Why they matter: hunter-gatherers today
This paper documents some specific observations made during a few years of research were conducted in Botswana among Kua hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari.
The Foraging Systems and their Ecological Effects
Among the three main language groups of foragers surveyed in the south eastern Kalahari, there were similarities in keeping with the emerging picture of human life within this ancient economic system. Their organization of work by division of labor, their tolerant childcare, their long life spans, their tendency to see all of the natural world as a manifestation of an interconnected physical and spiritual being, their overall health, general relaxed attitudes, and abundant leisure time. The material culture of these Kalahari groups was similar to that of other hunter-gatherers around the world.
The group of foragers I ended up studying in depth, the Kua, lived in close proximity to the Bantu-speaking farmer-herder cultures that had penetrated southern Africa some 800 years earlier, the Kua had kept their language and technologies intact, and about 25% of the bands (camping parties) were getting most of their day to day food from foraging All year round. About the same proportion of the population were living near boreholes, where BaKwena cattle-posts, under the management of BaKgalagadi family groups, were located. There some of the Kua men worked as herders and the women were occasionally employed as domestic helpers.
Seasonal “lands areas”, where crops of sorghum and millet were grown by BaKwena from Molelepolole, and similar cropping zone used by the BaKgalagadi, attracted Kua as well. They came for access to water points, and a number of Kua from each camping party took short-term contracts with farmers, to help with harvests and other work. There was also a kind of cottage industry of jobs usually taken by men, curing animal skins, repairing the basketry, and making mats, doors and other structures from woven stalks of cereal grain. They also made wooden spoons and motors and bowls.[i]
Seasonally, therefore, about 40% of the adults worked at these payment-in-kind jobs within the Bantu economy — the women acted as living scare-crows, they helped with the sorghum and millet harvests, while men did piecework. The Kua were perceived by the people of the agro-pastoral economy as a source of extra labor, and thus were tolerated close to the permanent springs and boreholes during the driest part of the year.[ii] I did not, however, get the impression that it was mainly the employment that was drawing the Kua to these areas.
The boreholes had augmented the number of springs in the fossil river valleys. These springs were, in the past, the center of annual winter encampments for hunter-gatherers and they frequently brought together groups speaking different languages. During my fieldwork, these winter encampments still persisted. At such times, the Kua, and their neighboring G/wi and !Xo often held joint ceremonies and exchanged information, jokes., songs, dances, and — sometimes — intermarried. Judging by the genealogical data from each language group indicating about 2% intermarriage, the low but persistent frequency of friendships crossing language barriers, and the fact that there were protocols in place to facilitate joint ceremonies and prevent any hint of material advantage sullying their mutual diplomacy, I suspect that these dry season assemblies represented long standing interactions between the different regional macro-bands of Kua with similar groups from the neighboring language groups.
In other words, it was a defining political event that confirmed ties of mutual peaceful intent and created a burst of information exchange. News of unusual animal behavior, of game migrations, of wildfires, of observed incursions by strangers (hunting and safari parties), of deaths and births, and of diseases and accidents, were all exchanged in eager conversations. Children played and learned words in each other’s language, while adults picked up friendships and reclaimed kinship ties that were sometimes tenuous — a G/wi cousin who married a Kua woman “in the time of my grandfathers grandfather” and generations deep. All through the one or two months of assembly, currently popular jokes and hit-parades of songs and thumb piano music were the treasures shared, and older adults even grew nostalgic, reflective, and even tearful, at the sharing of old favorite tunes and sacred stories.
It became clear over time that every Kua experienced many such gatherings over a lifetime. Even the people in the remotest camps, whose economy was fully committed to hunting and gathering wild food, had participated. Not only that, but everyone had all at one time or another, also worked odd jobs, and herding and harvest labor contracts within the agro-pastoral Bantu economy. Few had worked for the same BaKwena or BaKgalagadi family more than once, but all adults knew the political “ward” they fell under within the tribal political system.
