to make a quick trip to the shops and buy everything from exotic spices to tropical fruit. If you took the average modern person and put them in the middle of an ancient landscape they’d be dead within a few days, even if they had tools and weapons.

(Stonehenge, the most impressive and famous of Stone Age sites, though the current structure wasn’t built until into the Iron Age)

There were many things our ancestors knew because they had to, because if they didn’t they wouldn’t last long. Here’s 5 ancient survival skills we have forgotten that would have been second-nature knowledge to ancient people that the modern human has absolutely no idea about.

1) Navigation

Navigation today consists of looking at your phone or GPS and going where whatever program you’re using tells you to. They are very accurate devices but without them, most people wouldn’t even know which direction to walk in, never mind find a specific point dozens of miles away.

(Learning how to walk dozens of miles and make it back again when there’s no roads or sign posts is quite a skill)

Using the sun and landscape to find your way was something that you learned very well if you didn’t want to end up stranded. There is evidence in many ancient civilizations about how they traveled hundreds of miles without navigational tools or even maps. The best example is Stonehenge, which was built near the town of Salisbury in England, though it uses stone from the Preseli hills in Wales.

How our ancestors in 3000 BC managed to travel over 150 miles each way without getting lost is quite incredible. Due to the number of stones, it’s safe to say they made the trip many times, and all without roads or maps, something that people today would stand no chance of doing.

2) Gardening

Many people like to do a bit of gardening, with a potato patch or a few tomatoes being common in the average garden, but this is far from having to rely on what you grow to last a whole year. Unless you live next to the sea and can rely on fish, the only other way to feed a large population is to farm. People had to know exactly how much grain to grow and how to dry and store it properly, along with exactly what to plant and when.

Growing things is much more difficult than people think, with crop rotation, ground nutrient levels, and combating plant diseases being things that you either knew very well, or you starved to death. If you ask anyone you meet on the street how much corn you get from an acre of land, I guarantee you they’ll have no idea.

What makes this all the more impressive is that this knowledge would be passed down through families over generations, and since the children would help out as soon as they were able to, you can bet the gardening knowledge of an ancient 10-year-old would probably surpass that of any average modern-day adult.

3) Tracking

It’s nice to just walk up to the meat counter and buy a pre-butchered chunk of beef, but imagine having to run for hours once a week after a bleeding deer, just waiting for it to finally die before you can chop it up and carry it on your back all the way home.

(Most people couldn’t track a deer if their life depended on it, which it often did for our ancestors)

Since arrows didn’t have the penetration capabilities of bullets, they rarely killed on the first hit and instead caused the animal to slowly but constantly bleed. After an animal was shot it would run off, quickly leaving the sight of the hunters whose only way to find it would be to recognize tiny signs within the forest floor.

Knowing which animal made which track and how long ago it was made were things every hunter would need to know. They could look at any footprint and tell you which animal it is and even if it was running or walking, a skill that made the difference between your people going hungry for the next few days or not.

4) Poisons

There are thousands of plants that can do you harm all over the world, and even in a small country like the UK we have enough dangerous plants to be able to kill a creature of any size. The UK is one of the places where the Monk’s hood flower and death-cap mushroom grow, both of which are guaranteed to kill you.

(The death cap mushroom is fatal and its poison has no cure, something ancient people probably found out the hard way)

When you would often have to rely on foraging to keep you alive, you need to know exactly what you can and can’t eat down to the point where you can tell which one is poisonous between two almost identical mushroom species. In an age where there was no such thing as epi-pens, antibiotics, or any reliable cure of any kind, you either knew exactly what was safe to eat or you wouldn’t last.

5) Basic knowledge of metals

Most people don’t even know where steel comes from, with a common answer being “steel ore”. Upon telling someone there’s no such thing as steel ore, they would probably just admit they don’t know, but producing such things was common knowledge for our ancestors, and even for young children.

Before children went to school they would do the exact same jobs as the adults, and working in a mine or at a smelter was just another day for an iron-age child. The bronze age was the first major age in human history that really utilized metals, with the average person probably knowing how to make it themselves, compared with today when most people don’t know what bronze actually contains, do you?