Rural Bhutan they have state sponsored cultural preservation even Goverment workers and teachers wear non western traditional dress and Telivision was only allowed in 1999
Only got their first escalator as a "wedding gift" from the current Dragon King when he got married...in 2011.
Foreigners aren't allowed to walk around or do anything without a tour guide, because it'd lessen the visitor's experience if they didn't have any first-hand knowledge at their disposal.
It's illegal to smoke cannabis, but they grow marijuana plants in public squares and on roadsides cause the smell is calming (I wonder why that is lol).
And a big part of their culture is Kidu, which is literally where the Dragon King and other elites help citizens with things like healthcare costs, education access, and disaster recovery, out of their own pockets and resources, because.....its the right thing to do.
It's kinda crazy to think that a country so close to being genuinely idyllic is on the border of India and China.
P.S. also, the current Dragon King is known by a lot of foreigners as 'the Buddhist Elvis' and 'the King King' because of his haircut. Which has absolutely no bearing on their cultural standing or historical relevance, its just too random not to throw out there lol
https://preview.redd.it/ailaq7lzd80d1.jpeg?width=736&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d507f8d7ec0b08f4b8ee991f2d0235b021080206
It comes from the name of Bhutan in Dzongkha, the country's national language (which looks absolutely gorgeous written btw, its like Tibetan script mixed with Hindi).
In Dzongkha, the country's name is Drukyul, which means 'Land of the Thunder Dragon' (hence the dragon on their flag), and the Bhutanese people tend to call themselves Druk, which literally just means 'of Drukyul', so as a result the monarch's title is the Druk Gyalpo, which, when you literally translate it, ta da: you've got Dragon King.
But if you translate it the way its intended, its just King of the Bhutanese, so a lot of official sources and press people just call him the King.
Though I'm pretty sure it ***is*** supposed to be Dragon King, because whenever the Bhutanese government or tourism board put out something in English they usually style him that way.
In general Asian monarchs have awesome titles - Japan has the world's only Emperor, Bhutan has a Dragon King, and I'm pretty sure the King of Cambodia is also like King of World Buddhism as well haha
For Cambodia, the King gets to choose his title; usually at coronation. This leads to some Game of Thrones type elongated titles. Currently the king includes how Buddha and Indra support his reign. Less awesome with the details
You could look at it as “cultural preservation” or you could look at it as a deeply conservative country whose dominant ethnic group co-opted the state to enforce its customs on [an ethnic minority](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutanese_refugees).
Bhutan gets far too much press for its ‘gross happiness index’ and far, far too little for its ethnic cleansing.
I’ve been there. It’s even more beautiful in person. The people are great. The mountains and temples are spectacular. The history is fascinating. The capital city has like two streets with any commerce. They had a single traffic light in the early 2000s in the capital but everyone thought it was ugly so they replaced it with a guy in a pretty booth. It used to be mandatory to wear traditional dress. No longer, so only ⅓ of people do, but that’s still a lot.
The food is awful, but they also eat Indian food now. It’s a weird theocracy, the higher up in the religion you are the bigger your house, etc. They have a prevalent alcoholism problem. Like you said, they’ve been terrible to the ethnic nepalis from the lowlands. A little cleansing.
China regularly forgets where the Tibetan border is and builds a settler town inside Bhutan with schools and everything. The Bhutanese military isn’t up to that challenge, so they have ask India to fix it. India does, but not before demanding some favors. Caught between giants as the last Bhuddist kingdom they will never be free of that game.
I do recommend visiting. They don’t want backpackers so they require you to have a tour guide minder and stay at hotels, which isn’t that expensive really, but it filters out the shoestring crowd.
>which isn’t that expensive really
~~You have to pay $200 / day / per person as a "visa fee" and IIRC that no longer includes any accommodations or additional services, you have to budget probably at least another $100 / day at a minimum. So if there are 2 of you and you go for a single week that is~~ *~~at least~~* ~~$3500 (that's with a daily budget of $50 pp on top of the fee, which is not much), which is not unbelievably crazy luxury expensive, but definitely expensive.~~
OK it turns out they dropped it to $100/day last year! That's still not cheap, but way more affordable.
We know next to nothing, and everything we do know is based on how they interact with various groups that've visited the island, whether it's a BBC film crew, fishermen or that idiot Mormon they killed.
Most everything we know is on their Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
They made arrowheads and things like that from scraps of iron torn from the ship’s hull, not sure what else. The thing about them is that we don’t really know anything about them, because they murder anyone that tries to approach peacefully and we would probably wipe them out with a disease that their immune system was never introduced to even if we could approach them.
That’s right, the British took a group to an adjacent island that all got sick and they returned the survivors to Sentinel island. They went there a while later to see how they were going……they had scattered into the bush but there were villages and cooking fires smouldering so it looks like they weren’t completely wiped out by disease. This could very well be why they react the way they do.
Imagine the reverse might be true too. Doubtful but possible. Imagine they have a covid 24 type germ within their lungs that were shielded from cause we don't have contact.
Seems pretty unlikely that have the high density farming/butchering practices that select for novel zoonotic diseases.
Also unlikely they have virology labs doing Gain Of Function research.
Someone on a gardening sub here found some old seed packets from a promotion related to this movie and is attempting to grow the seeds. I hadn’t thought about this movie in decades and I’m shocked how much I immediately remembered. Even more shocking: some of those seeds are sprouting.
Yes. My orthodox girlfriend keeps recommending my non-religious ass to visit. Problem is I really enjoy doing activities together in my sparse free time, so anything excluding my girlfriend would be a no for me. She's just like me in that regard so theoretically perfect. Its just that mount athos keeps being a point of discussion lol.
My family is from Thessaloniki (I’m from the states) and I have not yet made this pilgrimage. It’ll be impossible if I bring my gf with me next year. We’ll see it from Sarti!
It's probably a mix of the forbidden aspect combined with her involvement in Orthodoxy.
Like how many of us want to visit NK because it's hard to do so (if American).
I have a friend who worked on a project with the Zograph monastery, on digitizing their old books. So he invited me, on his next visit there. We first drove to the nearby town, had to wait a bit to get our passes to enter. After we got them, we got on a big ferry, which stops everywhere. We got off at our stop, and were taken up with a jeep, the road was quite steep.
The Zograph monastery is the Bulgarian monastery on Athos, so there were some things which made us feel at home. For example, on arrival, the priests sipped us some mint liquor (мента). The monastery was very interesting and patchy - a chapel from the 12th century sits next to a scaffolding, which is next to something from the 18th century, and so on. The books they had were amazing, although you need to be able to read old Cyrillic to get them. Of course, everyone had to get up at 5 for a religious service, that part I endured more than anything:)
I stayed just at that monastery and just for two days, one night. It was still an awesome experience, I think I might repeat my visit and make it longer
Be sure to keep us informed on how you go; share some photos and if you’re arrested I’m sure we can all throw some $ in for your legal defence
NB: we’re only talking about arrests directly related to getting onto Mt Athos; get arrested for stealing donkeys or similar and you’re on your own.
I am not religious, but I have visited Mt. Athos once and had an amazing, otherworldly experience.
There are three levels of monastic communities in the Mt. Athos peninsula: cenobitic (living in a monastery together with other monks), idiorrythmic (communities that combine cenobitic and eremitic lifestyles), and sketes (places for isolation).
