Surviving Winter
Random thoughts on work, life & dignity
There was an fascinating post on Reddit recently asking how people survived in extremely cold regions like the Great Plains hundreds of years ago without any sort of modern technology. I'm sure the question was asked due to the nuclear blast of cold that is currently afflicting large swaths of North America just in time for the Christmas holiday. Where I am, the windchills have been 5-15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for several days already. I have to spend 20 minutes suiting up like an astronaut going for a spacewalk just to leave my damn house (if I even bother leaving).
Much of the answer boils down the fact that preindustrial people spent much of the year preparing for the winter. They constructed shelters that kept them warm and protected them from extreme cold. During the rest of the year they were vigorously active (i.e. "they made hay while the sun shined"). They skinned animals and used the animals’ fur and hides to construct warm clothing and blankets. They stockpiled enough food to get through the winter when nothing was growing. And during times like now when the wind chills were deadly and blizzards were common, they laid low with a fire on and waited it out with their friends and family.
And, of course, they were far more physically active than we are just to survive, which meant that they were generally much more physically robust and resistant to cold. Combine that with the fact that before ubiquitous climate-controlled buildings we physiologically adapted to the gradual temperature change of the seasons. In some regions people also moved to slightly less inhospitable locations for the winter, and the fact that there were more forests around helped, too—trees act as natural windbreaks (although this was not as applicable to the Great Plains).
The secret of Arctic 'survival parenting' (BBC)
In the case of Canada and the northern United States, it's worth remembering that the people who populated this continent came from Beringia—the now mostly-submerged lands that spanned Siberia and Alaska. Genetic evidence indicates that they were there for a very long time, and they would not have survived in such harsh conditions if they hadn't been extremely hardy people who were exquisitely adapted to it. So you could say Native Americans knew how to survive in cold, barren regions by default. I'm also reminded of something I once read which pointed out that the needle and thread were among our most important inventions. They were just as important as fire when it came to surviving in harsh conditions far away from our ancestral African homeland.
This is one of the better answers, from user u/Pckman, which I've slightly edited. It applies to traditional adaptations to the cold more generally, rather then Canada and the Great Plains/Upper Midwest specifically:
In many ways, they did much the same of what we do today, but there are many interesting differences too. For starter every region and time period varies but there's some consistent things throughout pretty much all regions and history
• Dressing appropriately. Obviously our first line of defense against the cold is warm clothes. Depending on the region and time period different materials were available but a consistent one throughout history has been animal pelts. Animals withstand cold much better than humans, and that is partly owed to their pelts. Of course animals also have different fat deposits and different metabolisms but even the pelt alone fares well against the cold because of its good insulation.
Aside from pelts wool or other fabrics could be used and usually people would put on as many layers as they could. A main difference from today is that they would wear their clothes all the time, even in their houses and when sleeping, unless the clothes were wet from rain or ice.
The same philosophy could be applied to houses, even rudimentary earthen huts could be somewhat insulated against bad weather with mud, twigs or pelts, which helped keep the interiors warmer. Igloos are a famous example of a structure which retains heat well, even if it does sound counter intuitive. Throughout all civilisations various forms of insulation were used
• Fire=Warm. That may sound obvious but we have been more or less using fire ever since we lived in caves to today to keep warm, and throughout history it was arguably the most essential way to keep warm. Even with no other ways to protect yourself from the cold, if you can sustain a fire and stay close to it you can stay warm. People tried to keep a fire going pretty much all the time during winter if they were able. They'd use the same fire to cook, heat up other objects, and keep the house warm.
Heating stones, sand or other things to use as bed warmers, or later using coals in specialised containers was very common since it was impossible to uniformly heat up a house consistently so often special focus would be placed in keeping beds warm. In fact during winter staying in bed under whatever blankets or pelts you had was a great way to keep warm.
• We're warmer together. Speaking of keeping beds warm, one very effective way to keep a bed warm is for everyone to sleep on it at the same time. We may find communal sleeping weird today but in older times it was not uncommon that entire families slept on the same bed. Most houses did not have multiple rooms or beds anyways and it was a great way to keep warm. In the same vein it was also common to bring livestock inside the home, both to ensure their survival and also for their warmth.