The Kua characterized themselves as people of the bush — “Basarwa” is the Setswana term for “Bushmen”. I was explicitly told that there were “BaSarwa” foods, medicines, house-styles, music, technologies, and even psycho-reactive drugs. These were among the things that caused the Kua (the “real people”) to identify themselves with other Kalahari hunter-gatherers, despite linguistic differences.
The Kua were aware that farmers and herders frequently augmented their food supply with wild foods before the harvests, but deplored the fact that these people did not “take care” of these plants and animals: they only took care of their crops and livestock. And so their hunting and gathering economy was reified into an ethnic identity. All men longed to be hunting, I was told. All women longed to be providing wild gathered foods for their households. It was not surprising then that even when encamped near settlements of Bantu-speaking people, only a few adults from each camping party worked in their economy, while the majority of the men and women continued to bring wild foods into their camps. It was also not surprising either that most Kua preferred to camp several miles from the farming and herding settlements, in zones less overgrazed, and less picked over by gathering and hunting parties from these villages.
I was intrigued by what “taking care of” wild plants and animals actually referred to. I soon found out. Variously practices, some spiritually nuanced, some deliberately pragmatic, and even some that were apparently careless, all contributed to the maintenance of a diverse and thriving “wilderness” by the Kua.
During gathering trips, I observed women deliberately taking a handful of berries or nuts from their bags, and tossing them on the ground as they walked along, and then heeling them into the dirt. I asked why, and was told this was a way of thanking the plants for their bounty, by putting some of their “babies” where they might grow.
I observed the trickle of small seeds and nuts and berries falling out of the folded ends of the leather bags — fewer when women walked along, but more each time a woman paused to spend a few minutes digging up a wild root. She put down her carrier bag to retrieve the root, and when she hoisted it again, a handful of dusty berries, small root vegetables, or nuts might need to be scooped back into the bag. Often she did not bother to do that.
Such small losses of gathered material were hardly noticed, but the cumulative effect was not hard to imagine. Dozens of trips by parties of women, circulating through miles of terrain around each hunter-gatherer camp, repeated over thousands of years as camps appeared and disappeared over the landscape might well increase the range and diversity of species of food considered desirable by the human forager is stunning. Imagine this: 400 Kua women x 6 seeds or other viable plant parts dropped/trip x 3 trips/week x 52 weeks x 100 years = 37,440,000 plants dropped — if even a third of these grew into a new plant, that is over 10,000,000 plants distributed across a landscape –if of comparable size to that traverse regularly by the Kua — of 10,000 square miles. Now consider this: six viable seeds, nuts, or small roots dropped by accident and carelessness during each gathering trip is a conservative estimate, given what I observed on some occasions. And that does not even include the ones deliberately replanted along the way.
Imagine this: 400 Kua women x 6 seeds or other viable plant parts dropped/trip x 3 trips/week x 52 weeks x 100 years = 37,440,000 plants dropped — if even a third of these grew into a new plant, that is over 10,000,000 plants distributed across a landscape –if of comparable size to that traversed regularly by the Kua — of 10,000 square miles.
Planting near camps (“returning to the mother”) of useful wild food plants was common as well. I observed wild tubers and onions, which were not eaten within two days, and starting to wilt, casually being replanted behind the camping site. Women joked about this as their way of “farming” — and indeed, on gathering trips, they would sometimes detour past long abandoned campsites to harvest plantations of tasty root crops.
The frequent passage of women gathering wild plant food, in areas within a few miles of each temporary campsite, habituated the game to human presence. It was years before I understood the significance of this.
Research by wildlife ecologists has now revealed that fear of predators can cause extinction of species whose numbers are down.[iii] Thus, “predator fear” was a real problem that early ancestors of humans must have encountered, when they began to join the guild of other hunting species. For some species of herbivores and omnivores, already coping with lions, leopards, cheetahs, canines, and other predators, the emergence of hunting hominins might well have pushed small local populations of prey species over the edge to extinction, especially during the severe African mega-droughts of the Pleistocene. It is obviously still an issue facing human hunters today.
