The Once and Future World

J. B. MacKinnon grew up on the edge of a Canadian prairie.  “I knew the prairie in the hands-in-every-crevice detail that only a child can, and it was, for me, a place of magic.”  He developed a healthy relationship with the living ecosystem, an experience that is no longer ordinary.  Years later, as an adult, he returned to visit home, and his sacred prairie had been erased by the Royal Heights subdivision.  He could find no trace of the red foxes that he had loved so much.  It hurt.

By and by, curiosity inspired him to spend some time studying books about the days of yesteryear.  To his surprise, he learned that the foxes of his region were not indigenous, nor was much of the prairie vegetation.  His childhood home bore little resemblance to the wild prairie that existed several centuries earlier.  Before he was born, the land was home to caribou, elk, wolves, and buffalo, all absent in his lifetime.  What happened?  Could the damage be repaired?  MacKinnon explored these questions in The Once and Future World.

The world we experience in childhood is typically perceived as being the normal, unspoiled state.  We can comprehend the damage that has occurred during our lifetime, but not all that has been lost since grandma was little, or grandma’s grandma.  This ecological amnesia is called shifting baseline syndrome.  It whites out the past.

Thank goodness for the venerable grandmothers of the temple of history.  They can take us to sacred mountains offering views of eons past, and help us remember who we are, where we came from, and how much has been lost.  We can see the Pleistocene cave paintings, aglow with reverence and respect for the family of life, created by a culture in which humans were “just another species on the landscape.”  Later Greek paintings illustrate a culture of total disconnection — human gods, goddesses, warriors, lion killers — starring the one and only species that mattered (as does our culture).

Like MacKinnon, the world of my childhood has been erased.  Three hundred years earlier, it had been a paradise of forests dotted with many pristine lakes, home to unimaginable numbers of fish, turtles, waterfowl, and assorted woodland critters.  Thousands of years earlier, in the wake of the melting glaciers, Pleistocene Michigan had been home to giant beavers, walruses, whales, mastodons, mammoths, peccaries, elk, moose, caribou, musk oxen, and bison.*  I had been completely unaware that they belonged in this ecosystem, and that their absence was abnormal.  I did not dream of their return, since I didn’t know they were missing.

MacKinnon says that we have inherited a 10 percent world, because 90 percent of the planet’s wildness is largely gone.  We can’t begin to comprehend all that has been lost in the last century or three.  But the tragedy can also be medicinal.  “The history of nature is not always a lament.  It is also an invitation to envision another world.”  Indeed!  Our current vision is suicidal.  His mantra is remember, reconnect, and rewild.  “We need to remember what nature can be; reconnect to it as something meaningful in our lives; and start to remake a wilder world.”  Great!

The rewilding bandwagon is picking up momentum now.  Twenty years ago, it meant reintroducing missing species, like elephants, mountain lions, and wolves, acts that would spark firestorms of opposition.  Lately, it has expanded to include smaller, doable tweaks that can be done right now, around the neighborhood, to make the ecosystem a bit more wild — reconnection.  Tiny successes are likely to feed the soul, and inspire bolder acts of healing.  It all adds up.

Importantly, rewilding directs some of our attention to the ecosystem that we inhabit, a form of awareness that’s getting close to extinction in consumer societies.  MacKinnon doesn’t fetch his paddle to spank capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, incompetent activists, or the consumer hordes that live high impact lives whilst dishonestly denying all responsibility.  Instead, he suggests that most people simply don’t get it.  Industrial strength cultural programming makes it difficult or impossible for most people to wander beyond the mall parking lot.  Listen to this:

“Standing on the globe as we know it today, among people who are predominantly urban, who often spend more time in virtual landscapes than in natural ones, and who in large part have never known — do not have a single personal memory — of anything approaching nature in its full potential, it is hard to even wrap one’s head around where to begin.”

Most people are focused on short-term human interests, and nothing else.  They have been taught to inhabit a world of pure fantasy.  On the walls of their caves are paintings of trophy homes, SUVs, smart phones, tablet computers, big TVs, and on and on.  Most of them will never find their way home.

The tiny minority of folks who have found the power to think outside the box, like biologist Michael Soulé, feel “profoundly alienated from mainstream society.”  Communication is nearly impossible.  He says, “We are different.  We’re wired to love different things than other people are.”  I know what he means.  We don’t feel at home in this society.  Maybe we’re pioneers, scouting a new and safer path.

Mark Fisher is one of the different ones, an advocate for rewilding.  He works with the Wildland Research Institute in northern England, a devastated nation where people sometimes strongly oppose even the reintroduction of trees (let alone vicious man-eating beavers).  On a visit to America, he was overcome with emotion when he saw wolves running wild in Yellowstone.  When he stood on an overlook at White Mountain National Forest, and observed 800,000 acres of woodland, “I just cried my eyes out.”  Ancestral memories returned with great beauty.