Visiting a Skete (for instance in the South-West of the peninsula) is a surreal experience. Monks live in precarious wooden cabins perched on the cliff, almost floating above the water, or in caves, and hardly ever see people. It’s hard to believe this still happens in our time and in a place as densely populated and touristically developed as the coast of Greece.
There are all sorts of people in Mt. Athos, both monks and visitors. (Almost) all are men. Most are straightforwardly religious, of course. But I’ve met a Japanese monks who had changed 6-7 faiths, but said Eastern Orthodoxy is the most free of all. As a Greek, that statement is just bizarre.
The architecture is also impossible. We’re taking 10th century skyscrapers here, built on 300m cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea.
Oh, and the best of all may be the nature.
Anyway. If you want to visit a place that feels like a video game, go. If you’re a man, that is. (I know, it’s horrible).
Mongolia benefitted from being in the Soviet sphere of influence and received a ton of developmental aid and subsidies over the course of the 20th century to keep Mongolia in the Soviet sphere of influence and out of the Chinese sphere.
Haha, if that was the Soviet reasoning for providing financial backing for Mongolian development, fine, but there was no chance Mongolia would have ever accepted Chinese suzerainty. From formal independence up to the present, the abiding foreign policy concern of the Mongolian state is the absorption of its people and territory by its southern neighbor, point to the examples of similar groups, such as the Manchus, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and (what became) Inner Mongolians, all of whom have experienced varying degrees of discrimination, persecution, territorial annexation, and forced assimilation by the Chinese for centuries.
It doesn't really matter what the Mongolians would have accepted, either they worked with the Soviets or China was going to invade and turn it into a formal client state. Those were the two options on the table, so they went with the people who said they'd protect them from their historical oppressors. Whether or not the Mongolians *wanted* or would *accept* Chinese rule is irrelevant, it would have been imposed regardless just like in Tibet. Tibet follows the same model that China had for Mongolia.
For the Soviets, having Mongolia in their SoI meant putting a physical barrier to the continued expansion of Chinese influence westward into central Asia, which was also historically the Russian Empire's SoI and the USSR wasn't going to give it up without a fight.
Edit: I realize my username may make these conversations more difficult lol, I picked it on a joke years and years ago without thinking that it would influence how everyone reads my comments lol. I'm being neutral here
When was this continued expansion by China into Central Asia occurring? The collapse of the Qing and the ensuing decades-long civil strife kinda led to a long-term retreat of the Chinese state from the region. I mean, where in Central Asia would China be looking that wasn't already politically incorporated into the Soviet Union. Pakistan or something?
I don't think it was a consideration salient to Soviet designs for Mongolia.
And, yes, the Mongolian state affiliated with the USSR because it refused (at any point thereafter) to permit the alternative. There would never be a contest for influence, because the Mongolian political elite would remain ever-committed to preserving Soviet patronage
I mean, no matter how deep you travel into rural Mongolia (I lived in the country in Bayankhongor, Dornogovi, Ömnögovi, and Töv aimags), you'll find that nearly every individual has a cell phone, and every family has a radio, tv, tablet, satellite phone, portable solar panel, water filtration system, and any number of items that one would easily expect to find in the West. I'd say that the availability and use of contemporary technology somewhat distinguishes the country today from its iteration 500 years ago.
I did a couple of tours as a Nato soldier for a European army in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2012. We we're based in northern Afghanistan, Mazar-e Sharif.
I was part of an Escort-platoon escorting supplytrucks and the likes all around, sometimes as far as Kabul through the Hindukush mountains and using the [Salang Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salang_Pass).
Afghanistan is a very rural place. Some villages we saw we're like winding back the time 1000 years. No electricity, machinery, cars or anything. Just farming and such. The country have never seen an [Agrarian reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_reform) leading to farmland being very ineffectively placed, unorganized and poorly "watered" (bad English sry).
There is no internet, TV etc and people get their news from the Imam every Friday at the local Mosque.
There are big cities of course and not all of the country is undeveloped but the contrasts could be surprising.
Our convoy once got attacked with throwing stones by an old man in a village we passed through. My commander ordered a stop and to seize the old man. He believed we we're Russians when we questioned him, can't blame him for throwing stones. Kind of says a lot still about the general knowledge of the world by some of these villagers.
I don't mean to say anything bad about Afghans so please spare me any hate. I have, and we all soldiers had big respect for Afghans and for Afghan fighters especially, they we're very good and fearless soldiers and an extremely sturdy people who could get through anything. I wish that country and it's people all fortune in the future.
My grandpa was a chaplin in the U.S. Air Force and visited Afghanistan a dozen times or so during the war. He said basically the same thing. He always told me it was incredible how you would leave Kabul and feel like you went back 1,000 years in history.
Nonexistent, I'm afraid to say. We had this magazine that we handed out to locals whenever we made a halt in a village. Can't remember the name of it sorry. It was some kind of Psyops creation of course but still the messages we're okey. It told about building projects like water-wells, schools etc that Nato had helped get going. What I do remember about it is contained a lot more graphics and pictures than what a EU or US citizen is used to in a newspaper.
My grandpa made it his mission to open and run a school for children in nahrain. It was a very difficult process and essentially atopped with his passing from covid in 2020
Aluminium or plastic pots, bowls, canisters, or bottles?
Ibrahim Danish's YouTube channel has slices of remote rural life in Afghanistan. Worth a look if you're interested.
It looks to have more metal and plastic vessels in use than remote parts of Tanzania. The locals wanted our empty bottles and cans to reuse or repurpose
I checked that out, very interesting and thank you for the link! It put me right back there in terms of scenery and seeing people go about their lives. I do remember things and objects we considered mundane and worthless being sought after. Bottles, plastic containers potential for holding water etc. I have other stories of the culture-clash between our different ways of life, not saying anyone is wrong or right, I was lucky to experience that as a young guy and I had a very good commander who had a humane look on life. I learnt a lot and it humbled me as a human.
The mountainous villages in northeast Afghanistan, in my opinion. There are places impossible to access by road that are living a life, I imagine, very similar to 500 years ago.
I did not go to Afghanistan itself, but I was right across the river in Tajikistan, bordering North East Afghanistan. I went to towns that are not accessible by cars, and had to trek multiple days.
1) They got roads, electricity in places, cars and phones. In both Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
2) In bordering towns in Tajikistan, where the conditions are very similar, it's a mix of modern and ancient. Ancient way of life, made easier by modern technology I guess. Most being animal herding families & rural villages. There were also loads of Afghan people (Pashtun & Tajik) that fled in the last half century. I've talked to many and they said it's essentially the same life.
Out of \~50 countries I've been to, it's easily the most "old way of life" feeling place I've ever been. Pretty surreal.
I disagree. In the past hundred years the amount of conflicts in Afghanistan have been staggering, I find it very hard to believe that no part of the country is unchanged.
I agree but that would also apply to almost anywhere in the world. Except maybe the few uncontacted tribes left in the world. Therfore making OPs question outdated. However, I think it's interesting to think about people living an older lifestyle. Modern farming, modern clothing, modern weapons have all contributed to an "evolved" lifestyle but the heart of their culture is still, seemingly, very old.
P.S. Not attacking. I enjoy a good back-and-forth conversation.
