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I need a spleen transplant
- Thread starterBill McIntyre
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Thread Status: Hello
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A very interesting Bill article and it would be more interesting if they could find out how long ago this change occured in the Bajau as if it were from the 1600s then it would show that humans can evolve to certain conditions/enviroments very quickly but to prove this so you would need a Bajau spleen that is three to four hundred years old.
Although the Bajau can dive deep they do have other problems and ruptured ear drums at a young age is one of them as they have not been taught to equalise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12151830
Although the Bajau can dive deep they do have other problems and ruptured ear drums at a young age is one of them as they have not been taught to equalise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12151830
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They have not been taught to equalise? That seems weird as that is something that kind of comes natural for someone that spends a lot of time under water. That they would have been diving deep for hundreds and hundreds of years without learning the most fundamental bit, equalizing. Seems far fetched to me.
I think I saw a documentary a good while ago where they said that some would purposefully puncture their eardrums if they had recurring issues with equalization and hence sacrifice hearing for diving.
Always a bit doubtful when they claim loosely that some of them have 13 minute dive times though..
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/bajau-sea-nomads-free-diving-spleen-science/
Nat Geo was pretty impressed with their diving. Apparently they're doing 13 minutes hangs at 60m.
Nat Geo was pretty impressed with their diving. Apparently they're doing 13 minutes hangs at 60m.
The greek sponge divers would just blow their ear drums as kids as well.. i guess when your lively hood involves diving 100s of times per day hearing can maybe be lowered on the priority list.
The general way reports on freediving go.. maybe a Bajau did a 13 min static (probably not) and his friend did a 60m dive with fins+rope (very likely) reporters will mix the two and write that a naked, finless, maskless, and deaf guy did 13 mins to 60m because it looks cooler on paper.
That dive isn't possible in any case.
This people have spent so much time under water that their bodies have evolved to the extent that their spleens are enlarged, how the hell is it possible for them to avoid learning equalizing for hundreds and hundreds of years!? It's pretty self-explanatory if you spend so much time under water; you hear it, you feel it, and it is easily replicated once you learn it. Seems pretty unavoidable to me.
They have not learnt it and that is a cycle which has been going on for generations because they were not aware it could be done so they did not aquire the skill to do it. They do not have they ways and means like we do to find out that information as they do do not have the technology to find out how to equalise where as i can look it up how to equalise in five minutes on my laptop.
I agree. You would think they would have learned it by accident after hundreds of years.
I’m trying to remember how I learned in the early 1950s. I sure didn’t read it on the internet and their were no training courses. Maybe Jacque Cousteau mentioned it in The Silent World.
I don't think we had airplanes when I learned. Or at least I didn't ride in one until years later.
This thread has my mind wandering about easy availability of information now compared to when I was a kid. I was freedive spearfishing from about age 13 to 15 and I thought it was completely normal to feel dizzy and see stars when I surfaced. I don't think anyone knew about SWB. Its a wonder I survived.
Then at age 15 in 1954 I bought my first scuba gear. There were no certification courses that I was aware of. I think it did come with a little manual that said I shouldn't hold my breath while ascending. I didn't mess around in a pool. My first scuba dive was when I jumped off my father's boat in about 25 feet of salt water with a speargun in my hand. At least I was used to the environment. After noticing how neat it was to breath air I went off in pursuit of a big fish that I saw. So much for training.
I was mostly a bubble blower until age 57, 22 years ago. One of the things that got me back into freedive spearfishing was Bluewater Hunting and Freediving by Terry Maas. At least we had learned about SWB by then, and he covered it in the book.
Please forgive the derail, but old minds wander, and it is my thread.
This thread has my mind wandering about easy availability of information now compared to when I was a kid. I was freedive spearfishing from about age 13 to 15 and I thought it was completely normal to feel dizzy and see stars when I surfaced. I don't think anyone knew about SWB. Its a wonder I survived.
Then at age 15 in 1954 I bought my first scuba gear. There were no certification courses that I was aware of. I think it did come with a little manual that said I shouldn't hold my breath while ascending. I didn't mess around in a pool. My first scuba dive was when I jumped off my father's boat in about 25 feet of salt water with a speargun in my hand. At least I was used to the environment. After noticing how neat it was to breath air I went off in pursuit of a big fish that I saw. So much for training.
I was mostly a bubble blower until age 57, 22 years ago. One of the things that got me back into freedive spearfishing was Bluewater Hunting and Freediving by Terry Maas. At least we had learned about SWB by then, and he covered it in the book.
Please forgive the derail, but old minds wander, and it is my thread.
"Someone who says a thing cannot be done should never interrupt a person doing it" Ancient Chinese proverb
I watched this some weeks ago, i'm not sure the story of the oldman is 100% real, but from what he said, all of what he learned was by emitting others
nobody taught him to dive, he just did it naturaly when playing with kids.
they also have a myths about sea spirits waiting for people who go too deep, he mentionned an incident that happened to him when he went too deep (the symptoms he reconted indicate barotrauma).
He also said he lost his son to the sea, because he didn't have time to teach him anything about diving (this seems like a perpetual cycle).
I think the reason the sea gypies evolved genetical traits that helps them with diving very fast in just a couple of thousand years, is exactly bc of the high mortality rates, and they over dependency on fishing and living in the sea, if hunting under-water wasn't a matter of surivival, the inviduals who had better inherent biological adaptations woudn't have been selected.
Aloha Brochman, a few years back archaeologists found a bottle of Portuguese Port from the 1500s in Darwin Bay, Northern Australia. In a rock shelter near the bay, they found paintings of a square-rigged ship and of a boat with similar rigging to what the Bajau still use. It is suspected that the Portuguese traded port with the Chinese and then the Chinese traded the port with the Bajau for the sea cucumbers they harvested. It was the Bajau who are suspected of throwing the empty port bottle overboard into Darwin Bay. All this 200 years before Captain Cook. Aloha
Aloha Bill, a few years back archaeologists found a bottle of Portuguese Port from the 1500s in Darwin Bay, Northern Australia. In a rock shelter near the bay, they found paintings of a square-rigged ship and of a boat with similar rigging to what the Bajau still use. It is suspected that the Portuguese traded port with the Chinese and then the Chinese traded the port with the Bajau for the sea cucumbers they harvested. It was the Bajau who are suspected of throwing the empty port bottle overboard into Darwin Bay. All this 200 years before Captain Cook. Aloha
Thanks PrimeMerian a good bit of info about the Bajau. I find it strange that we are usually taught as children that explorers such as Cook and Columbus were the first to find certain continents and Islands but if there are already native people living there then obviously it was discovered at least by those native peoples if not before them. And why we were not taught at school for instance that the Viking Leif Erikson set foot on American soil in the early 10th century almost 500 years before Columbus got there makes me think that even though the Archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows was found in 1960 that they just couldn't be bothered to change this fact in the schooling twenty five years later.
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