Survivor communities outside the known world

[MrHouse]

Man, Mexico is doomed... Kind of...

There are small towns here and there, especially in the north, that are either not on the official maps, or barely mentioned. These are, more often than not, heavily rural and a lot of people carry a hunting rifle either to hunt game or scare away animals/people. I'm use one or two of these might survive.

[CrypticalCat75]

North sentinel island? That one on my 9gag feed about how the natives kill anyone who lands there?

[Aierdome]

OK, so I've been reading this thread an any ideas I have come up have probably already been posted/suggested by others, but I thought that maybe someone could create a map of the world showing any possible locations of surviving communities, just so we can get a picture of what the whole world looks like? I know people have made maps of smaller areas, but that could be quite interesting.

I'm thinking about it and should probably have some free time over the next two weeks, so hey, why not. Given the sizes of possible survival communities, that would have to be a really huge map, just so that it could capture all those tiny specs of red. Or perhaps there could be arrows pointing to general regions on Earth map and "zoom-ins" on the margins.

On another note, having just caught up with the thread (37 pages since I've last been here  :'( ), I've been thinking about some other ways people may've survived. So far, all of propositions were static, permanently inhabited areas, save for mention of Mongolians and aircraft carrier groups. But what if some people would manage to eke out a living as a nomadic community?

Aha - this is gonna be a long post.

Imagine this scenario: everything goes to hell and some people perform a GTFO, running off to the countryside. We can assume those are the immune, as the Rash-affected don't have time to run. Now, however, those runaways have a problem: while they may have some means of transportation and thus shelter, they probably don't have much in way of food or water. So what do they do? Basically, they have two options:
- hunt in the wild (and we know now that some game animals, like deer, have survived)
- scavenge from villages and cities (which would kill off any non-immunes left v. quickly and would require much stealth, but as the team has shown so far, you can walk in and out of a city without dying)

Over time, those groups of survivors would bump into each other and join forces, as this means more people to hunt/scavenge, to fix stuff, watch over others and so on and so forth, not to mention more genetic diversity. The cars they used to get away from the city start to break down and run out of petrol, but there are some ways to counter that. If they find some immune horses, they can use them to pull the cars (now I have an image of horse-drawn caravan in my head) or abandon the machines alltogether and loot some shops for lightweight tents, possibly with immune animals to carry the stuff for them. Perhaps, if they have electric car, some know-how and luck, they can loot solar panels off some house and fit them on to the car's roof. And of course, they can use bicycles (anyone noticed how underused bicycles are in any post-apo?).

For the first year, the main food source is probably what they manage to find in cities - they probably don't know how to hunt at this point - and this is also where all their tech and spare parts come from. However, over time there's less and less of ready-to-eat food to go by and hunting starts to be main way to eat. Any animal that can be taken in - dogs, cats, chicken - is, and soon the cats' value is discovered. Water can be filtered - again, filters would be looted - and, later, cooked. Perhaps the survivors find some cattle and so it accompanies them.  Perhaps they grow some food on the backs of pickup trucks or roofs of other cars. In any case, as there is less and less working tech to go by, the survivors are slowly gearing down to baser tech levels. They are always on the move, for several reasons:
- they need to find new hunting places;
- they want to avoid trolls;
- they are aggressively looking for tech to replace what's breaking down.

By the year 90, I imagine such a nomadic community to look thusly:
- huge "main group", moving through what was once rural areas, keeping their distance from cities. Children and food animals are with them, as are all the technicians (doctors, manufacturers etc) and people who take care of cattle and "roof farms".
- "defenders", whose job is to protect the main group. Best armed of the bunch, and if there's not much weaponry to go around, the only armed force. They use cats and immune dogs.
- "front watch", checking whether the area the main group is going to is safe, and "back watch", checking whether there's nothing following them. Similar to scouts of Nordic Alliance. Also use cats.
- "looters", daredevils who venture into the city to search for anything the community may find a use for. Value stealth above everything else and have cats to alert them.
- "hunters", who provide everyone else with food. Likely to be one of bigger groups and may sometimes spend days away from the main group.