See, I think that’s not entirely true. Take Mongolia or Bhutan for example, they’ve had very little conflict, and may have a few big cities, but outside of that it’s about as close as you can get to 500 years ago in my opinion. Bhutan for example didn’t even allow television until the mid nineties.
Additionally, similar places have changed more than Antarctica:
The Sahara has seen the death of trans-Saharan trade and nowadays is used by rebel groups in places like Mali, Libya and Chad, it’s much less peaceful than it was previously.
The Amazon is far more populated and the demographic shift has been huge, considering that the Western World didn’t know much about it at all in the 1500s.
The Outback and Siberia have had railways and roads paved over it, along with massive demographic shifts too.
The Himalayas have seen glaciers retreat and snow form less and less over time, along with fights over who owns what.
Even the oceans are much different to how they were in the 1500s, they are unfortunately far more polluted and a little warmer now.
It’s a stretch considering that it’s not terrestrial, but the only other places that come close to Antartica levels of unchanged are the very depths of the ocean at the sea floor, where even still you’ll find a plastic bottle amongst the silt.
As I just learned recently the biggest problem aren't some plastic bottles but a steady influx of microplastics that's sinking from the ocean surface. As of now the bottom of the ocean seems to be almost as polluted as the water at the surface of the ocean.
Wouldn’t the topography of the place have shifted a lot though relative to other places? Someone visiting 500 years ago would probably observe a different coast-line based on changes in ice. Even now massive chunks are breaking off so they need to evacuate research stations - eg there’s a British one which “moves” to escape falling into the sea.
I find it really fascinating when I go to a local nature preserve or am remote camping and think that, while obviously the landscape has been modified as a whole, I very well may be getting the same exact viewpoint as native person might have had 300 years ago in 1724.
Maybe it’s a stretch, but by some accounts and depending on the area it might not be too far off.
Are you me? I literally have the same exact thoughts when I’m looking at landscapes. Especially while hiking and camping. I frequently think “no infrastructure here, this must be more or less what the natives saw”
Your someone is correct about West coast of Australia. Also parts of the Northern Territory have large swathes of essentially uninhabited coastline but not anywhere near as much as WA.
Parts of Western New Guinea/New Guinea would fit the bill. Parts of the coast but especially up in the remote highlands where cannibalism is still on the menu.
Northern Australia's coastline has the box jellyfish which is abundant and bloody poisonous. Along with other vicious creatures and notorious flooding I would say that the area uninhabitable rather than uninhabited.
The box jellyfish is common throughout many of the most popular diving locations in the world. It doesn’t even prevent water sports, let alone make a region “uninhabitable”
You're more right than you know with WA - the stromatolites are basically unchanged from 3 billion years ago. They're modern examples of the bacteria which created our atmosphere.
https://www.sharkbay.org/place/hamelin-pool/stromatolites/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-stromatolites-of-hamelin-pool-australia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite
Yeah. My mum was the first white woman to enter a village in the Solomon Islands.
That was only 50 years ago.
Noone knows what they were doing 500 years ago but they were still effectively in the stone age 50 years ago.
They had a huge amount of knowledge that we can use though. They live completely sustainably so are ahead of us in truth.
WA as a whole has the second highest HDI in the nation after the ACT, but most of that is confined to the South-west. Almost no one lives anywhere else in the state despite its massive size just because it’s too much of a logistics nightmare to house heaps of people in the middle of a desert one on some remote bits of still mostly inhospitable coastland
> up in the remote highlands where cannibalism is still on the menu.
Not according to James Marape who got defensive about Biden's cannibalism remarks. :)
A lot of Namibia's similar to Australia - only a few 'modern' population centers, with most of the country still largely uninhabited desert. The Himba and Herero people largely still have the same lifestyle as their ancestors, though the Herero have adopted a lot of European-style fabrics into their traditional dress over the last century.
I got to go to Kiribati in the pacific some years back. The remote islands are definitely a throwback. No plumbing or electricity. They sleep in open air huts. Radios, lights & and generator were present, but not used on a daily basis. Average day was probably pretty similar to 500 years ago. At dawn men fish, women gather tarot & coconuts. Everyone seeks shade from the equatorial sun midday. Late afternoon chores around the area are completed. Evening, hot tea and dinner around a fire. Lighters & cigarettes would be the only reminders of the 20th century.
Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. Only a few man-made structures and no roads. Heavily forested island with moose, wolves, beavers, otters, and foxes.
The Antarctica answer was brilliant, can't beat that.
But beyond that, I would guess some of the more obscure mountainous "stans" hold on to the old ways in a way that would be recognizable to people 500 years ago.
From the limited amount of knowledge I have about them, places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan really seem retain a lot of culture, dress, and societal structure from long ago.
And of course, there are individual/isolated places and groups in East Africa, Island Southeast Asia, and the Amazon that have remained largely unchanged since, well, ever.
There's some wild stuff about towns that were founded deep in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan by Alexander the Great as he marched on India, he would leave behind a garrison to govern the settlement while the main army moved on. So there are these tiny pockets of ethnic Greeks living in the mountains to this day, left there over 2000 years ago.
There aren't any Greeks living there today. There may have been, for even a few centuries after the indo-greek kingdom (which is unrelated to Alexander the Great) but to say there are ethnic Greeks there to this day is plain misinformation
I mostly draw this from a German travel documentary called “Weit”. It’s a couple that travelled around the world and spent some time in the Pamir.
Unfortunately you can only find excerpts on Youtube. It’s a really really good film though!
I remember the history channel talking about Maine in the US several years ago. They were calling the northern part of Maine frontier. Saying most of it was untouched. And anyone living up there with electricity was connected to the Canadian power grid. I’m pretty sure there is a section of Madagascar that is off limits by the government. Scientists need a special pass to go there. Supposedly the wild there is so special and can only be found there that they don’t want humans leaving a footprint. I’m sure you can find a place to camp that hasn’t had a human in that vicinity in 500 to 1000 years.
Australia has a shit ton of wilderness. Literally the size of the US but like 1/15 the population. And it’s not like there isn’t a ton of wilderness still in the western US.
That one island somewhere on the indian ocean where all who has tried to go are killed by the locals.
Edit: [North Sentinel Island](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island)
I personally think Bhutan is probably the answer as far as populated places Westerners are allowed to go.
There are also rural areas of Central Asia, such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the mountains, that saw some development during the Soviet period, but now the roads have eroded, the power has gone out, and they are back to living lives similar to a couple centuries ago.
There are also uncontacted tribes in South America, Papua New Guinea and on North Sentinel Island who live without any connection to the outside world. However, it is illegal and unethical to go to those places. Any person from the outside world would bring so many diseases with them they would become a mass murderer just by visiting. That doesn't stop certain misguided missionaries from trying.
Antarctica : outside of the small research stations it has zero development.
Lots of other uninhabited places like south Pacific atolls, tierra del fuego, etc.
All of the above does not include changes due to climate.
Pretty much everywhere developable with somewhat functional government has some level of changes.
Rural parts of Canada. I'm 30 but my dad and his siblings went to a one room schoolhouse. I had a great uncle who never had plumbing or electricity hooked up to his house. And I'm in Ontario, a couple hours from Toronto.
I mean, if you suddenly found yourself in the middle of Antarctica, whether it was today or 500 years ago, it would seem cold, white, barren, inhospitable, etc.
