Seal hunting through ice requires skills no one can improvise in years.

Evidence

To hunt seals, you first have to find their breathing holes in the ice. It’s important that the area around the hole be snow covered—otherwise the seals will hear you and vanish. You then open the hole, smell it to verify that it’s still in use (what do seals smell like?), and then assess the shape of the hole using a special curved piece of caribou antler. The hole is then covered with snow, save for a small gap at the top that is capped with a down indicator. If the seal enters the hole, the indicator moves, and you must blindly plunge your harpoon into the hole using all your weight. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 110

Categorization

• FICTION: This dense, sequenced set of Inuit hunting procedures is a ready-made template for a survival-tension scene in fiction.
• SHARE: The chain — snow-covered hole, smell check, antler-shaped hole gauge, down indicator, blind weighted plunge, detachable sinew-lashed harpoon head — is exactly the kind of technical anthropology detail one friend of mine collects.
• XREF: connects to: Cumulative cultural adaptations cannot be improvised by individuals in years.; Lone individuals with ancestral know-how out-survive well-provisioned expert teams. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 134; Arctic survival depends on interlocking, non-obvious cultural techniques no individual could reinvent. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 111