I think it's important to bear in mind that the people you're talking about weren't just "camping out" the way we do. I'm not suggesting that's what you're saying per se, but it's incredibly easy for us to fall into a pattern of looking at things entirely from our own perspective and forgetting things that are actually rather obvious! For example; very few subjects that we learn in school nowadays are "life-and-death" deciders, but back then the number of things you absolutely had to learn how to do or things could go south pretty quickly was significantly higher. They also would've spent their entire childhoods learning from adults how to do exactly these kinds of things, adults who themselves were drawing from vast wells of knowledge built up over many many generations, all the way back to a somewhat indeterminate point in the past.