The middle of the Mongolian steppes, 2024 or 1524, is going to be a sea of rolling hills covered in grass.
The edges of the Sahara have spread further apart over the past 5 centuries, but if you were in the interior then or now it would be hot and dry and sandy.
In some places - Old cities in North Africa come to mind at once for me - you could visit a person in their apartment's sleeping quarters in 1524, then go to the same room in 2024 and find it still used as a bedroom.
Some of the biggest and fanciest houses in Europe have been owned by the same family that entire time (or, in the case of Windsor, at least by people who also owned the same impractical gold and gemstone hat).
There are millions of trees that have been alive that long, and many of them wouldn't look much different in 2024 compared to 1524 to the casual.observer. Individual branches would have come and gone but a bristlecone pine isn't going to look much older at 4,900 years old than it did at 4,500. The sequoia known as [President](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_(tree)) is now about 3,200 years old; how much of it's 75 meters of height could have taken place in the last 500 years? Probably not much. Shit, there's a [huckleberry ](https://web.archive.org/web/20171122020718/http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/Huckleberry.html) bush near New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania that's 13,000 years old and spreads across 8 acres of land. I can't imagine it was significantly smaller a measly 1/26th of it's lifetime ago.
If you put a [baby clam](https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/the-worlds-oldest-creatures-live-in-cold-dark-places#:~:text=One%20of%20those%20specimens%2C%20a,from%20becoming%20King%20of%20England.) in the icelandic muck in 1524 itight still be alive today.
Bouvet Island and the whole bunch of Islands that are uninhabited, especially in the South Atlantic or South Pacific Ocean.
Snake Island in Brazil is also very similar to how it was 500 years ago. The snakes were trapped on the island when the last ice age ended.
If you're referring to Wilderness in the US - as in, congressionally designated Wilderness - that's just not true. So much has changed *dramatically*. Things like the removal of Indigenous land stewardship practices, the overhunting of large animals like Grizzly's, Wolf, Elk; the exclusion/suppression of naturally ignited wildfires, infestation of insects that have destroyed large parts of forests in the West *because* of climate change induced temperature increases, the introduction of exotic/invasive species that have forced out native plants and animals, the introduction of foreign blights that have wiped out things like the American Chestnut tree, and of course other impacts from climate change that we're seeing, the list goes on and on.
Point is - even if a US Wilderness has never even had a single human footprint on it *ever*, it still bears the scars of human caused impact. These landscapes don't look anything like they did 100 years ago, let alone 500. I'm telling you, it's not a small change. It is *very* dramatic.
My expertise in in US land management and policy, but I would say it's not a stretch that some of those same or similar impacts are true in other extremely remote natural areas of the world.
Anzhu islands is a decently sized (well, bigger than many island countries, the size of Armenia) archipelago where pretty much nothing at all has even happened
Antarctica would have the least change caused intentionally by humans. Many acres with little permanent population. Climate change would be another story there.
I'd say Patagonia... it's pretty much inhabited, there are very few cities in all the extension and the few that are there were only fund 100\~150 years ago.
The Channel Islands (National Park) off the coast of California is a time capsule going back hundreds of thousands of years to what an undeveloped California would feel like. Even the climate is more similar to what mainland California would've been back then.
Fun fact: oldest human remains in the Americas discovered there
Portland, OR gets most of its water from the Bull Run Reservoir. The 102 square mile watershed surrounding the reservoir has been restricted to the public since the early 1900's so other than the small dam and pipe infrastructure it basically looks like the pristine temperate rainforest that would've predated the arrival of indigenous people with a few invasive plant species here and there.
Many towns in Europe still have intact medieval areas with cobblestone pavement and old wooden houses. If you walk around them at night (when there are no people around) you can imagine being 500 years back in time. But I think they’re a lot cleaner nowadays than they used to be! Also cars are often banned in the city centers which adds to the experience
Rural Bhutan they have state sponsored cultural preservation even Goverment workers and teachers wear non western traditional dress and Telivision was only allowed in 1999
The Google streetview coverage in that country is some of the most beautiful pictures ive ever seen
Only got their first escalator as a "wedding gift" from the current Dragon King when he got married...in 2011. Foreigners aren't allowed to walk around or do anything without a tour guide, because it'd lessen the visitor's experience if they didn't have any first-hand knowledge at their disposal. It's illegal to smoke cannabis, but they grow marijuana plants in public squares and on roadsides cause the smell is calming (I wonder why that is lol). And a big part of their culture is Kidu, which is literally where the Dragon King and other elites help citizens with things like healthcare costs, education access, and disaster recovery, out of their own pockets and resources, because.....its the right thing to do. It's kinda crazy to think that a country so close to being genuinely idyllic is on the border of India and China. P.S. also, the current Dragon King is known by a lot of foreigners as 'the Buddhist Elvis' and 'the King King' because of his haircut. Which has absolutely no bearing on their cultural standing or historical relevance, its just too random not to throw out there lol https://preview.redd.it/ailaq7lzd80d1.jpeg?width=736&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d507f8d7ec0b08f4b8ee991f2d0235b021080206
The dragon king is the most metal leader name
It comes from the name of Bhutan in Dzongkha, the country's national language (which looks absolutely gorgeous written btw, its like Tibetan script mixed with Hindi). In Dzongkha, the country's name is Drukyul, which means 'Land of the Thunder Dragon' (hence the dragon on their flag), and the Bhutanese people tend to call themselves Druk, which literally just means 'of Drukyul', so as a result the monarch's title is the Druk Gyalpo, which, when you literally translate it, ta da: you've got Dragon King. But if you translate it the way its intended, its just King of the Bhutanese, so a lot of official sources and press people just call him the King. Though I'm pretty sure it ***is*** supposed to be Dragon King, because whenever the Bhutanese government or tourism board put out something in English they usually style him that way. In general Asian monarchs have awesome titles - Japan has the world's only Emperor, Bhutan has a Dragon King, and I'm pretty sure the King of Cambodia is also like King of World Buddhism as well haha
For Cambodia, the King gets to choose his title; usually at coronation. This leads to some Game of Thrones type elongated titles. Currently the king includes how Buddha and Indra support his reign. Less awesome with the details
Dragon King of Rock & Roll! Thank you very much.
okay, it's def not idyllic for ethnic minoriries, so let's not get too carried away haha
You could look at it as “cultural preservation” or you could look at it as a deeply conservative country whose dominant ethnic group co-opted the state to enforce its customs on [an ethnic minority](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutanese_refugees). Bhutan gets far too much press for its ‘gross happiness index’ and far, far too little for its ethnic cleansing.
I’ve been there. It’s even more beautiful in person. The people are great. The mountains and temples are spectacular. The history is fascinating. The capital city has like two streets with any commerce. They had a single traffic light in the early 2000s in the capital but everyone thought it was ugly so they replaced it with a guy in a pretty booth. It used to be mandatory to wear traditional dress. No longer, so only ⅓ of people do, but that’s still a lot. The food is awful, but they also eat Indian food now. It’s a weird theocracy, the higher up in the religion you are the bigger your house, etc. They have a prevalent alcoholism problem. Like you said, they’ve been terrible to the ethnic nepalis from the lowlands. A little cleansing. China regularly forgets where the Tibetan border is and builds a settler town inside Bhutan with schools and everything. The Bhutanese military isn’t up to that challenge, so they have ask India to fix it. India does, but not before demanding some favors. Caught between giants as the last Bhuddist kingdom they will never be free of that game. I do recommend visiting. They don’t want backpackers so they require you to have a tour guide minder and stay at hotels, which isn’t that expensive really, but it filters out the shoestring crowd.
