The Winds and flooding can do so much damage with modern construction. Seems like it would wipe out entire villages if they were more primitive.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It certainly could, and it likely did many times. But some will survive, and they’ll rebuild. That’s the simple answer.

    The Sentinelese are a good example. It wasn’t a a hurricane, but the 2004 Indian Earthquake and Tsunami seemingly wiped out a portion of their already small tribe, if you take the census numbers as factual, (but that’s really hard to gauge). But it survived, and it’s growing still.

    The more complicated answer involves probability (yes they may be hit with a hurricane but how bad was it, was it a direct hit, etc). It’s basic survivorship bias: we know where a lot of indigenous pre-industrial villages existed and/or still exist in modern forms, because those are the ones that didn’t get blown away.

    But beyond that, most of these indigenous people just…adapted. It depends on where we’re talking exactly, but certain peoples found ways to ride out storms and then passed that knowledge down through generations. Native Americans in the south east knew the signs of hurricanes and prepared for them. They found the shelter they could, moved inland, sought higher ground, etc. Fate did the rest.

    There’s also some evidence to suggest we make hurricanes worse by the way we build our cities. Pavement, for example, collects water that must then runoff somewhere, hence more flooding. Obviously not an issue for indigenous tribes that live with the land. They know where the flood plains are. In fact many tribes warned Europeans when they tried to settle in areas that would get flooded during hurricane season.