> If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell

> If you were just galavanting through the forest and you come up seeing that without any prior knowledge or park rangers to assure you you would say “oh, hell no” and you would turn around I think you're assuming much more individualism in the primitive dynamic than actually existed. As I said, individual humans are terrible at judging danger. There was an article posted a few days back about collapses while trenching for construction, and the difficulties of getting people to take that risk seriously until it actually happens. So at the state you're envisioning, I'd say it's more like others in your tribe telling you to stay away from those weird holes in the ground, because some tribe members had already been killed by them. And the contemporary dynamic is more like an extreme scaling up of that, with a much more nuanced understanding of the dangerous mechanisms.