• Preserving food. Of course it wasn't always easy to keep animals inside throughout winter. For starters not everyone had livestock and even those who did did not necessarily have enough food to sustain them through winter, so it was also very common for animals to be butchered and preserved before winter. Meat could be preserved in many ways, smoking, salting, drying, fully submerging in honey or butter or many other ways. Native Americans were famous for their pemmican made of dried buffalo meat. It's not very tasty but it's calorie rich and lasts for a very long time in a variety of conditions which made it very valuable.
Oats and grains could also last very long in storage while most vegetables did not though some roots and legumes could be stored long term. Ales and wines and other alcoholic drinks also lasted long in storage and it was not uncommon to drink more of those than water, both because they were safer and because they usually did not have high alcohol content. Most food preservation techniques arose out of need and not so much for their specific taste which is the main reason we use them today.
• Preparing for winter. Preserving food was just one part of the wider sum of things that needed to be done to prepare for winter, which is arguably the biggest difference between people in the past and us today, though in some parts of the world it still plays a huge role, and of course for those of us who don't prepare for winter, there's other people doing it for us.
Basically, a large part of life in the past was preparing for winter. All throughout spring and summer people were doing things that would enable them to survive winter. The most obvious was growing food since crops could not survive in winter. From the food produced a part was stored to be consumed throughout winter. Oats and grain, meats, anything people could get their hands on and spare to be honest.
They'd also chop wood to have a stockpile ready for winter when it would be much harder to chop and transport large amounts of wood and also carried out any repairs to their houses or preparations so they could withstand the winter. They'd also make any clothes they needed for winter along with really anything else they'd need.
Once winter set in, it was pretty hard to do pretty much anything. You can't easily dig the ground or traverse long distances or keep livestock fed and warm or really anything. Every region varied in severity but basically people wanted to go into winter with everything prepared before hand, if they didn't, it had disastrous consequences and led to many deaths. It is unfortunately a reality that many people died of starvation or the cold during winters despite their best efforts.
A number of people gave examples of the types of buildings people built in northerly climates to say warm. Those include earth lodges, quinzhees and iglus. These types of shelters are based around the fact that both earth and snow make fantastic insulators, which ancient people knew very well. Earth shelters were used by many cultures, including the turf houses Scandinavians made in places they colonized like Iceland and Newfoundland. We have evidence of shelters made from mammoth bones and hides going back 25,000 years ago at the Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological site in Siberia.
No. 3140: TEMPERATURE UNDERGROUND (Engines of Our Ingenuity)
Someone also posted this excellent video of the Nunat reindeer herders of Siberia erecting a temporary shelter which strongly resembles the tipis of the Great Plains Indian tribes:
Watching this video, I can't help but think about the back-and-forth debates surrounding work hours between traditional and modern societies. In the above video, we see that it clearly takes a great deal of "work" to survive in regions like this. If you were an anthropologist keeping track of work hours for academic purposes, you would dutifully record all of these activities in your tables as a part of your research.
But it's abundantly clear that everything they do is both absolutely necessary and essential for their survival. If it weren't, they probably wouldn't be doing it. How can we even begin to compare that to "work" in our modern-day societies? That's what makes these discussions so frustrating. We're using the same term "work" to refer to these types of activities as well as the busywork and pointless nonsense we are forced to engage in just to earn a living in our always-on, eternal growth modern societies. Our clock-managed work is alienating and stressful and doesn’t contribute much at all to our individual or collective survival (and in fact, is often detrimental to it).
Much of their time is spent erecting shelters, sewing clothes, gathering food either by hunting or tending to animals, preserving food, handicrafting, procuring firewood and dung for fuel, hauling water, and so on. They're not answering customer service calls or filling out spreadsheets. No one is bossing them around. They don't have to request vacation time and the only deadlines are set by nature. They're not selling off the hours of their life to the highest bidder. Their work sustains their life, while ours often subtracts from it due to physical inactivity and chronic stress. How can work hour tables alone begin to capture such qualitative differences? Consider how much of their “work” we would consider recreation.