The sexual division of labour may have become a more successful strategy precisely because such a pattern resulted in less fear than joint foraging. Larger parties moving across the landscape digging up roots and picking fruits for immediate consumption might arouse no more concern than a troop of baboons doing the same, but that would change rapidly if these foragers began chasing after any animal they thought they could catch. Thus, the more the hunting was separated from the gathering, the less fear would be created by human presence, and the healthier and less wary the game populations would be.
The Kua were fully aware that animals, which saw humans as dangerous predators, were more difficult to approach. They may not have known that animals severely stressed by predators were less likely to reproduce successfully. I never thought to ask that question. However hunting interviews did indicate that they deliberately reduced the fear impact of their hunting. Most important, they knew that herd animals learned to fear predators when they witnessed attacks on one of their number.
They also knew that this fear reaction would be passed on to future generations as youngsters took their cues from adults. So the hunter stalked carefully and slowly and used the smallest poisoned arrows. When one member of a of herd was hit, it might flinch, but often the other animals, though initially startled, returned to grazing. The arrow usually dropped off and the work of the paralysing poison was not dramatic: it took hours to take effect. The affected animal would usually seek out a place to lie low while the rest of the herd wandered off. A careful tracking, and quiet approach, followed by a swift stab to open an artery in the neck, was the preferred end to the hunt. A prayer of thanks followed, and I was always moved to tears at the quick ritual phrase that ended this tribute, biding the spirit of this creature to wait for the hunter in the unknown dimension where the two would dwell again as kinfolk. One or two kills like this, even of a small antelope, were enough to supply meat (extra was dried) for ten days or even a few weeks.
In this way, local game species remained far less disturbed by the arrival of a human camping party than they seemed to be by the presence of the local lion pride, or by the leopards that hunting in that area. Large species with slow reproductive rates were rarely taken: hunters rarely set out looking for giraffe or elephant, since these could not be as successful killed in a stealthy way and had long memories. Even eland were not often hunted, as their numbers were small: the animals in the neighborhood of any campsite were regarded as valuable and carefully managed: pregnant cows being killed was disapproved of by some of the older hunters I interviewed.
No shaman hunted his spiritual helper. Shamanistic training, according to my interviews, involved periods of isolation and fasting. Apparently the apprentice would be sought out by an animal, a representative of the spirit or totem of its species, and thus initiated into a healing grace. I was assured that this was a real animal, no mere hallucination or dream. The shamans I interviewed were indignant at my incredulity that a wild animal would approach a human. This was why they had to be alone and still for days, they told me. One man describe the approach of a young Oryx (gemsbok Oryx gazella) that stood close, sniffing the air all around him as he sat completely still under a tree, before walking on and disappearing into the distance. That certainly sounded very like the curiosity of a wild animal and not some dream-like fantasy.
There have previously been suggestions that other practices, such as divination, might serve to randomize human behavior, thus increasing overall hunting success.[iv] I wonder if such food restrictions, resulting in some hunters who merely pass by a certain species of animal with no more than friendly interest, serves to confuse the expectations of game species: not every lone human that they see shows much interest in any stalking approach, and this inconsistency may distinguish humans from predators like leopards and lions, which tend exhibit obligatory stalking even when not hungry.
The fact that the campsites were situated in the neighborhood of known communities of a number of territorial antelope species was also interesting, in that some individual animals seen from year to year were even given nicknames.
Eland, Khudu, Sable, Gemsbok, Duiker, and other more territorial antelope were thus hunted differently than the “returning” or “visitor” species like Hartebeest and Wildebeest. These migratory species were eagerly anticipated. Preferably, more than one animal was killed in a single hunt, and men hunted in twos and threes, sometimes from blinds set up near water points; sometimes the hunters even used spears and running pursuit.
I have wondered, since these observations were made, whether the larger territorial game species were deliberately lightly harvested, and if this featured in the calculations that motivated frequent abandonment of campsites. Most moves were initiated after a period of three to six weeks. There was also the fact that some hunters left certain species alone.
