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Muso
l33t
Joined: 22 Oct 2002
Posts: 655
Location: The Holy city of Honolulu
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 Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 10:16 pm Post subject: Russian Family Unaware of World War II |
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For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II
| Quote: | In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga
Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors' downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.
It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.
The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots' sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. "It's less dangerous," the writer Vasily Peskov notes of this part of the taiga, "to run across a wild animal than a stranger," and rather than wait at their own temporary base, 10 miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. Led by a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, they "chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our prospective friends"—though, just to be sure, she recalled, "I did check the pistol that hung at my side."
As the intruders scrambled up the mountain, heading for the spot pinpointed by their pilots, they began to come across signs of human activity: a rough path, a staff, a log laid across a stream, and finally a small shed filled with birch-bark containers of cut-up dried potatoes. Then, Pismenskaya said, | Quote: | beside a stream there was a dwelling. Blackened by time and rain, the hut was piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish—bark, poles, planks. If it hadn't been for a window the size of my backpack pocket, it would have been hard to believe that people lived there. But they did, no doubt about it.... Our arrival had been noticed, as we could see.
The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive.... We had to say something, so I began: 'Greetings, grandfather! We've come to visit!'
The old man did not reply immediately.... Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: 'Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.' |
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eponymous_dick
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| Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 11:40 pm Post subject: |
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No incest? Unpossible.
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"I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A, as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'... unless you have sufficient cause to seize a scientist's heist of weird foreign species." |
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notageek
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 05 Jun 2008
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Location: Bangalore, India
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 2:49 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | No incest? Unpossible. |
++
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dmitchell
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 4:30 am Post subject: |
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Fascinating.
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Ahenobarbi
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Joined: 02 Apr 2009
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Location: Warsaw, PL
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 9:54 am Post subject: |
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| But that's perfectly normal, there they didn't have World War II in Soviet Union. They had Great Patriotic War instead. |
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eponymous_dick
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 2:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Ahenobarbi wrote: | | But that's perfectly normal, there they didn't have World War II in Soviet Union. They had Great Patriotic War instead. |
Yes, and they won it pretty much by themselves, by getting their ass kicked on an historically unprecedented scale.
By the way, there are still dozens of totally un-contacted aboriginal tribes living in Brazil.
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BonezTheGoon
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Location: Albuquerque, NM -- birthplace of Microsoft and Gentoo
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the read!
Re: Incest in this case; I think that when you are on the edge of starvation every moment of your life you probably have no libido, just an evolutionary safety I believe.
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eponymous_dick
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2013 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| BonezTheGoon wrote: | Thanks for the read!
Re: Incest in this case; I think that when you are on the edge of starvation every moment of your life you probably have no libido, just an evolutionary safety I believe. |
That's my experience from having been very hungry and in in danger before. However, the morning after pigging out on a freshly-killed antelope and getting good night's sleep, young Dmitry is undoubtedly going wake up next to unwashed, pheromone exuding Natalia with a raging boner and a case of blue-balls, and you know what's going to happen.
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