As to their tactics against trolls: even if they have guns, they are sure to run out of bullets rather quickly, therefore those nomades prefer to avoid trolls rather than combat them directly. However, if things go south, their weponry are likely to be some bows, blade-on-a-stick kind of weapons and large, immune dogs trained to combat trolls. As everyone is immune, the vermin are not as big a problem as in Scandinavia, but if they eat food, cats are there to kill them.

As to nomads' magic and beliefs, it depends, of course, what region they're in. It's also likely that the group ends up so diverse that none major religion reemerges and instead they believe that, for example, their ancestors work through the mages.

So yeah, there's that. Any thoughts?

[MrHouse]

Fury Road kind of solved the shortage of stuff, in its way: There was a town that only produced gas, another town that only produced ammo, and another that only produced food (and crazy car-driving berserkers lead by guitar/flamethrower-wielding blind men). Of course, Mad Max is an entire thing altogether.

I think, if a massive amount of people with little to no survival skills sets out in the wild, it's gonna spell disaster for everyone, not just themselves. Game? Hunted down by the end of the year, maybe two or three (unless they manage to regulate it, more on that in a moment); Wood? Burnt down, most people would even begin burning down tires to get warmer; clean water? Forget it.

I think that in order to survive away from the cities and into a self-sustaining community, they would have to be small enough to be manageable by a group of people, but large enough to deter raiders/beasts (surplus people could be sent as 'scouts' or 'pioneers' far into the wilds, in order for them to fund new communities); it would not be a nomadic tribe entirely, but they community could move through a large area according to season; also, when it comes to food, we would have to return to a more vegetable-rich diet, and in the case of the Americas, maybe even taking notes from what the native Americans ate (squash, beans, corn, even wild onions) with an emphasis on foraging and small-scale farming (perhaps even have 'greenhouse cars', large rigs entirely devoted to plant food on the road), and while meat/proteins that come from meat would still be necessary, it would come from other more compact sources like bugs, sheep, chickens, goats, and/or fish instead of cows. What would happen to people with a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle? In the case of vegetarians, dairy products are an option; in the case of vegans there are nuts, beans, spinach, and seeds, as well as several supplements that could give them the necessary protein without eating meat (heck, this would be standard with everyone).

To the subject to belief, I'm positive that it might depend on the region. One survivor community might actually keep their christian faith, another might return to a pre-christian faith, another might worship machines as gods, and another might even see the trolls/giants/beasts as gods themselves.

[snotra]

A nomadic lifestyle would require an immense effort to start, effectively rendering most of your looting base useless as it's suited for a sedentary lifestyle. This could work, but you'll need the right people around to start up the process and to keep it going for about one generation.
Retention of mobility is paramount, so unless you know your stuff or can do something valuable, a good physical condition and stamina are required to survive, or a retinue to compensate for limited mobility.
Nomads don't just wander around, they follow a route. What would nomads in poast-Rash society follow? Large herds of herbivores might reassert themselves, but they would need to find new migration routes to avoid trolls. That, or humans must somehow form a screen around them to clear out the path before them and to catch off any excess population.
Also, nomad groups have a limited size to expand to, lest the group becomes too large to be supported, or too slow to connect to whatever they are following, after which new groups must form. Social norms will have to be reinvented for that, redistributing professions around the population and reinventing group identity.

[Aierdome]

MrHouse, snotra, thank you for thoroughly proving that my oh-so-brilliant idea wasn't very brilliant after all    So just to sum up your points, my hypothetical nomadic group would have to:
- find animal herds to follow
- put artificial limitations on how many animals they hunt
- have a lot of mechanical know-how
- failing that, a lot of stamina
- know a lot of about survival
- know how to grow food
- know which "collectible" food can be eaten
- be resilient to many water-carried diseases
- keep their numbers above "too little to sustain themselves" and below "too big to be mobile"

So the baseline is, they'd have to be really, really lucky, at least for the first generation or so. Well, I guess it is possible, but my vision of large neo-nomadic tribes travelling through plains and lowlands with packs of horses, cattle, dogs and cats seems much less realistic now. Thanks! 