Clearly, from these observations, the traditional patterns of gathering and of hunting were strategic, not haphazard, forays. Success of individual hunts might often involve random factors, rather than planning, but the skills of the hunter were developed in the context of a deep knowledge of the behavioral ecology of each species of animal. At the same time, spiritual traditions introduced a quixotic feedback: it is not more likely that a lone person, sitting still under a tree, would be eventually be approached by a local wild animal that had not learned to fear humans enough to overcome curiosity? Also, animals of a territorial species, in non-breeding seasons, are more likely to be alone or in browsing in small and scattered groups. So the less noisy and aggressive hunting methods, that leave animals less fearful of the human predator, were also facilitated through spiritual practices that in turn strengthened beliefs in the sacred unity of humans and other life forms.
I must add one observation to this. In the southern parts of the range of the Kua, hunting was much less careful and selective. Trap-lines were used and anything and everything that got caught was doomed. Even the little Guinea Fowl were shot, and by grown men, whereas they were ignored by adult hunters in the remoter regions. Bow and arrow hunting was rare since the flight distances of most gazelle and other suitable game were too great. Animal behavioral changes, due to the impact of BaKgalagadi and BaTswana hunters with guns and dogs, thus altered the tactics of the Kua hunters enormously.
When I asked about why the wild antelope and gazelle in the remoter regions, near the Central Kalahari Game reserve, acted no more nervous than the cattle near boreholes, I was told: “Yes, they are tame to us: only frightened animals are wild.”
In remoter areas, however, I was often struck by the way game animals were relatively unperturbed by the sight of a gathering party, almost like the deer in a Canadian park, like Ontario’s Algonkin Park, where, as a child, I had seen deer sauntering past our family picnic, and grazing nonchalantly along roadsides. When I asked about why the wild antelope and gazelle in the remoter regions, near the Central Kalahari Game reserve, acted no more nervous than the cattle near boreholes, I was told: “Yes, they are tame to us: only frightened animals are wild.”[v] Clearly, from these observations, the specific patterns of gathering and of hunting played a role in shaping their ecosystems in positive ways. Clearly too these were in many cases carefully articulated and deliberate measures. A conceptualization of animal behavior and reproduction, as well as ecosystem dynamics, appeared to be based on empirical observations, accumulated over many generations. This was more than “hunting lore”: it was wildlife management. So, the subsistence ecology was based on a kind of folk science, not mythology or magical thinking. “Folk science” it might be, but in the years since my fieldwork, the principles of ecology implicit in much of what I observed, and was told, has actually been confirmed in studies published by wildlife biologists and ecologists, not just in semi-arid ecosystem, but even in more heavily forested ones as well.
The same convergence of indigenous and scientific databases has occurred regarding the use of fire for ecological management. Kua burned small patches, as the rainy season began, to reduce fuel loads, so there was less chance of massive grass fires hot enough to kill trees and endanger people’s camps. The Kua cleared camping sites with careful little burns to get rid of ticks and mites.
The main objective of larger burns was to help “clean the dead” away — the dried leaves and grass from the previous season’s growth, so favored plants could “grow”.
Since many of these were pioneering species that were found exclusively in the first or second successions after a fire, and it seemed that a number of them were actually dependent of fire in order to germinate, what resulted from these deliberate fires was a continuing healthy abundance of these pioneering plants.
Animals also came to lick ash, and nibble the inevitable flush of green grass that followed a fire, even before the onset of rains, so people set small grass fires here and there within a few miles of their camp. The presence and persistence of certain species, like the Sable antelope, is thus encouraged, for these sought out recent burned patches for calving. I often was not sure if the actual intention of these burns was the effect on animal behavior: hunters were aware that it made plants grow, but not everyone I asked seemed to be aware that the use of fire maintained a kind of fire sub-climax in grassland, or set back succession at woodland edges, resulting in a complex mosaic of communities in different stages of regrowth in each locality where they camped.
