![]() Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking prey in the wild. “Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and for more than ninety-nine percent of human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit ![]() ![]() The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.” "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life." For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. ![]() “In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. ![]()
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