Gulliver's giant feet walking in the diminuative forest of the lilliputians

Gulliver's Travels

by Jonathan Swift

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Pretend you are Gulliver ...

What will happen to you today if, like Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, you too are marooned alone for one year on an island inhabited only by the Stone Age humans?

 

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I am not sure I would be very successful as a Stone Age human.  First of all, I think they’d kill me as soon as they saw me because I would not look as they expect.  If for some reason they didn’t, I would have to live amongst them.  I am allergic to almost everything, I am a vegetarian, and I have limited use of one arm and one leg.  I doubt I would survive long!

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Probably I would die.  Like the previous answerer, I've gone camping.  But these people have live their whole lives "camping."  I couldn't teach them thing one about that.  My best hope would be if I could teach them something from modern times so as to make myself useful to them.  But what would that be?  I can't think of anything I could teach them that would help and so they'd have very little incentive to help me out.

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I would hope that, if I found myself marooned on an island with some Stone Age humans, I would have the resourcefulness and flexibility to adapt to the situation and learn the skills I would need to survive.

Obviously, none of us can truly know how we would react unless we are actually faced with such a set of circumstances. However, I have had experience with camping and have some knowledge of plants that could be used for food, construction of rudimentary shelter from natural materials, and first aid. I also think I could use pantomime and other forms of communication to hopefully establish to others that I was not a threat.

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