I have decided that the 200,000 B.C. version of either Costa Rica or the Canary Island will be fine.

I would prefer the Canary Islands. Islands tend to have fewer dominate predators that would be a threat, sea food, bugs to eat and, hopefully, water.

And some para-cord!

Yea, but Costa Rica is where Jurrasic Park is located, talk about dominate predators.

I'm not sure what the deficit is from that description, but the visual system does several things for you:

- closeup vision provides the ability to select ripe and non-infected fruit; avoid small nasties hiding there (mostly toxic injectables from insects)

- long-distance vision for navigation; finding prey; good patches of forest, rivers, lakes; detect predators far away

- quick detection of moving prey and predators

then there is night vision...

how many of you know how to tan a hide?

make fire?

We wouldn't be able to tan a hide with modern methods. I do know how to brain tan a hide...very time consuming, but it's the ancient way. And, yes, I can start a fire, also not easy without the right stuff.

I am functionally blind without my glasses or contacts. I am also very tall, so I used to joke with my eye doctor as she (yes she was hot, but no, I don't have any pictures) asked me to slouch in the chair because I didn't fit her equipment that I was the blindest and tallest person she would see that week. I correct to 20/20, which my eye doctors have all found remarkable. So imagine a 6'4" blind caveman wandering around trying to find a reason to make the clan want to keep me around, and you see why I don't think I'd last very long when men had to compete with the wooly mamoth for food. But I do know that the best way to kill one (or a herd of buffalo) is to scare them into a stampede over a cliff, so maybe they would find a use for me afterall.

I do understand the rudements of how to tan a hide. I read My Side of the Mountain My Side of the Mountain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia when I was a kid. It is the story of a boy who runs away to live on his own in what was then the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains, and he described how to tan a deer hide in the stump of a big oak tree. The book was chock full of survival techniques and is a fantastic read. I highly recommend it to anyone, regardless of your age. It is fiction, but it is so well written and accurate that I used to think it was an autobiography.

The Foxfire books are also excellent for woodcraft survival, as is the Boy Scout Handbook and several merit badge booklets. I can build a shelter and I know the theory behind building a fire, but whether I could do it with a couple of rocks and a pile of tinder for real, I don't know. I think I'd be doing some social engineering with my fellow tribesmen to trade my knowledge for their protection. Maybe I could recite The Illiad or Beowulf to them, or maybe I could write The Art of War or On Strategy and become a great blind poet or advisor to the local warlord. Maybe I could invent a futures market for mamoth skins or derivitives for wampum and become the ancestor of the Rothschilds. If not, I would have died as a preteen when my eyesight started to fail.

I have to use reading glasses now in low light, and hate 'em(!)

The clan would keep you around for your superior wit, wisdom and potential to deter a wolf attack by them stopping to feed on you while the others get away.

but IIRC, this thread is a solo thing, so...

There's help for everyone now - there's a guy in NZ with a YouTube channel called "Primitive Technology." Guy alone in the woods with just a pair a shorts, building stuff. Turn on CC, as he doesn't speak in his vids.

i would be a saber tooth tiger turd.

You would have been a saber tooth tiger turd back in 2013 too according to you then. People would have been one of the more serious dangers 200K years ago. You needed a group unit around you to keep you safe & look out for the safety of the group - otherwise you'd probably end up being hunted down & eaten like any other source of protein.

The "Naked and afraid" TV folks would never want this guy.

Me? Not a chance of surviving.

I'm thinking tropical and coastal. You want warm all year long which means lots of flora and fauna for food all year round Unfortunately, most of us don't live in that environment so figuring out what's good to eat and what's not good to eat could pose a problem if you first find the "bad".

But hey, if Tom Hanks can do it....

I could probably handle my local environment as the harshest (effectively the PNW), provided I was dropped off in the late spring. I'd need to use the warm season to sort out shelter, clothing, extra food, wood stores etc. Given all that preparation, I might be able to survive a winter where it occasionally snows. I probably would have perished last winter though...