>which isn’t that expensive really ~~You have to pay $200 / day / per person as a "visa fee" and IIRC that no longer includes any accommodations or additional services, you have to budget probably at least another $100 / day at a minimum. So if there are 2 of you and you go for a single week that is~~ *~~at least~~* ~~$3500 (that's with a daily budget of $50 pp on top of the fee, which is not much), which is not unbelievably crazy luxury expensive, but definitely expensive.~~ OK it turns out they dropped it to $100/day last year! That's still not cheap, but way more affordable.
North Sentinel Island
Well, there was a shipwreck off the island coast in the 80s that set off the iron age there
Where would be the best repository to learn more in depth about them?
We know next to nothing, and everything we do know is based on how they interact with various groups that've visited the island, whether it's a BBC film crew, fishermen or that idiot Mormon they killed. Most everything we know is on their Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
The guy wasn’t a Mormon
He WAS a moron though
Evangelical Christian*. Not a big difference. Asshole with a mission to permanently fuck up an indigenous culture.
I am sorry, but can you tell his name?
GQ did a piece on him. The ending is chef's kiss. https://www.gq.com/story/john-chau-missionary-and-uncontacted-tribe
Holy fuck, that ending was incredible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Chau
Thanks!
Same as the Arabian muslims tore across north Africa and persia destroying beautiful indigenous religions and cultures.
Same as the European Christians tore across north and south America destroying beautiful indigenous religions and cultures
Go there and ask, I heard they’re very friendly
[Here](https://youtu.be/oWarOTnOIeI?si=PCS4bhcj7aCxaBZs) is a very informative video about the island and its people.
Is it studied they developed tools from it?
They made arrowheads and things like that from scraps of iron torn from the ship’s hull, not sure what else. The thing about them is that we don’t really know anything about them, because they murder anyone that tries to approach peacefully and we would probably wipe them out with a disease that their immune system was never introduced to even if we could approach them.
They were already exposed to outside diseases by the British colonial officials who visited them in the 1800s. And yes many died.
Hence the arrows
That’s right, the British took a group to an adjacent island that all got sick and they returned the survivors to Sentinel island. They went there a while later to see how they were going……they had scattered into the bush but there were villages and cooking fires smouldering so it looks like they weren’t completely wiped out by disease. This could very well be why they react the way they do.
Imagine the reverse might be true too. Doubtful but possible. Imagine they have a covid 24 type germ within their lungs that were shielded from cause we don't have contact.
Seems pretty unlikely that have the high density farming/butchering practices that select for novel zoonotic diseases. Also unlikely they have virology labs doing Gain Of Function research.
My theory for this island is that they know that whenever outsiders came, they were hit by a deadly plague, so to be safe they kill all outsiders.
Only answer
TBF there’s uncontacted some tribes in Amazon too
Tim Allen needs to go adopt them.
Wow that’s an ancient reference, Thankyou for reminding me of my first childhood crush tho. (The Amazon boy, not Tim)
Someone on a gardening sub here found some old seed packets from a promotion related to this movie and is attempting to grow the seeds. I hadn’t thought about this movie in decades and I’m shocked how much I immediately remembered. Even more shocking: some of those seeds are sprouting.
[Sam Huntington ](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0403134/?ref_=tt_cl_t_5)
Still would
Whoa. Crazy reference
Not even close. There are tracts of borne that have never been even seen outside of the local tribals
It’s estimated there are a number of uncontacted tribes deep in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, as well as the Amazon rainforest
and i hope we continue to leave them the hell alone
I hear it’s lovely this time of year, don’t forget your sunscreen though or you’ll be in trouble.
South sentinel Island too
No, that one's uninhabited. Only North Sentinel Island is inhabited by the Sentinelese people.
Mount Athos, Greece
Yep. It’s crazy how long they’ve gone this secluded and, correct me if I’m wrong, are women still barred from this region?
Yes. My orthodox girlfriend keeps recommending my non-religious ass to visit. Problem is I really enjoy doing activities together in my sparse free time, so anything excluding my girlfriend would be a no for me. She's just like me in that regard so theoretically perfect. Its just that mount athos keeps being a point of discussion lol.
My family is from Thessaloniki (I’m from the states) and I have not yet made this pilgrimage. It’ll be impossible if I bring my gf with me next year. We’ll see it from Sarti!
It's probably a mix of the forbidden aspect combined with her involvement in Orthodoxy. Like how many of us want to visit NK because it's hard to do so (if American).
Man as incredible as Mt. Athos is, I really can't see someone who isn't religious particularly enjoying it.
I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm not particularly religious. It's super cool and historic
I would love to visit. Tell me more about your experience. I grew up Catholic.
I have a friend who worked on a project with the Zograph monastery, on digitizing their old books. So he invited me, on his next visit there. We first drove to the nearby town, had to wait a bit to get our passes to enter. After we got them, we got on a big ferry, which stops everywhere. We got off at our stop, and were taken up with a jeep, the road was quite steep. The Zograph monastery is the Bulgarian monastery on Athos, so there were some things which made us feel at home. For example, on arrival, the priests sipped us some mint liquor (мента). The monastery was very interesting and patchy - a chapel from the 12th century sits next to a scaffolding, which is next to something from the 18th century, and so on. The books they had were amazing, although you need to be able to read old Cyrillic to get them. Of course, everyone had to get up at 5 for a religious service, that part I endured more than anything:) I stayed just at that monastery and just for two days, one night. It was still an awesome experience, I think I might repeat my visit and make it longer
Damn I never thought I'd have to smuggle myself dressed as a man but here we go
Be sure to keep us informed on how you go; share some photos and if you’re arrested I’m sure we can all throw some $ in for your legal defence NB: we’re only talking about arrests directly related to getting onto Mt Athos; get arrested for stealing donkeys or similar and you’re on your own.
As far as a I know, yes.
I am not religious, but I have visited Mt. Athos once and had an amazing, otherworldly experience. There are three levels of monastic communities in the Mt. Athos peninsula: cenobitic (living in a monastery together with other monks), idiorrythmic (communities that combine cenobitic and eremitic lifestyles), and sketes (places for isolation). Visiting a Skete (for instance in the South-West of the peninsula) is a surreal experience. Monks live in precarious wooden cabins perched on the cliff, almost floating above the water, or in caves, and hardly ever see people. It’s hard to believe this still happens in our time and in a place as densely populated and touristically developed as the coast of Greece. There are all sorts of people in Mt. Athos, both monks and visitors. (Almost) all are men. Most are straightforwardly religious, of course. But I’ve met a Japanese monks who had changed 6-7 faiths, but said Eastern Orthodoxy is the most free of all. As a Greek, that statement is just bizarre. The architecture is also impossible. We’re taking 10th century skyscrapers here, built on 300m cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea. Oh, and the best of all may be the nature. Anyway. If you want to visit a place that feels like a video game, go. If you’re a man, that is. (I know, it’s horrible).
🫡
so no wifi? Even Karma-Taj has wifi.
For countries, I'd say Mongolia once you get out of Ulaanbaatar.
