On ethnography, hallucinogens, improvised knife, etc.

[migueldiaz]

Originally Posted by KuKulzA28

I meant that comment as a half-joke, and half alluding to the fact that these people may be better at discovering the beneficial properties of some plant species than we are. But, some people just have a good sense of the world around them. Some people can just read people. Some just understand dogs, don't know why but they do. Perhaps some people can just tell something about plants. This "tree-listening" is a whole new concept to me, never looked at things that way.... even if technically trees don't speak.. it's the concept I mean, not the actually "communication"

Agree

Talking about having that good sense of one's surroundings, I think it was Jared Diamond in his Guns Germs and Steel who made the same allusion in said book.

IIRC, Diamond said that if you drop a Papua New Guinea (PNG) native in the middle of Manhattan or something like that, the PNG native would be totally disoriented of course.

But in the same manner, Diamond said that if he [Diamond] was dropped in the middle of the PNG rainforest, he won't survive.

Thus Diamond was saying that he's not really smarter than the PNG native. Rather, each one of them merely adapted to his own native surroundings. And having made that adaptation, the heightened sensitivity is there.

To cite another example, Spanish missionaries during the colonial period had often recorded how Filipino seamen masterfully navigate the seas by merely "reading" the cloud formations, the floats encountered in the sea, the type of fishes that swim by, the looks of the waves, etc.

I'm sure seamen who are Polynesian, Mediterranean, etc. also possessed the same heightened sensitivity to his surroundings.

So yes, we are saying the same thing after all

PS - Maybe somebody should ask Wade Davis what exactly did the Indians mean when they said that they hear those plants "singing" under the moonlight. It's also possible that something was lost in the translation.