[Note: This is the fifth sample from my rough draft of a far
from finished new book, Wild Free & Happy.
I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while. My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and
you are very welcome to explore them.
The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents
of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or
subjects.]
Savannah
Pioneers
When our ancestors moved from the forest to the savannah,
they began a journey into an entirely different way of life. Critters that evolution had fine-tuned for
arboreal living were poorly prepared for surviving on open grassland. They were not big, strong, or speedy. They didn’t have horns, fangs, or claws. They couldn’t digest grass. They had to adapt to different sources of
food, and different threats to their survival.
It took centuries of trial and error to develop new ways of living, and
hundreds of thousands of years to evolve new and improved bodies fine-tuned for
their unique experiment.
In the early days, our ancestors were not apex (top level)
predators, they may have been more like walking meatballs, easy prey for big
cats, packs of hyenas, huge crocodiles, and other hungry carnivores. Chris Stringer mentioned genetic research
indicating that today’s Earth-pounding mob of Homo sapiens trace back to an
ancestral population of about 10,000 breeding individuals. Earlier, a million years ago, in the Homo erectus era,
there were just 20,000 breeding individuals.
For a very long time, our ancestors existed not too far from the brink
of extinction. It wasn’t easy being a
highly vulnerable ground-dwelling primate.
Scavenging
and Primitive Hunting
Our ancestors on the African savannah were hunter-gatherers,
and their diet majored in plant foods, with a regular supplement of highly
nutritious animal foods. In the early
chapters of the great hominin adventure, they were not expert hunters with
effective weapons. Meat was acquired via
scavenging and primitive hunting. With
bare hands, they could grab critters like grubs, grasshoppers, termites,
maggots, snails, shellfish, lizards, and frogs.
They could kill animals sleeping under bushes, dig up others from their
burrows, chase down slow moving aardvarks and porcupines, and snatch immature
youngsters. Large birds could be knocked
down by throwing clubs.
It’s easy to forget that rocks can be lethal weapons. Wendell Bennett wrote that the Tarahumara
people of Mexico threw stones with remarkable accuracy, killing rabbits, birds,
and animals up to the size of coyotes.
Some of their groups did more hunting with stones than with bows and
arrows.
Alfred Crosby wrote that any human more than eight years old,
male or female, can throw projectiles farther and more accurately than any
other species. This ability gave us the
power to effect change from a distance.
Well-thrown projectiles could drive away hungry predators or kill a
plump bunny for dinner. Researcher Frans
de Waal noted that stone throwing chimps also have “impressive long-range
aim.” (Ouch!)
Crosby noted that a few hundred years ago, Europeans visiting
Samoa got a painful lesson in the superb stone-throwing skills of the
natives. Of the 61 men sent ashore, 12
were killed by well-thrown rocks. Humans
also invented the rock-throwing sling, which was even more deadly, especially
when loaded with lumps of lead. Many of
the conquistadors visiting Mexico had life-changing experiences while getting
stoned by the angry sling-twirling Indians.
Scavenging is getting
meat from carcasses that you didn’t kill — leftovers from large carnivores, or
animals that died from other causes. In
later times, as the ancestors became more skilled at hunting, scavenging was
not abandoned. Meat is treasure, no
matter how it is acquired. Scavenging
was often less work and less dangerous than pursuing and killing an animal.
During the day, our ancestors paid careful attention to the
skies. When vultures flew in a specific
direction, they might be en route to a fresh carcass. Circling vultures were strong evidence of a banquet
directly below. Once you got a hot tip,
it was best to move quickly, in an effort to beat other scavengers to the
banquet.
Hyenas work in gangs, and can quickly strip the scraps off
carcasses, leaving few leftovers, if any.
Their arrival time was sometimes delayed by their need to stop, pant,
and cool off from time to time. Our
ancestors were far better at shedding heat, an important advantage. If hyenas or jackals arrived first, it was
sometimes possible to mob them and drive them off. On lucky days, it was possible to steal lunch
from a lone cheetah.
Lions were another story.
To drive them away from a kill, surprise was important. You and your buddies should suddenly charge,
waving your arms, shouting, throwing rocks, swinging clubs, or maybe start a
grass fire upwind. Smart scavengers
never tried this when lions were just beginning their lunch feast, and were
still very hungry. It was best to wait
until they were full and ready for a nap.
Lions rarely consume brains or marrow, and sometimes leave some meat scraps
for the intrepid.
It was also important for scavengers to pay attention to
trees. When leopards didn’t completely
consume a kill at one sitting, they stored the leftovers up in the
branches. Leopards are night
creatures. If you found their unguarded
stash in the daytime, there was less chance of getting shredded and devoured by
an angry cat.
Right now, your eyes are following a track of squiggly
scratches, and your mind is comprehending meaning from them. My thoughts and actions created those tracks,
and they contain specific meaning for those who have learned how to interpret
them. The farther you are able to follow
my tracks, the more you will learn about me.
