It was not one continuous hike. He takes frequent breaks. But travels back to where he last stopped and continues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
Still very impressive, but a little less impressive than I first thought.
replies(5):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
Still very impressive, but a little less impressive than I first thought.
> Due to visa limits, Bushby has had to break up his walk. In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days before leaving for 90, so he flies to Mexico to rest and then returns to resume the route.
Given that he literally swam across the Caspian Sea in order to avoid Russia and Iran because of legal issues, nevermind bring imprisoned in Russia due to what sounded like bureaucratic BS, it's more impressive than I first thought.
> They were detained by Russian border troop officers while they were crossing the Russian border near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry.
Illegal border crossing is absolutely not bureaucratic BS in any country.
I'm saying this as someone who enlisted in the defense of said nations once. Most of the structures that make up a country these days are for the birds - let a guy hike for chrissake. I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense. We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Göbekli tepe easily refutes your isolationism, as does stone- and bronze-age globalism.
Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.
I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".
If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.
Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.
There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#Methodo...
In starting to read through some of the criticism's of the book just now, I was reminded of the seasonal hunting parties where many smaller groups would band together for better kills. That's what I mean with "tribal fluidity".
And by freedom of movement, the impression that I had coming away from the listen was that there were many ways in which someone could find themselves in a role where the could migrate through several communities and still live. looking at things again presently, I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_tradition, which I think illustrates what I was trying to convey. "Border sovereignty" doesn't make much sense to me as a concept in that world... i think things were much more fluid. There weren't border checkpoints throughout prehistory.
And you're absolutely right that tribes could join forces to accomplish objectives. And the Hopewell tradition is mainly about trade and cultural dissemination -- of course trade involves traveling with goods to other tribes.
But none of that changes my point. Even if tribes allied for a purposes, they still had their distinct geographic areas. If if people traveled to other tribes to exchange goods, they were just visitors traveling through.
"Border sovereignty" was absolutely real, just as it is in primates. There weren't literal manned border "checkpoints", but you can be sure that as soon as a tribe got wind of a stranger approaching, they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary. The idea that the norm was that some stranger could just waltz in with their family and they'd be welcomed to stay and share the land is not supported by evidence.
(Even though that's definitely the anarchist ideology that Graeber was trying to push in his book, because that's exactly where he gets criticized for ignoring most of the evidence and cherry-picking examples.)
> they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary.
Was there never the case that they investigated, saw that the strangers were floating down a river on the border of "their territory" and simply let them pass through unmolested? That doesn't happen today, and my intuition is that was simply so much space in the americas before recorded history that it happened often then.
I didn't say that the nationalism and border sovereignty that exist in 2025 are exactly what prehistoric humans practiced. That would obviously be absurd.
What I said was:
> Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation
In other words, we have the same instincts operating whether it's with a group of 300 people or 300,000,000. People occupy a geographic area and call it theirs and control who can live there. Many primates do the same.
And is your case of someone traveling down a river trying to contradict me? My example was of that being allowed if they weren't threatening. And the modern equivalent would be something like like a transit visa or connecting international airports.
I really don't know what you're arguing. We're not talking about people traveling anyways, the subject is whether tribes would just let random people come in and share their land. They didn't. They had a concept of group sovereignty, the same idea as national sovereignty, and of land they occupied.
If you want to insist that modern national sovereignty and borders drawn on maps are completely and utterly unrelated to tribal sovereignty and tribal borders -- if you don't see the obvious similarity, the same human group instinct and human territorial instinct -- then I really don't know what to tell you.