[HN Gopher] How A Bedouin Tracker Sees the Desert
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How A Bedouin Tracker Sees the Desert
Author : Thevet
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-09-08 05:27 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| doodlebugging wrote:
| The Israelis took advantage of native Bedouin tracking skills in
| the same way that the US Army employed Native American scouts
| during the Indian Wars. The skills that one picks up from a
| lifetime of living outdoors in a natural environment can't be
| taught from a book. They are skills that you get from hands-on
| experience.
| abdulhaq wrote:
| I'm wondering if the bedouin Arabs escaped the expulsion in the
| 1948 exodus?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I suspect that we both know that the answer to that question
| is that they have not escaped resettlement as Israeli
| settlements have pushed further into territories that they
| (the Israelis) claim. If I remember, there is a large area
| that is traditional Bedouin land and where they formerly had
| a fair degree of autonomy for years (after 1948) but as
| settlements expand in the last couple decades especially,
| they are being moved to make way for new Israeli settlers.
|
| I have followed maps over the years showing the expansion of
| Israeli claims and for that reason, it is unlikely to me that
| Bedouin people living on land where their people lived for
| generations, will not be affected by the expansion of
| Israel's territorial claims.
|
| I am not an authority on the subject by any measure and
| welcome any corrections.
|
| In general, the history of mankind doesn't favor indigenous
| people, regardless of how well they know their home
| environment. This is why so much historical knowledge is lost
| to later generations.
| seer-zig wrote:
| Back in the day, Arabs would send their children to the
| desert so that they would learn proper Arabic, as it was
| the most pure form, not mixed with other tongues or
| dialects. Not to mention learning other skills like
| survivability and patience and so on.
|
| Fortunately, the Muslims went to great length to preserve
| the history and culture, even as globalization etches away
| at it. There's a reason we take great pride in how our
| religion and traditions have been preserved (all by the
| Grace of God of course).
| simple10 wrote:
| About 10 years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few nights
| in a Bedouin camp. It's difficult to describe how different the
| world looks from the desert. Not just the immediate surroundings
| but how the desert shapes their entire world view. It feels like
| a completely different timeline. Like a parallel world looking
| through a spyglass to the modern world passing on the horizon.
|
| One night, a sand storm kicked up and started rumbling the tents.
| We were in temporary tents for guests and not traditional Bedouin
| tents. I remember looking up at the tent poles, watching them
| shake. Then in an instant, the tent just disappeared, going from
| the blackness of the tent to the most intense canvas of stars in
| the night sky. The wind had plucked the entire tent and threw it
| across camp.
|
| The next day, I had tea with one of the Bedouin guides. Her eyes
| were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune. When she found out I
| grew up in Colorado, she said it's been a childhood dream of
| her's to visit. I thought at first it was because of the
| mountains, but then she pulled out a picture she kept with her.
| It was a large reservoir in the foothills outside of Denver. She
| dreamed of one day being able to swim in so much fresh water.
|
| Much of Western Civilization is culturally rooted in the
| mythology of the desert. Its impact is often forgotten but runs
| surprisingly deep.
| sonofhans wrote:
| This reminds of of what Prince Feisal said in Lawrence of
| Arabia:
|
| > I think you are another of these desert-loving English:
| Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the
| desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the
| desert. No man needs nothing.
| noja wrote:
| Wow what a great comment. Please write more.
| simple10 wrote:
| Thanks noja. I'll try to add more later today.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I find it odd they would use tents that disappear into the
| night for their honored guests.
|
| I do not say that lightly.
|
| Did they set it up or someone else?
|
| I have had the honor of being on the receiving end of their
| hospitality twice and it humbled me. I never spent the night
| with them though.
|
| I have since tried to return the favor
| sharadov wrote:
| Beautiful, you have a way with words.
| elliekelly wrote:
| You might enjoy the book _Lords of the Atlas_ by Gavin Maxwell:
| https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/fa9b6ea3-f262-4ab1-b297-...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I love that article!
|
| Thanks so much for sharing it!
| mike10921 wrote:
| Marvelous, these people are so connected to the land they see and
| feel things that very few do.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| You can get some of this feeling from spending a large amount
| of time in a given area.
|
| I grew up in a house on about five acres in the country, and
| spent a lot of time outdoors reading. I grew to know the area,
| the types of animals that lived there, where they tended to
| move and where they stopped, and learned to recognize the
| individual animals. Animal behavior alone can tell you quite a
| bit - have you ever been in the woods and suddenly felt a
| little uneasy? That's probably because you unconsciously
| noticed that the background noise changed. Birds and small
| animals got quiet around you because of the presence of a
| predator.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Indeed. I've been backpacking in the wilderness about every
| month for a few years and, although I rarely encounter
| anybody when out there, I usually know when a large predator
| (including human) is getting near because the sounds of the
| wilderness change.
|
| I can't even really describe what changes about it, but it
| changes. It's nothing obvious like suddenly everything gets
| quiet or loud. It's subtle, but unmistakable.