[urbicande]

So the baseline is, they'd have to be really, really lucky, at least for the first generation or so. Well, I guess it is possible, but my vision of large neo-nomadic tribes travelling through plains and lowlands with packs of horses, cattle, dogs and cats seems much less realistic now. Thanks! 

That's probably true of ANY community, though.  This is a massive disruption to most societies -- anything tied in to the world economy in Y0 is almost certainly not self-sufficient, and most first-world countries are going to have a low number of people who actually know how to grow food, hunt, prepare game etc.

[Róisín]

If something like that was going to work at all (and presuming the beastified wildlife could be kept at bay, which is a pretty big presume), the theoretical tribe would have to adopt a method used by some plains Indians, Australian Aborigines and Siberian tribes. All these groups (and for all I know others elsewhere) had plant crops which could be scattered about in a suitable area, didn't need tending and could be left until just before harvest. The migration patterns of the tribe were based around the cycle of these plants as much as around seasonal patterns and animal movements.

In the Australian desert and semi-desert such crops included quandongs, sandalwood (not so much for the wood as for the delicious and very nourishing fruit), wattleseed, desert lime, various yams and yam-daisies, karkalla and nardoo. In the coastal areas such as the Coorong there would be muntries, exocarpos, sea grape, salicornia and various fruiting heaths, yams and yam-daisies and again karkalla. And of course edible grass-seeds all over. What all of these plants have in common is that they grow in open and quite inhospitable areas: deserts, saltmarshes, claypans, salt lakes, dunes and the like, which would make it hard for anything to sneak up on the harvesters. In some cases the edible parts are underground, buried in mud or otherwise concealed (for example the heath-cranberry, with branches sprawling on the ground and the fruit growing on the underside of the extremely prickly branches). Nardoo has to be gathered from under the mud in its dried-up claypans or salt lakes, and well cooked before it becomes digestible. So nothing much apart from humans eats these plants. The explorers Burke and Wills starved to death on nardoo because they didn't know how to process it, and it was edible but not digestible. One of them wrote in his diary 'starvation upon nardoo is not unpleasant'. So knowledge of processing these foods would need to survive.

On the east coast, and in Tasmania, especially in the mountains, there are similar plant foods, the difference being that many grow in cold inhospitable conditions, or have erratic cycles. On the other hand, when the Bunya nuts, for example, do fruit, the yield is huge and can be stored for years. The natives in areas where those grew used to make caches in small caves, seal the caches with stones, and thus keep a reserve.

Another resource that nomadic tribes would exploit was insect foods. In the desert you have honey ants, termite mounds with their tasty juveniles, plenty of locusts and grasshoppers for the kids to catch, and various grubs. In the cold Eastern mountains the Bogong moth harvest was a big event, with tribes coming from all over as they did for the Bunya nut harvest. The moths would gather in their millions in early winter to hibernate in rock crevices high in the mountains, and the humans would collect them, strip off the wings and either roast and eat them then and there, building their own fat reserves to see them through the harshest part of winter, or slow-dry them on hot stones and compress them into cakes for storing and travelling. These were pretty much pure fat and protein in an extremely compact form.

Anyway, adding a bit to the possibilities!

[Stefan]