Once upon a time, MacKinnon met a mother and daughter who had lived for 30 years in a remote region of British Columbia, in grizzly bear country.  The mother had had two brushes with the bears, and perceived them as “highly spiritual experiences.”  Being reminded that humans were not the Master Species helped her remember who she was.  “It was just like coming home.”  The daughter had no notion that living near grizzlies was unusual.  MacKinnon found hope in this, “We are always only a single generation away from a new sense of what is normal.”

Finally, I was fascinated to learn about our olive baboon relatives of Ghana.  Like us, their diet is omnivorous.  Like us, they evolved in a tropical climate, where they needed no clothes or shelter.  Like us, they can inhabit rainforests, deserts, and savannahs, but prefer savannah.  On average, males weigh 53 pounds (24 kg), and females weigh 32 pounds (14.5 kg).  Despite their size, they have been able to survive for millions of years in a world of powerful carnivores — without tools — without becoming hopelessly stuck in the toxic tar baby of innovation and technology, with its enormous bloody costs.

Instead of chasing large herbivores with spears, baboons hunt a wide variety of small critters with their bare hands and teamwork.  Hunting provides a third of their food.  Unlike us, they never migrated out of Africa, into chilly climates where they could not survive without techno-crutches.  Unlike us, they didn’t exterminate the predators that kept their numbers in balance.  They have never had any need for fire, psych meds, or cell phones.  Might there be a lesson here?

* Wilson, Richard Leland, The Pleistocene Vertebrates of Michigan, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. LII, 1967.

MacKinnon, J. B., The Once and Future World — Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2013.

Cro-Magnon

Once upon a time, long, long ago, musicians Stephen Stills and Judy Collins enjoyed a romance.  Then, Judy sailed away and broke his heart.  Stephen wrote Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, which I recently heard again.  One line made my head spin: “Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.”  Why not?  Remembering the past sounds like an excellent idea.  What we are not now is wild and free human beings — normal & authentic.

I just finished Brian Fagan’s book, Cro-Magnon, which describes an important segment of my family history.  The happy news is that there have been three studies of the mitochondrial DNA of modern Europeans, and their genes are primarily indigenous.  The invading farmers from the Fertile Crescent did not exterminate the natives.  The genes of the eastern immigrants are somewhere between 15% and 28% of the modern European DNA. 

It staggers the imagination to contemplate the astonishing wildness, beauty, and vitality of Ice Age Europe.  It’s heartbreaking — and illuminating — when these grand memories remind us of what we are not now.  After reading the book, I feel a much stronger connection to the ancient cave paintings.  Those artists were my ancestors, and their images belong in the family album.  My people once lived in lands inhabited by wooly mammoths, aurochs, bison, and vast herds of reindeer.  They lived beside streams that thundered during salmon runs.  This gave me a sense of homecoming, a powerful remembering.

Fagan does a nice job of describing the world of the Ice Age, and the wild swings of the climate — growing glaciers & melting glaciers.  When the climate warmed, the hunters and their game moved north, and when frigid times returned, they moved south.  The hunters followed the meat, and the meat followed the grass.

“There were at least fifteen to twenty short-term events when temperatures were up to 44.5 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) warmer than during the intervening colder intervals.”  The climate could swing from pleasant to freezing over the course of a lifetime.  Siberia was once a tropical forest, the Sahara once had lakes and grasslands, and there was a time when you could walk from France to England.

The sad news is that the hunting tribes of Europe became farmers.  This may have been similar to the spread of corn from Mexico to the tribes of the north — an amazing innovation that bit us on the ass, and cast wicked shadows on the unborn generations.  Fagan helped me to better understand the transition to agriculture, in which ongoing innovation in hunting technology played a leading role.

All hominids have African ancestors.  Some of them migrated to Asia, where Neanderthals first walked onto the stage.  Some Neanderthals moved to Europe maybe 300,000 years ago, where they hung out in cool temperate forests.  Their primary weapon was a heavy thrusting spear with a sharp fire-hardened tip.  These were great for killing large slow-moving animals. 

Fagan believes that the Neanderthals were luckless dullards, because they displayed almost no innovative cleverness over vast spans of time.  They were simple and stable, and their dance on this planet may have been far longer than ours will turn out to be — and they didn’t destroy paradise.  What dreary bores!

“Cro-Magnon” refers only to the Homo sapiens clans that inhabited Europe, but our species originally emerged in Africa, maybe 170,000 years ago.  Around 45,000 years ago, some moved into Europe, and within 5,000 years, they lightly inhabited much of the continent.  Cro-Magnons left us the gorgeous painted caves, magic peepholes into fairyland.  Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago, for unknown reasons.