The same could be said for the native inhabitants of the Dakotas and, well, pretty much every preindustrial society before the last several hundred years. It's not that there aren't genuine benefits to living in modern industrial civilization. It's just that it seems like we have to produce more and more "jobs" just to give people opportunities to earn enough money tokens to survive rather than activities which are genuinely beneficial or make our lives better. Traditional cultures didn't do that, which is why direct comparisons of working hours between ancient and modern cultures are so hard to make and misleading.
On a related note, I feel like cultures which traditionally lived in extreme northerly climates naturally evolved certain psychological coping mechanisms. Christmas itself could be seen as one of those, along with its pagan ancestor Yule. In fact, winter has always been a time of increased anxiety in every culture around the world that lived in the far north, including Northern Europe as this article from History Today describes:
The coming of winter was a genuine fear and not something to treat lightly, but there were ways of managing that anxiety by making the preparation for winter a communal, even a festive experience.
One of the major feasts of the medieval church year was Martinmas, the feast of St Martin of Tours, celebrated on 11 November. Patron of soldiers, St Martin was a very popular saint, but the importance of Martinmas relied more on its place in the seasonal calendar, on the cusp of autumn and winter. Martinmas became associated with the slaughter of pigs and cattle, so that livestock, too expensive to feed through the winter, could provide meat to be cured and salted for the months ahead.
That was work that had to be done – violent and bloody work, probably accompanied by some fear about how long those foodstocks would last out if the winter proved to be lengthy. But the necessity was turned into a positive through the celebrations of Martinmas. With a ready supply of meat available and the prospect of cold dark months to come, light and good food were both very welcome: the festival was celebrated across Europe with lantern parades, bonfires and feasting on beef or goose.
Winter and its Discontents (History Today) If you want to know more, you can watch this video:
Even today, places like Germany and Scandinavia have customs that help them deal with the long winter. See, for example, the Danish Hygge/Pyt culture or Sweden's Friluftsliv. I think it's in the nature of winter to want to huddle together in order to survive. However, in America, we have only our brutal, isolated, individualistic, twenty-four-seven, commercialized, winner-take-all culture to sustain us. The strident libertarianism which has spread out from the Sun Belt has all but eradicated the erstwhile values of places like the Upper Midwest romanticized by Lake Woebegon Days, making living in the endless cold and dark virtually unbearable. No wonder so many people are moving away—or dying.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this thought: all of our conveniences are someone else’s inconvenience.
We don't have a slave economy, but we do have a service economy, which often feels like slavery with extra steps. The callousness with which some people treat other people in this country today never ceases to shock and appall me.
We've always has service occupations, of course. In the past we even had actual servants! But during the middle part of the last century, we were mostly considered to be a manufacturing economy. As the jobs were gradually automated and outsourced, we shifted to a service economy where we told that service jobs would just take the place of manufacturing jobs and all would be well. The "Uberization of everything" brought to you by Silicon Valley has made this even more intense.
I wonder if the whole phenomenon of treating service workers like subhumans, flipping out over trivial matters, and the whole "Karen" phenomenon is an innate psychological reaction to restructuring our society along these lines. In other words, once society bifurcates along lines of one class essentially waiting hand and foot on the other—of which a slave economy is the most extreme manifestation—the upper class in these societies by default comes to adopt psychological mechanisms to dehumanize those below them. In that case, it might be a manifestation of some kind of inherent—and tragic—feature of human social psychology manifesting itself in the postindustrial landscape. Countries which have an “hourglass” social structure seem to exhibit this phenomenon more than level societies, which is why I think you see less of this type of entitled behavior in Europe, for example.
To end on a lighter note, this article uses It’s a Wonderful Life as a springboard to explain some of our common misconceptions about banking:
It’s a Wonderful Lie – That Movie Misled Us About Money (Andrew Leahey)
Hope everyone’s having a wonderful St. Stephen’s Day/Boxing Day/Hanukkah/solstice, etc.
For that is the time to eat, drink and be merry
'Til the beer is all spilled and the whiskey is flowed
And the whole family tree you neglected to bury
Are feeding their faces until they explode.
Awesome, thank you. That bit about work was so spot on
Fascinating as always Chad!
Happy New Year to you as well!