What Did Ancient Humans Do When Lost?

300,000 years ago, getting lost didn't mean missing dinner. It meant dying alone. This video explains what went on inside the body and mind of ancient man and woman when they got lost, the panic, the instincts, the tools the brain has to use to navigate, and the truly frightening reason that so many never made it back. The anxiety you get when you can't locate your car? That's 300,000 years old. And it never went away. --- Sources & Further Reading Cannon, W. B. (1915). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage. Appleton. Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press. Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S., Moser, M. B., & Moser, E. I. (2005). Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature, 436(7052), 801–806. Hill, K. R., Walker, R. S., Bożičević, M., Eder, J., Headland, T., Hewlett, B., Hurtado, A. M., Marlowe, F., Wiessner, P., & Wood, B. (2011). Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure. Science, 331(6022), 1286–1289. Koester, R. J. (2008). Lost person behavior: A search and rescue guide on where to look for land, air, and water. dbS Productions. Marlowe, F. W. (2010). The Hadza: Hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press. O'Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34(1), 171–175. Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don't get ulcers (3rd ed.). Holt Paperbacks. Souman, J. L., Frissen, I., Sreenivasa, M. N., & Ernst, M. O. (2009). Walking straight into circles. Current Biology, 19(18), 1538–1542. Wedin, B., Vanggaard, L., & Hirvonen, J. (1979). Paradoxical undressing in fatal hypothermia. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 24(3), 543–553.