The trademark weapon of Cro-Magnons was the lightweight throwing spear, tipped with stone or antler.  It was excellent for hunting on open land, and it could kill from a distance.  It made it easier to kill a wider variety of prey, like deer and reindeer.  Thus, there was more meat on the table, more bambinos in the nursery, and more spear-chuckers running around the bloody countryside.  Even during warm eras, European summers were short, and plant foods were limited, so meat was the core source of nourishment.  Homo sapiens have been purebred hunters since day one in Africa.

Later, the bow and arrow arrived.  Bows may have been used 18,000 years ago, based on circumstantial evidence, but the oldest bow found so far was from 10,800 BC.  The bow was a diabolically powerful weapon.  It could be fired from any angle, and quickly reloaded.  It could kill critters large and small from a long distance.  It was great for forest hunting.  Nets, traps, and barbed fish spears also came into use.  Rabbits, birds, and rodents now appeared on the menu — more meat, bambinos, and hunters — and less and less wildlife.  Our consumption of plant foods and shellfish increased.

Around 12,900 years ago, the Younger Dryas period brought frigid weather back again, for a thousand years.  It brought severe droughts to the Near East, and the humans adapted by harvesting and planting grass seeds.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  The combination of excess cleverness, deficient family planning, and climate change put us on a bullet train to global catastrophe.

“Within a surprisingly few generations, the people of the Near East and southeastern Turkey were entirely dependent on farming.  When wetter conditions returned at the end of the Younger Dryas, the new economies spread like wildfire across Anatolia and into southeast Europe, where they were well established before eight thousand years ago.”

What we know about human evolution and Ice Age Europe is quite fragmentary.  Time, glaciers, and civilization have taken a big toll on the meager evidence.  The timeline is full of holes, the dates are controversial, the theories are controversial, and the research continues.  Fagan’s book also has some holes, which can be filled by a visit to Wikipedia.

Annoyingly, he inserted a number of ideas unsupported by hard evidence, based on speculation.  For example, Neanderthals probably didn’t have complex language because they persisted in living in a simple manner.  Their primitive brains may have lacked the neural circuits necessary for feverish innovation and pathological ecocide. 

Fagan is the captain of the Homo sapiens cheerleading squad.  He gushes with praise for our unbelievably clever species.  “Effective technology, an acute self-awareness, and an intimate relationship with the environment made the Cro-Magnon personality practically invincible.”  In frigid regions of Europe, they “adapted effortlessly to the ever-colder conditions.”

I’m glad that I read this book, because I learned a lot from it, and I will not forget it.  The entire era of civilization has existed during an unusually long period of warm and stable weather.  Our food production system is fine-tuned for this climate, and it’s going to have tremendous problems as the planet gets hotter and hotter.  Fagan helps us remember the scary roller coaster of climate history, and how it mercilessly hammers the unlucky, over and over again, big brains and all.

Given the fact that we’re currently beating the stuffing out Big Mama Nature, the gushing praise for human intelligence and innovation emits a noxious cloud of stinky funk.  Where is the line between brilliant innovation and idiotic self-destruction?  Are they the same?  Is it possible that simple and stable do not mean stupid?  These questions should not be swept under the rug.  We really, really need to remember what we are not now.  We need to discover the long lost treasure.

The next book on my voyage is The Humans Who Went Extinct, by Clive Finlayson, who is far more sympathetic to our Neanderthal relatives.  Sounds interesting.  Stay tuned.

Fagan, Brian, Cro-Magnon – How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010.

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

I’ve been living like a hermit for 19 months now, reading dozens of powerful books, and writing weekly blogs.  I’m not the same person I was when I started.  My perception of reality has gone through some changes.  I’ve been sharing what I learned with the world.  I hope that seekers will find it, and I hope that my work will be helpful to them.  I’ll be publishing this material in book form shortly.

Genuine sustainability, of course, is the holy destination — a way of life that is healthy, satisfying, and has a long-term future.  Getting there, of course, will be an enormous challenge, requiring enormous changes, enormous wisdom, enormous luck, and probably a century or three, at least.

What we are today is the result of many choices and changes — stone tools, projectile weapons, fire, complex language, consciousness, directed thinking, cultural evolution, civilization, industrialization, the domestication of plants, animals, and minerals, and so on. 

At the time of the Great Leap Forward, 40,000 years ago, the megafauna were still abundant, and perhaps we were still sustainable.  But these cave painters were quite different from the far simpler hominids who roamed in Africa 500,000 years ago.  The high-tech cave painters were much more vulnerable to falling out of balance, which is exactly what happened.  Infants born today are still pure wild animals, ready to grow up in an advanced tribe of cave painters, or a primitive tribe of early Africans.  As Prince Charles says, we are what we are surrounded by.