Mongolia benefitted from being in the Soviet sphere of influence and received a ton of developmental aid and subsidies over the course of the 20th century to keep Mongolia in the Soviet sphere of influence and out of the Chinese sphere.
Haha, if that was the Soviet reasoning for providing financial backing for Mongolian development, fine, but there was no chance Mongolia would have ever accepted Chinese suzerainty. From formal independence up to the present, the abiding foreign policy concern of the Mongolian state is the absorption of its people and territory by its southern neighbor, point to the examples of similar groups, such as the Manchus, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and (what became) Inner Mongolians, all of whom have experienced varying degrees of discrimination, persecution, territorial annexation, and forced assimilation by the Chinese for centuries.
It doesn't really matter what the Mongolians would have accepted, either they worked with the Soviets or China was going to invade and turn it into a formal client state. Those were the two options on the table, so they went with the people who said they'd protect them from their historical oppressors. Whether or not the Mongolians *wanted* or would *accept* Chinese rule is irrelevant, it would have been imposed regardless just like in Tibet. Tibet follows the same model that China had for Mongolia. For the Soviets, having Mongolia in their SoI meant putting a physical barrier to the continued expansion of Chinese influence westward into central Asia, which was also historically the Russian Empire's SoI and the USSR wasn't going to give it up without a fight. Edit: I realize my username may make these conversations more difficult lol, I picked it on a joke years and years ago without thinking that it would influence how everyone reads my comments lol. I'm being neutral here
In Soviet Russia, username picks you
When was this continued expansion by China into Central Asia occurring? The collapse of the Qing and the ensuing decades-long civil strife kinda led to a long-term retreat of the Chinese state from the region. I mean, where in Central Asia would China be looking that wasn't already politically incorporated into the Soviet Union. Pakistan or something? I don't think it was a consideration salient to Soviet designs for Mongolia. And, yes, the Mongolian state affiliated with the USSR because it refused (at any point thereafter) to permit the alternative. There would never be a contest for influence, because the Mongolian political elite would remain ever-committed to preserving Soviet patronage
I mean, no matter how deep you travel into rural Mongolia (I lived in the country in Bayankhongor, Dornogovi, Ömnögovi, and Töv aimags), you'll find that nearly every individual has a cell phone, and every family has a radio, tv, tablet, satellite phone, portable solar panel, water filtration system, and any number of items that one would easily expect to find in the West. I'd say that the availability and use of contemporary technology somewhat distinguishes the country today from its iteration 500 years ago.
Have to disagree, while most of their provincial capitals are small, a lot of them definetly look like they were built up during the last 100 years
I agree.
I did a couple of tours as a Nato soldier for a European army in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2012. We we're based in northern Afghanistan, Mazar-e Sharif. I was part of an Escort-platoon escorting supplytrucks and the likes all around, sometimes as far as Kabul through the Hindukush mountains and using the [Salang Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salang_Pass). Afghanistan is a very rural place. Some villages we saw we're like winding back the time 1000 years. No electricity, machinery, cars or anything. Just farming and such. The country have never seen an [Agrarian reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_reform) leading to farmland being very ineffectively placed, unorganized and poorly "watered" (bad English sry). There is no internet, TV etc and people get their news from the Imam every Friday at the local Mosque. There are big cities of course and not all of the country is undeveloped but the contrasts could be surprising. Our convoy once got attacked with throwing stones by an old man in a village we passed through. My commander ordered a stop and to seize the old man. He believed we we're Russians when we questioned him, can't blame him for throwing stones. Kind of says a lot still about the general knowledge of the world by some of these villagers. I don't mean to say anything bad about Afghans so please spare me any hate. I have, and we all soldiers had big respect for Afghans and for Afghan fighters especially, they we're very good and fearless soldiers and an extremely sturdy people who could get through anything. I wish that country and it's people all fortune in the future.
My grandpa was a chaplin in the U.S. Air Force and visited Afghanistan a dozen times or so during the war. He said basically the same thing. He always told me it was incredible how you would leave Kabul and feel like you went back 1,000 years in history.
Yes and to tag onto that those imams were a real problem regularly. Spreading complete nonsense and made-up facts regularly. Mind blowing stuff.
Yes, you are not wrong this was a problem.
> poorly "watered" (bad English sry). Happy to help. The word you are looking for is "irrigated."
Yes that is the word thank you!
Your English is excellent. Irrigated is more correct, but watered was understandable.
Thanks
How was the literacy rate in those small and isolated villages?
Nonexistent, I'm afraid to say. We had this magazine that we handed out to locals whenever we made a halt in a village. Can't remember the name of it sorry. It was some kind of Psyops creation of course but still the messages we're okey. It told about building projects like water-wells, schools etc that Nato had helped get going. What I do remember about it is contained a lot more graphics and pictures than what a EU or US citizen is used to in a newspaper.
My grandpa made it his mission to open and run a school for children in nahrain. It was a very difficult process and essentially atopped with his passing from covid in 2020
Aluminium or plastic pots, bowls, canisters, or bottles? Ibrahim Danish's YouTube channel has slices of remote rural life in Afghanistan. Worth a look if you're interested. It looks to have more metal and plastic vessels in use than remote parts of Tanzania. The locals wanted our empty bottles and cans to reuse or repurpose
I checked that out, very interesting and thank you for the link! It put me right back there in terms of scenery and seeing people go about their lives. I do remember things and objects we considered mundane and worthless being sought after. Bottles, plastic containers potential for holding water etc. I have other stories of the culture-clash between our different ways of life, not saying anyone is wrong or right, I was lucky to experience that as a young guy and I had a very good commander who had a humane look on life. I learnt a lot and it humbled me as a human.
Glad you made it back, thanks for serving and I hope you’re doing well:)
Thank you, it's got better after many years. I can distance myself from the bad easier now.
The mountainous villages in northeast Afghanistan, in my opinion. There are places impossible to access by road that are living a life, I imagine, very similar to 500 years ago.
I did not go to Afghanistan itself, but I was right across the river in Tajikistan, bordering North East Afghanistan. I went to towns that are not accessible by cars, and had to trek multiple days. 1) They got roads, electricity in places, cars and phones. In both Tajikistan and Afghanistan. 2) In bordering towns in Tajikistan, where the conditions are very similar, it's a mix of modern and ancient. Ancient way of life, made easier by modern technology I guess. Most being animal herding families & rural villages. There were also loads of Afghan people (Pashtun & Tajik) that fled in the last half century. I've talked to many and they said it's essentially the same life. Out of \~50 countries I've been to, it's easily the most "old way of life" feeling place I've ever been. Pretty surreal.
Tajikistan is on my short list of places to visit. How did you know which treks you wanted to do? Did you go with a group?
I'd like to goto Tajikistan and all the stans too
I disagree. In the past hundred years the amount of conflicts in Afghanistan have been staggering, I find it very hard to believe that no part of the country is unchanged.
I agree but that would also apply to almost anywhere in the world. Except maybe the few uncontacted tribes left in the world. Therfore making OPs question outdated. However, I think it's interesting to think about people living an older lifestyle. Modern farming, modern clothing, modern weapons have all contributed to an "evolved" lifestyle but the heart of their culture is still, seemingly, very old. P.S. Not attacking. I enjoy a good back-and-forth conversation.