These observations from the Kalahari do not represent recent or isolated effects of hunter-gatherers on their ecosystems. Use of fire for environmental management, and redistribution of various collected plants was not unique to the Kua.[vi] Cahuilla/Apache elder Lorene Sisquoc describes a reciprocal relationship with the plants and the land. “The plants are waiting for us to come take care of them so they can take care of us. In Temalpakh, Katherine Saubel writes that the Cahuilla word for an oak grove, meki’i’wah, means ‘the place that waits for me.” [vii]
Moreover, here is a quote, from an archaeological study, that is intriguing:
“People were most likely manipulating plants from as early as 50,000 years ago in the lowlands, Jones says. That’s around the time humans likely first arrived. Scholars had long classified these early inhabitants as foragers — but then came the studies at Niah Cave. There, in a series of limestone caverns near the coast, scientists found paleoecological evidence that early humans got right to work burning the forest, managing vegetation, and eating a complex diet based on hunting, foraging, fishing, and processing plants from the jungle. This late Pleistocene diet spanned everything from large mammals to small mollusks, to a wide array of tuberous taros and yams. By 10,000 years ago, the folks in the lowlands were growing sago and manipulating other vegetation such as wild rice, Hunt says. The lines between foraging and farming undoubtedly blurred. The Niah Cave folks were growing and picking, hunting and gathering, fishing and gardening across the entire landscape.” [viii]
In many tropical and temperate ecosystems dominated by rainforests, you can only increase human biomass by burning holes in those forests and thus encouraging a proliferation of edible pioneering vegetation and the animals that like to eat them.
This brings us to an inescapable conclusion: humans evolved in a culturally mediated niche, as an ecological keystone and engineering species, as well as in a collective “cognitive niche” which ideologically animating whole ecosystems as part of a sacred dance of relationship.
References
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[i]http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/bfarm.2008.1.2?journalCode=bfarm
[ii] I was delighted to read a recent paper on the opportunistic strategies involved in the Sanema approach to their Ye’kwana neighbours. . https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/dodged-debts-and-the-submissive-predator(9fddcc11-0f55-4670-a804-a76a24b1c302).html
I found a very similar dynamic between a hunter-gatherer and a horticultural-cultural group in the Kalahari. I did my doctoral fieldwork there in 1976–1980 and this was essentially my thesis. The title was “The Kua of the Kalahari: a study in the socio-ecology of dependency” I wanted to understand how this happened, and I went there assuming that the earlier descriptions of the relationships between the Bantu-speaking Tswana and BaKgalagadi groups (mixed famers) who had been living alongside the hunter-gatherers for many hundreds of years were ones of “Patron-Client” or even a kind of serfdom.
But that is not what I found. Even though up to half of the Kua were working seasonally or even year-round as herders and bird-scarers and helping with harvests etc within the Bantu economy, very very few were working continuously for any one family. It was short term contract work, often with a different employer every time. In each camp, there might be one household doing this kind of work. All the others were still getting a lot of their food from gathering or running traplines. 25% of the Kua stayed out and got all their food for hunting and gathering. NOT only that, but there was no evidence of any long term trend of acculturation. Almost every adult had at one time worked for farmers, even in the remote camps that were solely subsisting by hunting and gathering.
I sat in camps where people were doing work for the farmers, and was astonished to find them critiquing each other’s performance of subservience — it was like seeing actors discussing the merits of one another’s performances after a play. At one point I spent a day walking with a group of three women as they gathered in masses of a wild nut (Bauhinia esculanta) as well as at least 40kg of roots and wild melons (almost 35 kg) of various kinds (I weighed and totalled each woman’s bags and added them up) and then the next morning I was interviewing a BaKgalagadi headmen in a village about 5 km from the Kua camp. To my astonishment, these same three women came into the edge of the headman’s compound, and sat there sighing and flapping their belly skin and pleading for him to take pity on their poverty and starvation. He gave each one a small bag of freshly harvested millet. These women, seeing me, gave me the most deadpan looks.