There is one thought I want to add about the possibility of nomadic tribes. We will not necessarily see social systems in their pure form, like either sedentary or nomadic. It is quite possible that societies will form that are a mixture between both. The reason for this, as well as what decides over the degree to which a society will be sedantary/nomadic, is that some goods will be needed which will have to be made by tools which can't be transported and will need a significant amount of time to be produced.
A simple example are arrow heads. While you can use flint or obsidian, iron or other metals are better. The reason for this is that they can be resharpened easily and are more durable. But if you want them you need to smelt the metal and before that you either need a source of ore or scrap metal. Depending on the quality of the fuel and the amount of metal you want to smelt, the smelting will take from at least one work day to about a week. After you have smeltered the metal it needs to be forged into the arrow heads which again will take quite some time. A single arrow head will take, depending on size and type, somewhere between about 5 and 30 minutes and in some cases even longer. And making all the arrow heads needed to last a group for while will probably add up to at least several days of forging.
While I admit that a group could carry around the needed supplies for the occasional forging of small goods, if they need anything larger they need a real forgery and that can't be carried around easily.
A solution to this is to have a village or small town near a source of either scrap metal or ore where the smelter and the forgery is located. Such a town can trade the goods it produces(arrow heads, knives, swords, axe heads, ...) for the goods it needs(food, leather, ...). It would also be heavily fortified as a protection both against trolls and malicious groups. Nomadic groups will probably stop by once a year, as part of their traveling routes, to trade.
If you have several towns which provide different goods, lets say one has copper, another has tin and a third has coal, it is quite likely that trade routes will be established and that there will be groups who will live by tranporting and exchanging these goods. In this way you will get a society which will be both nomadic and sedentary. The ratio between the both will be determined by how difficult the terrain is between the towns and how far they are apart. The future development of such a society will depend upon factors, on how hard it will be to set up farming.

Edit 1:
Addendum
In several nomadic cultures there are occasions where several groups(tribes) meet. Many of them have religous or cultural reasons, but they serve more or less the same purpose. That purpose is exchange both of goods and people. The exchange of goods doesn't need further explanation. The exchange of people consist to a degree of youths marrying into a different group and to another of bards/priests/... who want to see a different part of the world, hear new songs and stories. While the actual reason for this exchange might not be obvious to those people for us it is clear. The reason is to upkeep diversity and to reduce the risk of imbreeding.
The interaction between such meeting places and towns goes both ways. Sometimes towns form at such meeting places and othertimes towns are used as locations for meetings between tribes. I should point out that towns can form independent from such meeting places and that the locations of these meetings see no further activity.

[MrHouse]

Well, there could be a trade caravan of sorts, a food route (similar to the Silk Road) to move between good and bad seasons.

Also, as a bit of a sidenote, I must've been sad for the people in the ISS (International Space Station) to see the world die off, I mean, aside from them passing away as well (because it's freakin' space).

[SectoBoss]

Also, as a bit of a sidenote, I must've been sad for the people in the ISS (International Space Station) to see the world die off, I mean, aside from them passing away as well (because it's freakin' space).

I might be able to help you with that.

[MrHouse]

... Them feels  .

Nicely written .

[Stefan]

Well, there could be a trade caravan of sorts, a food route (similar to the Silk Road) to move between good and bad seasons.

That is more or less the idea, but I doubt the Silk Road is a good comparison. For one it was used mainly by traders who merely traveled along the different branches without living of the land. And for the other there weren't any regular migrations along that route. But you can find good exaples in several tribes who traversed the Sahara in the past. For one the traveled the lands as part of raising their camels and other life stock and for the other they exchanged goods with the locals at several keypoints of their routes.

Also, as a bit of a sidenote, I must've been sad for the people in the ISS (International Space Station) to see the world die off, I mean, aside from them passing away as well (because it's freakin' space).

The question about the fate of the astronauts came up several times in the past. Mostly in the comments of the comic, but also here. Aierdome raised the question during a discussion about how long satelite services would be available after the rash. See here https://ssssforum.com/index.php?topic=175.msg34615#msg34615

I might be able to help you with that.

And that is a good story about the astronauts fates you wrote there, SectoBoss. I hope you will cover the fate of other survivor groups in the future.

[Dane Murgen]

And that is a good story about the astronauts fates you wrote there, SectoBoss. I hope you will cover the fate of other survivor groups in the future.

There is a story by ruth called First Contact,(which is about East Canada meeting The Nordic countries) as well as Rodina by Fenris, about northern Russia.

[MrHouse]

Hmm, maybe I could write one from survivors from southern US/northen Mexico... That being said, it's hot :s.