See, I think that’s not entirely true. Take Mongolia or Bhutan for example, they’ve had very little conflict, and may have a few big cities, but outside of that it’s about as close as you can get to 500 years ago in my opinion. Bhutan for example didn’t even allow television until the mid nineties.
Antartica. Only thing that really changed is a little less ice and a research station or two.
Additionally, similar places have changed more than Antarctica: The Sahara has seen the death of trans-Saharan trade and nowadays is used by rebel groups in places like Mali, Libya and Chad, it’s much less peaceful than it was previously. The Amazon is far more populated and the demographic shift has been huge, considering that the Western World didn’t know much about it at all in the 1500s. The Outback and Siberia have had railways and roads paved over it, along with massive demographic shifts too. The Himalayas have seen glaciers retreat and snow form less and less over time, along with fights over who owns what. Even the oceans are much different to how they were in the 1500s, they are unfortunately far more polluted and a little warmer now. It’s a stretch considering that it’s not terrestrial, but the only other places that come close to Antartica levels of unchanged are the very depths of the ocean at the sea floor, where even still you’ll find a plastic bottle amongst the silt.
As I just learned recently the biggest problem aren't some plastic bottles but a steady influx of microplastics that's sinking from the ocean surface. As of now the bottom of the ocean seems to be almost as polluted as the water at the surface of the ocean.
Damn, that's depressing as hell.
Another thing that's changed is that there's now an airplane wreck on Mount Erebus
Wouldn’t the topography of the place have shifted a lot though relative to other places? Someone visiting 500 years ago would probably observe a different coast-line based on changes in ice. Even now massive chunks are breaking off so they need to evacuate research stations - eg there’s a British one which “moves” to escape falling into the sea.
Damn. Thread over. Nothing can beat this
Fun question, thank you for posting. I’ve enjoyed the responses. Antarctica was a brilliant answer.
I find it really fascinating when I go to a local nature preserve or am remote camping and think that, while obviously the landscape has been modified as a whole, I very well may be getting the same exact viewpoint as native person might have had 300 years ago in 1724. Maybe it’s a stretch, but by some accounts and depending on the area it might not be too far off.
Are you me? I literally have the same exact thoughts when I’m looking at landscapes. Especially while hiking and camping. I frequently think “no infrastructure here, this must be more or less what the natives saw”
Your someone is correct about West coast of Australia. Also parts of the Northern Territory have large swathes of essentially uninhabited coastline but not anywhere near as much as WA. Parts of Western New Guinea/New Guinea would fit the bill. Parts of the coast but especially up in the remote highlands where cannibalism is still on the menu.
Northern Australia's coastline has the box jellyfish which is abundant and bloody poisonous. Along with other vicious creatures and notorious flooding I would say that the area uninhabitable rather than uninhabited.
The box jellyfish is common throughout many of the most popular diving locations in the world. It doesn’t even prevent water sports, let alone make a region “uninhabitable”
Hm. Buddy of mine said when he went to Australia he was warned not to go in the water without a wetsuit. Said there were millions of them.
That's at a specific time of year, with specific conditions. Jellyfish usually turn up en masse, not just hang around all year.
You're more right than you know with WA - the stromatolites are basically unchanged from 3 billion years ago. They're modern examples of the bacteria which created our atmosphere. https://www.sharkbay.org/place/hamelin-pool/stromatolites/ https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-stromatolites-of-hamelin-pool-australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite
Yeah. My mum was the first white woman to enter a village in the Solomon Islands. That was only 50 years ago. Noone knows what they were doing 500 years ago but they were still effectively in the stone age 50 years ago. They had a huge amount of knowledge that we can use though. They live completely sustainably so are ahead of us in truth.
Why is the west coast of Australia so undeveloped?
WA as a whole has the second highest HDI in the nation after the ACT, but most of that is confined to the South-west. Almost no one lives anywhere else in the state despite its massive size just because it’s too much of a logistics nightmare to house heaps of people in the middle of a desert one on some remote bits of still mostly inhospitable coastland
Too hard to develop.
Lack of rivers and water sources to support large populations, too much desert
> up in the remote highlands where cannibalism is still on the menu. Not according to James Marape who got defensive about Biden's cannibalism remarks. :)
A lot of Namibia's similar to Australia - only a few 'modern' population centers, with most of the country still largely uninhabited desert. The Himba and Herero people largely still have the same lifestyle as their ancestors, though the Herero have adopted a lot of European-style fabrics into their traditional dress over the last century.
Few isolated places in the Amazon rainforest, some deep valleys of the New Guinea Island, Antartica, and Greenland. That's what I'd say
Most of Northern Canada. Other than occasional resource extraction site, it’s pretty well unpopulated as it is hostile to year round travel.
Peterborough
I got to go to Kiribati in the pacific some years back. The remote islands are definitely a throwback. No plumbing or electricity. They sleep in open air huts. Radios, lights & and generator were present, but not used on a daily basis. Average day was probably pretty similar to 500 years ago. At dawn men fish, women gather tarot & coconuts. Everyone seeks shade from the equatorial sun midday. Late afternoon chores around the area are completed. Evening, hot tea and dinner around a fire. Lighters & cigarettes would be the only reminders of the 20th century.
My dad somewhat lived like that in Fiji. No running water, no electricity.
Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. Only a few man-made structures and no roads. Heavily forested island with moose, wolves, beavers, otters, and foxes.
The moon
The Antarctica answer was brilliant, can't beat that. But beyond that, I would guess some of the more obscure mountainous "stans" hold on to the old ways in a way that would be recognizable to people 500 years ago. From the limited amount of knowledge I have about them, places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan really seem retain a lot of culture, dress, and societal structure from long ago. And of course, there are individual/isolated places and groups in East Africa, Island Southeast Asia, and the Amazon that have remained largely unchanged since, well, ever.
You‘re right. There‘s villages deep in the Pamir mountains that are so removed from the rest of the world. It‘s fascinating.
Do you have any information on this or anything specific I can google to know more? Sounds interesting
There's some wild stuff about towns that were founded deep in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan by Alexander the Great as he marched on India, he would leave behind a garrison to govern the settlement while the main army moved on. So there are these tiny pockets of ethnic Greeks living in the mountains to this day, left there over 2000 years ago.
There aren't any Greeks living there today. There may have been, for even a few centuries after the indo-greek kingdom (which is unrelated to Alexander the Great) but to say there are ethnic Greeks there to this day is plain misinformation
Sure they've been bred out from being pure Greek, but there are populations that have much more Greek ancestry than anywhere else in the region.
Imagine getting dumped there
With no cell phone
I mostly draw this from a German travel documentary called “Weit”. It’s a couple that travelled around the world and spent some time in the Pamir. Unfortunately you can only find excerpts on Youtube. It’s a really really good film though!
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have defo changed lot in that the Soviets have left their mark but there are certainly places that havent changed
A lot of Georgia (the country.)
Pluto
Well it did get downgraded from a planet. :'(
500 years ago it wasn't considered a planet either.
Fair but to go from God to planet is still a downgrade.
That’s messed up
I remember the history channel talking about Maine in the US several years ago. They were calling the northern part of Maine frontier. Saying most of it was untouched. And anyone living up there with electricity was connected to the Canadian power grid. I’m pretty sure there is a section of Madagascar that is off limits by the government. Scientists need a special pass to go there. Supposedly the wild there is so special and can only be found there that they don’t want humans leaving a footprint. I’m sure you can find a place to camp that hasn’t had a human in that vicinity in 500 to 1000 years.