| googlryas wrote:
| In Tristan Gooley's _The Walker's Guide to Outdoor Clues and
| Signs_ , he recounts how he traveled to (IIRC) Papua New Guinea
| to learn more about...outdoor clues and signs... from native
| people there. Suffice to say, a lot of it is actually just
| bullshit, but then the parts that aren't BS give some people
| seeming superpowers in the jungle.
| smm11 wrote:
| Deliverance taught me that you can't outrun someone who has
| never left an area.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Reminds me of how the Comanche were complete masters of their
| environment in the American southwest.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I've been interested in this tribe ever since watching Lawrence
| of Arabia, maybe also being from the desert myself. They're
| amazingly adapted to a hostile environment.
| aaron695 wrote:
| mariodiana wrote:
| I recommend the travelogue _Arabian Sands,_ by William Thesiger.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Sands
| cheese_van wrote:
| Long ago, I had the pleasure of being in a two car convoy in the
| Syrian desert looking for a particular castle deep and isolated
| in the desert (we were Foreign Service). We had the galley draft
| for Monuments of Syria as a guide. We were somewhat lost.
|
| Over the horizon, we could see dust, then as the dust got closer,
| we could see a huge herd of camel headed straight for us. So we
| stayed put, ought to be interesting.
|
| Probably about 300 camels. With two Bedu kids driving them. The
| oldest maybe 15 or 16 or so. The other probably about 14 years
| old. They stopped to gawk at us, just as we were gawking at them.
|
| "How many camels do you have," we asked. They shrugged. "Where
| are you coming from?" we asked. They pointed behind them. "Where
| are you going?" They pointed in front of them. Then the oldest
| urged his mount forward, and we watched them disappear over the
| desert horizon.
|
| Syria was one of the most interesting places in the world to
| visit before it came to its present heartbreaking condition.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This seems like a good idea:
|
| > "Walidie sees himself as an envoy of Bedouin traditions,
| including tracking. He aspires to educate new generations of
| "desert children," to "wean them off iPhones, acquaint them with
| the natural environment of the desert, and teach them how to
| preserve it.""
| strulovich wrote:
| During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of
| working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest
| experience to what working with a wizard would be. They would
| look at something where you see nothing, and tell whole stories.
|
| Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking
| questions and learning from them.
|
| I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles
| on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they're
| going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick
| away as the tracks looked odd to them.
| cik wrote:
| Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a
| fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this
| doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to
| physically show the difference.
|
| It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that
| they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at
| eye level!
| toss1 wrote:
| >>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and
| not at eye level!
|
| Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any
| of us.
|
| One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception
| is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound
| sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the
| JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-
| descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things
| that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in
| pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume
| difference between two sounds, or the smallest size
| difference noticeable between two objects, etc.?
|
| It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND
| that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover,
| they can not even know it!
|
| I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the
| subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness
| levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned
| down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the
| darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely
| obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely
| flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski
| racing training that had gotten me to top international
| racing levels -- much of it was racing/training in flat light
| of cloudy days in snowfields -- where we need to discern at
| high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to
| get critical information about snow conditions or contours.
| Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was
| exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my
| experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but
| training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning
| the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so.
|
| Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| This is an interesting addition to my not-very-well stocked
| store of information about how tunable a human being is to
| specific tasks or situations.
|
| The second half of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves focuses on
| physical attributes, but I think it's the internal stuff
| like this that would be the real evolution paths.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| They see that they just laugh. Dude, oh this is going to be
| easy, I'm going to have to charge extra, too boring.
|
| Like think of all that you do with a computer, all that magic.
| Dude Stanford CS department in CS106A Mehran Sahami says it's
| the closest thing to magic. And witchcraft also...eh. Like
| typing on Dvorak is magic, like the raw speed, the comfort, the
| freedom of thought stedda the sad fad qwerty.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Did you have a stroke or are you gpt3?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Those accusations contradict each other.
| mcguire wrote:
| It's an exclusive 'or'.
| pegasus wrote:
| Exactly the kind of faulty logic GPT3 is prone towards.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| No like if you're accusing me of either being the tallest
| man in basketball _and_ the shortest loser on the street,
| both your accusations disprove the other.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| it is odd to me that QWERTY was designed specifically to slow
| speedy typers down because of the mechanical devices could
| not keep up. even after the physical limitations were no
| longer an issue, we decided to keep something intentinonally
| designed to slow people down.
|
| that's having full 1Gbps fiber connectivity, but instead
| choosing a 56kbps dial-up modem instead.
| ycombinete wrote:
| IIRC that story is apocryphal and has been debunked.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have never heard anything in the direction you propose.
| I'll leave it to you to provide evidence
| not2b wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#:~:text=Contrary%20t
| o%2....
| kerblang wrote:
| In case you're wondering what that pink thing sticking out of the
| camel's mouth in the picture is, it's called a "dulla", and it's
| normal. It's also pretty gross but feel free to google it and
| indulge yourself in camel obnoxity.
| pdmccormick wrote:
| I had not expected to spend 5 minutes learning about this
| today, but thank you nonetheless for the tip off.
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