I observed something similar while working in Burkina Faso years later. Only this time, it was a Mossi headman.. after he had just shown me all his granaries, with eight years’ worth of sorghum and millet harvest in store, a delegation from the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as a WHO and an FAO representative arrived in the village. This was one of the villages that was included in my study and I was part of a team (agronomists and economists) working at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. So we tended to get visits to our villages.
Well the chief sat among the lineage headmen and they all answered questions about their harvest and the current drought and so on.. and as it became clear that they were being probed for whether they might possibly qualify for shipments of food AID through the UN, they all immediately began to stress how poor the harvest had been and how their children were in danger of starving. The chief met my eye just once and so I winked at him.
I often wonder if all those descriptions you get in Hobbes — and the generalized impression you get about how all previous economic systems — foraging,, nomadic pastoralism, horticulture — were basically inadequate and people regularly starved — might actually be at least in part, due to these kinds of opportunistic strategies people use in dealing with a politically dominant and potentially aggressive neighbour or enveloping state society.
I never published my PH.D. — for years and years I was anxious that this might create problems if it was circulated among people in the Botswana government — for all the BaTswana I ever met were sincerely convinced that the BaSarwa (Bushmen) were all a class of wrenches that lived off the scraps they got from the “civilized” BaTswana (some of whom seemed to regard even the BaKgalagadi as a lesser class of persons.).
As for relationships between the Kua and their neighbouring hunter-gatherer groups like the G/wi and the !Xo.. here is the interesting thing.. they NEVER traded, and even gifts were frowned on. Gifts created “slaves” they said. Any hint that their interactions at joint camps or parties were done for any kind of material gain — was met with horror. You could not even present any kind of small gift to anyone who was not already in a sharing relationship with you, even just among the Kua themselves, so to do so to someone from another language group was almost grounds for them to punch you out.
[iii] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170725122224.htm
[iv] See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00060/asset/aa.1957.59.1.02a00060.pdf;jsessionid=0906E00FF24E6774EE929E6F95F27F5C.f04t01?v=1&t=j6dyme1g&s=f3de727c604674c24b228ee40e1d0f9d12ea0987
and also pages 170–176 in Patrick Curry (2013) Divination: Perspectives for a New Millennium, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. https://books.google.ca/books?id=U0TJkQvwWzkC&dq=Omar+Khayyam+divination+hunters&source=gbs_navlinks_s
[v] Personal communication from Gene Anderson (University of California, Riverside, Professor Emeritus (Anthropology) · 1966 to present · Riverside, California), “…in the Northwest Coast and California. Animals were kept from being “wild.” .
In California, an early ethnographer asked some Yokuts how far their bows would shoot. They answered that they hadn’t a clue. He asked, but didn’t you know from shooting at deer? They answered, listen, you’d be crazy to shoot at a deer from more than about 15 feet. You’d break your arrow or point and might not kill the deer. You sneak up on the deer. — which must have been pretty tame for that to work.”
[vi] Twomey, T. (2013). The Cognitive Implications of Controlled Fire Use by Early Humans. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 23(1), 113–128. doi:10.1017/S0959774313000085 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8833120&fileId=S0959774313000085
Francesco Berna, Paul Goldberg, Liora Kolska Horwitz, James Brink, Sharon Holt, Marion Bamford, and Michael Chazan; “Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa”
PNAS 2012 109 (20) E1215–E1220; published ahead of print April 2, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1117620109
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/E1215.abstract
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-evolution/news/controlled-fire-cueva-negra-southern-spain-june-2016
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767042030
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724840700084X
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10814-013-9069-x
http://hol.sagepub.com/content/6/4/481.citation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24073811
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-early-settlers-rapidly-zealand-forests.html
[vii] https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/what-happens-when-native-people-lose-their-traditional-foods
[viii] The Myth of the Virgin Rainforest (Karen Coates) Research exploring Borneo’s past and present illuminates the tangled relationship that has existed between humans and the rainforest for millennia. In Sapiens/ 21 APR 2016
http://www.sapiens.org/culture/the-myth-of-the-virgin-rainforest/
