All these comments and nothing about the guy having the ultimate bad acid trip?
These two young men ignored multiple warning signs and got crushed by the business end of the Fox Glacier.
I thought that maybe they weren’t prepared to deal with a body in that condition and used lightening as an excuse.
He brought his sister because he can not self-terminate.
Ah! Well, I can only speak to the hot springs I’ve seen in Yellowstone, and it’s certainly been true there, from all the ones I’ve seen. The cleaner they look, the hotter they are.
I remember this story. Why people blatantly ignore safety barriers is just beyond me.
is a glacier a “dangerous blunt object” in legalese?
I’m sure it counts as a “massive unstable structure”.
Carbonic acid is basiclly seltzer water, it dissolves limestone on geological timescales. There is another source of stronger acid if bodies are dissolving over days. My guess would be something oxidizing sulfur or hydrogen sulfide to sulfuric acid.
It takes a real idiot to mess with a bison given how overtly nasty even domesticated beef-servitors can be.
The canids really mellowed out, a lot, during domestication; so the notion that a wolf is just an Xtreme Husky is wrong but not totally implausible; but even domestic cattle are not to be trifled with.
They aren’t even domesticated, they are just sorta tame and used to people-ish. I guess technically semi-domesticated.
People have condemned past cultures because they didn’t domesticate the animals they had available to them, such as the bison or zebra, thinking they could take the place of cattle or horses. But their demeanor, social structures and ability to be domesticated are completely different than that of horses and cows.
That was one of the reasons that the New World was “behind” the Old World, is they only had 2 large animals domesticated to help with farming and meat - the llama and alpaca, and only a few small animals like dogs and turkeys. Think how much harder farming would be if done completely by hand with no help from animal to do labor.
Not just near to Old Faithful:
Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry. Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan’s men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds.
Henry Winser, 1883
Well I think we can relax a little now that it has been appeased. This guy wasn’t an idiot; he was a hero.
Interesting to think that the ancestors of the Parsee side of my family did just this. OK so long as nothing in the human food chain then kills and eats the vultures.
And, obviously, loved by the gods. ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν, ἀποθνῄσκει νέος
Dogs - perhaps 17000 years of domestication.
Cattle - around 10 000 years
Horses - around 5000 years
Arctic foxes - around 70 years, but with modern techniques of selective breeding.
I think you are making a temporal mistake here; modern dogs, cattle and horses are significantly different from their ancestors. The fact is that some cultures domesticated and some did not. Domesticating dogs was an important step to civilisation because, as scavengers, they prevented the accumulation of too much organic waste in dumps and so enabled more permanent settlements. There is enough evidence of this to show that tribes who domesticated dogs had a significant competitive advantage, but that other contemporary tribes in the same area still did not copy them. The arctic fox example shows that human directed selection can get significant results remarkably quickly.
For those closer to Colorado than Montana:
http://strawberryhotsprings.com
Highly recommended. Non-stinky hot springs metres from a snowmelt mountain river; sit in the heat until you cook, jump in the river to cool off, rinse and repeat.
Are you saying that because we domesticated some foxes we should be able to domesticate zebras or any other animal?
There are several components on if an animal can be domesticated. Some believe there is actually a domestication gene or genetic make up making certain animals more likely to be domesticated. Certainly there are certain traits some animals have that make them able to be domesticated. Certainly the current animals were not in this form originally, but they still possessed traits that made it possible to domesticate and breed them.
For example dogs and horses both have social structures that made them much easier to domesticate. You capture the head male horse, and his family will stick around where he is kept, making them easier to get. Zebras don’t have this structure. The travel in herds, but if you catch one of them they are like, “Fuck that guy, we never liked him any way.” Even the modern buffalo who are semi-domesticated required breeding with cattle to get them docile enough to not constantly tear down fences.
At any rate, the lack of domesticated animals in the New World certainly didn’t help them. Their greatest effect can be seen in lack of help in agriculture. More agricultural output leads to the ability to have larger cities, and larger cities are good ways for idea to breed, developed, and get shared.
Here is a good video with more:
We are far OT but never mind.
Interesting, and I did watch the video. However, not everybody agrees. I have seen it said elsewhere that the basic equine social structure (like that of dogs) is basically a family, but herds of zebra contain multiple family groups.
You raise some interesting points. As well as innate behavioural differences, and size, there are numerous reasons why different species might be harder to domesticate. One is herd size; another one is environment (I imagine domestication would be much harder on open savannah than woodland though this is speculation - the ability to build secure enclosures is a good place to start.) Another, as the video points out, is life cycle length.
The reason I mentioned arctic foxes is that they were bred for fur in the USSR and were a complete pain to breed due to aggression. Because Marxist theory argued for perfectibility (how’s that working out?) some Russian biologists decided to try a breeding program to select arctic foxes for lower aggression. Within a surprisingly short time, they had domesticated the arctic fox. About this time the Soviet Union fell apart and PETA got started and the market collapsed, but they had proved their point. An apparently untameable animal could be domesticated.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to reply. I do take on board the points being made.
Cats…