Similarly, animals leave behind tracks and other signs as
they move across the land. Folks who are
skilled at reading this information can accumulate pieces of a story. They can perceive a fantastic amount of
information by studying spoor — footprints, urine, feces, saliva, blood,
fur bits, feeding signs, smells, sounds, and so on. Spoor provides clues about the animal’s
species, gender, size, behavior, direction of travel, time of passage, and so
on.
Fresh tracks left by a game animal indicated that it had
passed through the area, and the direction it was moving — essential
information for hungry hunters. Also,
spoor left by large carnivores indicated predators on the move. Following their tracks might eventually lead
to a recent kill, and a carcass to scavenge.
The
San
Louis Liebenberg is a South African lad who has spent years
on the Kalahari Desert with the San people (other names include Khoisan,
Bushmen, !Kung). He was not a nerdy
anthropologist, he directly participated in hunts, and eventually became a
skilled tracker. He wrote two
outstanding books about tracking, scavenging, and persistence hunting.
One time, Liebenberg asked some San trackers if they could
actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope. They burst out laughing at his incredibly
stupid question. They couldn’t imagine
anyone not being able to do this. When
they see a human footprint, they immediately know which individual in their
band made it. Children can identify the
tracks of their parents. Footprints are
as unique and recognizable as faces. To
see the footprints of an unknown stranger was highly unusual, and would inspire
caution.
More anthropology books have been written about the San than
any other wild people. Geneticists have
found that they have the oldest DNA of any living culture — it is the genetic
foundation of nearly all modern humans. Their
genes are the closest to the ancient female from whom all living humans
descend, known as Mitochondrial Eve.
Thus, your family tree likely leads back to ancestors similar to the
San. (Pygmies are the second oldest
living culture.)
The San have been hunter-gatherers since the dawn of
humankind, and they enjoyed a way of life that managed to survive into the
1970s. Eight hundred years ago, the San
homeland included all of southern Africa.
Since then, Bantu and European herders and farmers have displaced them
from lands suitable for grazing and agriculture, forcing the San into the
Kalahari where, on average, two of every five years are drought years, and
severe droughts occur one in every four years.
There are large regions of the Kalahari that are quite flat,
an endless landscape having no notable landmarks for a white boy like me, who
would quickly become hopelessly lost, and turn into vulture chow. The San, on the other hand, always know exactly
where they are, across large regions, because they orient themselves by the
layout of plant communities, noting their size, shape, position, and unique
features. They know the face of their
land as well as they know the faces of their family.
Richard Lee wrote about the San. Their primary food was mongongo nuts, which
dropped once a year, but could be gathered all year long. Meat was their second most desired food. The Kalahari provided them with about 100
edible plant species, which they were careful not to overuse. The San expected periodic times of scarcity,
so they reserved some plant species for drought food. Portions of their territory were set aside
for lean times.
John Reader wrote about an extreme drought in Botswana that
lasted three years, resulting in the deaths of 250,000 cattle and 180,000
people. The San didn’t starve. Each week they spent 12 to 19 hours foraging
for their sustenance. They lived in one
of the harshest environments on Earth.
At the same time, hungry farming people had shifted to foraging during
the drought, so the San lands were supporting a larger population than that of
normal times.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lot of time with the
San. She wrote her first book on them in
1958, and her third in 2006. Like any
intelligent culture, their safety net included mindful family planning, to
avoid the problems caused by overpopulation, and its trusty companions:
environmental degradation, hunger, and conflict.
Because of low body fat and vigorous physical activities, San
women began menstruating later. Some did
not have regular monthly periods.
Children were usually nursed for about four years, which further reduced
their mom’s fertility. Most of the women
had one to four offspring. Nomads moved
frequently, and belongings and infants often had to be hauled long
distances. A woman could only carry one
infant, so just one twin was kept.
When a child could not be kept, the woman gave birth alone,
away from the camp, and buried the newborn before it drew breath. In their culture, a newborn did not
immediately become alive, so disposing it was OK. Crippled or badly deformed infants were not
kept, because they would be a drain on the wellbeing of the band. To avoid unwanted pregnancies in harsh times,
it was common for folks to abstain from intercourse.
Jon Young is the star of several YouTube videos on nature
connection. He was an early student of
Tom Brown, the famous author of many books on tracking and nature
awareness. Young visited a number of
wild cultures to find those that remain most closely connected to nature. He discovered that the San people were
incredibly well connected. They refuse
to enter houses, because people who live indoors go insane.
Young says that with the San, you always feel safe. They are super intelligent, super happy,
super vital, and great problem solvers.
You never feel competition. The people
are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating with
childlike wonder through all stages of their life. Every person in that community is committed
to the flowering of every other person.
They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a
brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.