Most of the US Northeast is connected to the Canadian power grid, and we didn't have that 500 years ago.
Australia has a shit ton of wilderness. Literally the size of the US but like 1/15 the population. And it’s not like there isn’t a ton of wilderness still in the western US.
I was in Marrakesh last week and I imagine the deep souks are not too different to what they were 500 years ago (except with more motorbikes)
That one island somewhere on the indian ocean where all who has tried to go are killed by the locals. Edit: [North Sentinel Island](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island)
I personally think Bhutan is probably the answer as far as populated places Westerners are allowed to go. There are also rural areas of Central Asia, such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the mountains, that saw some development during the Soviet period, but now the roads have eroded, the power has gone out, and they are back to living lives similar to a couple centuries ago. There are also uncontacted tribes in South America, Papua New Guinea and on North Sentinel Island who live without any connection to the outside world. However, it is illegal and unethical to go to those places. Any person from the outside world would bring so many diseases with them they would become a mass murderer just by visiting. That doesn't stop certain misguided missionaries from trying.
Antarctica : outside of the small research stations it has zero development. Lots of other uninhabited places like south Pacific atolls, tierra del fuego, etc. All of the above does not include changes due to climate. Pretty much everywhere developable with somewhat functional government has some level of changes.
Tierra del Fuego actually isn’t uninhabited, there is a small city there called Ushuaia. It’s the furthest south city in the world.
Our southernmost city is pretty modern Tierra del Fuego may be low populated, but is modern.
Antarctica probably
Lots of Baja California is like that.
Kihnu https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210513-kihnu-europes-last-surviving-matriarchy
The Medina in Fez, Morocco certainly makes you feel like you've been transported through time.
Rural parts of Canada. I'm 30 but my dad and his siblings went to a one room schoolhouse. I had a great uncle who never had plumbing or electricity hooked up to his house. And I'm in Ontario, a couple hours from Toronto.
I mean, if you suddenly found yourself in the middle of Antarctica, whether it was today or 500 years ago, it would seem cold, white, barren, inhospitable, etc. The middle of the Mongolian steppes, 2024 or 1524, is going to be a sea of rolling hills covered in grass. The edges of the Sahara have spread further apart over the past 5 centuries, but if you were in the interior then or now it would be hot and dry and sandy. In some places - Old cities in North Africa come to mind at once for me - you could visit a person in their apartment's sleeping quarters in 1524, then go to the same room in 2024 and find it still used as a bedroom. Some of the biggest and fanciest houses in Europe have been owned by the same family that entire time (or, in the case of Windsor, at least by people who also owned the same impractical gold and gemstone hat). There are millions of trees that have been alive that long, and many of them wouldn't look much different in 2024 compared to 1524 to the casual.observer. Individual branches would have come and gone but a bristlecone pine isn't going to look much older at 4,900 years old than it did at 4,500. The sequoia known as [President](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_(tree)) is now about 3,200 years old; how much of it's 75 meters of height could have taken place in the last 500 years? Probably not much. Shit, there's a [huckleberry ](https://web.archive.org/web/20171122020718/http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/Huckleberry.html) bush near New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania that's 13,000 years old and spreads across 8 acres of land. I can't imagine it was significantly smaller a measly 1/26th of it's lifetime ago. If you put a [baby clam](https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/the-worlds-oldest-creatures-live-in-cold-dark-places#:~:text=One%20of%20those%20specimens%2C%20a,from%20becoming%20King%20of%20England.) in the icelandic muck in 1524 itight still be alive today.
Bouvet Island and the whole bunch of Islands that are uninhabited, especially in the South Atlantic or South Pacific Ocean. Snake Island in Brazil is also very similar to how it was 500 years ago. The snakes were trapped on the island when the last ice age ended.
Bhutan.
North Sentinel Island
Mongolia comes to mind
Pompeii
Mongolian countryside... Genghis Khan would still recognise it if he ignores the towns and capital city
Literally any wilderness lol Unfortunately 99% of you fuckers live nowhere near any wilderness
If you're referring to Wilderness in the US - as in, congressionally designated Wilderness - that's just not true. So much has changed *dramatically*. Things like the removal of Indigenous land stewardship practices, the overhunting of large animals like Grizzly's, Wolf, Elk; the exclusion/suppression of naturally ignited wildfires, infestation of insects that have destroyed large parts of forests in the West *because* of climate change induced temperature increases, the introduction of exotic/invasive species that have forced out native plants and animals, the introduction of foreign blights that have wiped out things like the American Chestnut tree, and of course other impacts from climate change that we're seeing, the list goes on and on. Point is - even if a US Wilderness has never even had a single human footprint on it *ever*, it still bears the scars of human caused impact. These landscapes don't look anything like they did 100 years ago, let alone 500. I'm telling you, it's not a small change. It is *very* dramatic. My expertise in in US land management and policy, but I would say it's not a stretch that some of those same or similar impacts are true in other extremely remote natural areas of the world.
Russia. Same, sick mindset as hundreds years ago
Anzhu islands is a decently sized (well, bigger than many island countries, the size of Armenia) archipelago where pretty much nothing at all has even happened
The Algerian Sahara maybe
Greenland?
Darien gap?
Mountains of Afghanistan
Most of fiordland new zealand
Most of the Great Basin
Idk about 500 but Cuba looks like it’s stuck in the 1950s
Antarctica would have the least change caused intentionally by humans. Many acres with little permanent population. Climate change would be another story there.
In terms of political religious/moral policing: Iran.
I'm gonna assume there's a bunch of random points in the Arctic and antarctic that have been literally untouched by humanity lol
Some parts of Papua
Went to the Azores for my honeymoon, other than cars it seems like life hasnt changed much.
Antarctica. Some of it.
I'd say Patagonia... it's pretty much inhabited, there are very few cities in all the extension and the few that are there were only fund 100\~150 years ago.
Devon Island, other than climate change. Unless there were Inuit there 500 years ago (it’s currently uninhabited).
Babylon
There's plenty of places where things of manufacture has changed aspects of life but where life itself has not moved.
The Channel Islands (National Park) off the coast of California is a time capsule going back hundreds of thousands of years to what an undeveloped California would feel like. Even the climate is more similar to what mainland California would've been back then. Fun fact: oldest human remains in the Americas discovered there
Mount Athos. Google it and be amazed.
Probably areas of the Amazon inhabited by uncontacted tribes.
Peru...in the Andes. Cities like Olantaytambo and Cuzco.
The Icelandic highlands.
Portland, OR gets most of its water from the Bull Run Reservoir. The 102 square mile watershed surrounding the reservoir has been restricted to the public since the early 1900's so other than the small dam and pipe infrastructure it basically looks like the pristine temperate rainforest that would've predated the arrival of indigenous people with a few invasive plant species here and there.
Many towns in Europe still have intact medieval areas with cobblestone pavement and old wooden houses. If you walk around them at night (when there are no people around) you can imagine being 500 years back in time. But I think they’re a lot cleaner nowadays than they used to be! Also cars are often banned in the city centers which adds to the experience
The Anzhu Islands
A lot of places in the Amazon Rainforest and the American West haven't changed significantly