"I'd be curious to see what your fish traps look like, if you have any around the village. I'd also be interested to hear about what plants and animals are useful around here. We're from quite a distance and so we're not familiar with what is around here."

"Slow, after Sticks shows off her eel traps do you want to show the strangers what plants they can eat"

   "Yeah"

Sticks enthusiastically shows them how she makes a fish trap and describes how she would put it in the river. The traps are extremely primitive.

He asks several clarifying questions and suggests some possible avenues for improvement.

Sticks is happy to answer questions and take on suggestions. And after they finish with that Slow and two adults called Big Nose and One Eye (the latter of whom indeed has a missing eye) will take the explorers into the wilderness and point out some edible plants.

Alice takes samples of those and various other plants and puts them into vials she retrieves from her backpack.

Zabna asks questions about how often the plants can be harvested and how much of their food the tribe get from them.

Plants make up around a quarter of this community's diet. Considering that nothing is cultivated there is an unusual lack of anything that needs preparation to be edible, although Slow does comment on how some plants are best cooked.

That's quite surprising, he'll be interested to see the results of genetic tests when they send their samples back home. "Could you tell me more about the familial relationships in your village? Do you know who each person's birth mother is?"

"We don't know whether some old people are adopted, but..." they explain how everyone's related to each other. A bit under half the older people came from other groups and don't have parents present.

They will find that:

More human-looking mothers have noticeably more human-looking children, even accounting for generation.

Children all look noticeably more human than their mothers.

That's not how evolution generally works. He wonders if he could convince them to give blood samples. Probably not yet.

He asks about whether they've noticed any differences in how quickly things are invented between older people and younger ones.

"Yeah, mostly it's young people who invent stuff."

Do later generations invent more than earlier ones?

They do.

Eventually, Slow gets curious about Alice's backpack and takes a closer look at it.

She takes it off when it becomes clear what he's looking at. It's a fairly normal hiking backpack. It has nicely padded shoulder straps and internal structure to keep it from putting too much pressure on her back. It isn't strictly necessary given her body but they prefer not to be obviously inhuman. "Do you have any questions?"

"What's it made from?"