Any observation of a human being gets automatically flagged as casual, which is completely justified, but it got me wondering what criteria you’d need to meet for a genuine observation.
If somebody gets lost in the woods at a young age, raised by wolves & is 100% disconnected from human society - does that count?
If the Christian missionary who died on North Sentinel Island happened to snap a picture of the uncontacted peoples beforehand - does that count?
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None of that counts as non-casual. All observations of humans are Casual by definition on iNaturalist.
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Observations of humans and human artifacts are casual because they are not considered relevant data points regarding the natural (non-human) world – it is iNaturalist, not iAnthropologist.
This is not about some idea that they are “cultivated” rather than “wild”. Observations may be casual for any number of reasons; not being wild is only one of them.
I hope it is not necessary to explain why it would be incredibly inappropriate and offensive to treat certain people as not being fully human just because they are from a culture that had no previous contact with Europeans, or because they were raised without contact with other humans. Non-European cultures may have a different relationship with nature but this does not mean they are “wild”.
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Seems that a feral wolf-boy or wolf-girl should count. ;-). But yeah, no Homo sapiens will be RG on iNat.
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Well, technically any human (that is not currently dragged off by a ferocious beast, or the elements) is where it is because a human (they themselves, or another one) has put it there. So it seems that the only times where you could make a RG observation of Homo sapiens, are those when you, ethically, really should not be making an iNat observation of them right now. :P
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are still not ‘Wild animals’ for iNat.
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But one could just as easily make the argument from the other direction: all of these are where the organism being observed intended to be.
Since the question was hypothetical, it should be noted that the original question only said “a human,” and did not specify which species. So, hypothetically, what if someone encountered a living Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo neanderthalensis, or Homo rudolfensis? These are all considered to be species of humans.
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Bigfoot and Wildboy (1977 TV show):
https://youtu.be/-NNb1pgQlQo?si=CADiovoelFz1OL4Y
Harry and the Hendersons (1987 movie):
https://youtu.be/5DOX1Poxro4?si=-Anv6rxXkNlytViC
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This is disgusting but I think an observation of human feces outside of sanitary facilities could hypothetically be considered for RG, if only because of the disconnect between the pooper and their poop. I don’t believe this should happen though, and I’m fine with all Homo sapiens observations remaining casual
Mathieu, you reminded me of something I wrote in a different thread:
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All of these until someone suggest otherwise?
Edit: For some reason all of them are marked wild.
I think if we are going to recognize a dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (as iNaturalist does), the only way to do so without very quickly descending into bigotry is to recognise all human beings*, without exception, as part of ‘culture’ and by extension ineligible for research grade status on the site.
*I’m referring to Homo sapiens, but if there were other extant human species this would apply just as well to them.
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In which none of us were discussing human feces.
I’d say “uncontacted people” are simply human beings in their normal day-to-day habitat, as is an Iowa farmer in his cornfield or a Hong Kong banker in his bank. All of them could be interesting and worth observing but they and their cultural artifacts aren’t the subject of iNat observations.
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I would like to clarify that I did not mean anything racist by referencing the north Sentinelese & I do not wish for this hypothetical to devolve into bigotry, merely asking if anthropology on a society with little contact with the industrialized world has a place on Inat. as others have pointed out, the answer is no.
There was a discussion in anthropology (several decades ago) about whether it was possible to define a “natural state” for humans. The conclusion in the field was firmly that all attempts to do so were based in racism and the attempt to define European culture as the only culture that qualifies. People still sometimes twist themselves into pretzels trying to figure out what is the “natural” human lifespan or “natural” human behavior, but it always comes down to this: all human populations and individuals are necessarily subject to strong human influence and therefore by definition can never be in a natural state.
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Again, the reason that observations of humans are “casual” on iNat has nothing to do with non-wild status.
“Wild” and all the specific iNat criteria related to it are completely irrelevant. I would argue that this DQA item should not even be available on observations with a community ID of “humans”.
Anthropologists today can and do conduct research among just about any human culture or subculture on the planet. So there is no reason why images of one particular group of humans would be more anthropologically relevant or scientifically valuable (i.e., deserving of “non-casual” status) than some other – regardless of whether they are members of an isolated island culture or urban Manhattan.
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OP’s question has very much been answered in this thread, so I’m going to go ahead and close it
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