alt Hacker NewsThis is nothing new though; industrialization and specialization have already caused basic survival skills to atrophy in most of the population. Take the case of a massive EMP taking out all computer systems. Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive. Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.
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Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period. Subsistence level agriculture is also wildly inefficient and so again: the ecosystem cannot support it.
A hunter-gatherer dropped into a metropolis where all the logistics has suddenly failed would be as dead as everybody else.
If everyone in Manhattan had Bear Grylls-level survival skills, most would still starve in the long term without modern supply chains and industrial agriculture. The damaged ecosystems around large population centers can't support millions of primates, however skilled, suddenly relying on it.
Same would be true if you dropped off a million wild black bears in their natural habitat. The natural environment just can't support that many large animals in a small area.