Obviously, the safest and most conservative ideal would be to return to tropical regions.  Back in Africa, we didn’t need clothing, fire, shelters, or tools.  We lived much like chimps.  Food was readily available year round.  People enjoyed abundant leisure, and good health.  Perhaps climate change will come to our rescue here, by expanding tropical regions, and dealing a deathblow to agriculture.

But some predict that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Those who foresee near term extinction (NTE) perceive me to be a delusional moron for contemplating the possibility that any humans will exist 100 years from now.  Rapid heating will destroy agriculture and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  Oceans will become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.  Coal burning will cease with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be deflected by pollution, and the warming process will accelerate.  When the power goes out, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods at 430+ nuclear power plants will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse.  What the survivors choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for taking action to protect their wellbeing, to the best of my ability.  We all are.

Collapse will blow away many obstructions that currently block our return to sustainability, but not all of them.  In theory, we are smart enough to choose a new path, and deliberately strive to return to a sustainable way of life.  What we do today to encourage this return, before the lights go out, may make a big difference in the coming years.  It feels right to try.

Five hundred years ago, large portions of the planet were still inhabited by humans living in a relatively sustainable manner.  Four thousand years ago, even more.  But these nature-based societies had no long-term future because there were pockets of dark energy emerging on the planet, something like cancer tumors, and their plan was perpetual growth, by any means necessary.

In his parable of the tribes, Schmookler warned us that once a bully entered the playground, the fun and games were over.  Only power can stop power.  He believed that this problem could be cured by creating a global civilization that was guided by wisdom.  Jack Forbes called it the cannibal disease, and he thought that this disease could be eliminated by spiritual rebirth on a global scale.  There is no fast-acting, silver bullet cure for the growing predator energy.  It’s a formidable challenge to the healing process.  In theory, we can outgrow it.

Another serious problem is a lack of foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears don’t have this problem, because they hunt with tooth and claw, and this works just fine. 

Dilworth, Crosby, and Wright changed the way I think.  I used to believe that our problems began with domestication.  They taught me that our problems began with tool making.  Imagine what a paradise this world would be if prehistoric toolmakers had had foresight, immediately abolished their dangerous profession, and pursued careers in singing, dancing, and storytelling. 

At the dawn of the last century, there was loud and abundant opposition to automobiles, but the wise voice of conservatism was foolishly ignored — a huge mistake!  Two centuries ago, we failed to listen carefully to the ultraconservative Luddites, and what a mess we have now, Lord Almighty!  The problem really isn’t a lack of foresight, it’s a lack of stability.  Stable species have no need for foresight.  They live entirely in the here and now, and do so beautifully.  Domesticated humans are the exception.  We’re the loose cannons of the animal world.

Likewise, Shepard, Wells, Ehrlich, and Livingston warned us about the dangers of cultural evolution.  This is the same problem: a lack of stability.  Culture does not become toxic until it falls out of harmony with wildness, freedom, and the laws of nature — until it crosses the line and becomes unsustainable, a dead end.

It all boils down to remembering who we are, and how to live like human beings.  It’s about living as lightly as possible, and contributing the healing process to the best of our ability.

Thank you!  This has been fun!  Have an honorable life!  Best wishes!

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Three

The vision that guides our society is peculiar.  Step 1 is to absorb as much education as you can endure and afford.  Step 2 is to plug into the economy, aggressively pursue every opportunity for advancement, and make as much money as you can, by any means necessary.  Step 3 is to spend that money in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the current trends of consumer society. 

Obviously, this culture is disconnected from our ancestral roots, and from the family of life.  Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  In the magazine room at the library, I observe patrons devoting intense attention to understanding the latest trends in automobiles, electronics, fashion, cosmetics, homes, pets, and so on.  They long to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

Nature-based cultures understand and respect power.  It’s everywhere, in everything, including all of us.  Power comes in many forms, and it is the greatest gift of all.  Some folks are skilled at tracking, hunting, or midwifery.  Others are healers, warriors, or storytellers.  There are weavers, herbalists, or shamans.  Power speaks to those who listen.  Modern folks often leave their power in the box, unopened, because they’ve never discovered their vision.  They are lost.

A minority of modern people do manage to connect with their power, and use it.  They are not swept away by the strong currents of consumer society, because they can see right through the silly nonsense, and they have the power to deflect it.  They do not indulge in false hope and irrational optimism.  They remain present in reality.  I don’t understand why they are different, and I have no name for them, but they certainly exist, and they live outside the fence of the fantasy world, usually in the shadows, distrusted by the mainstream. 

They tend to be intelligent, imaginative, and horrified by the madness of modern society.  Their right brains are bulging and strong, from regular creative exercise.  They are often writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, storytellers, dreamers, or rebels — people whose spirits have not been severed from the ancestral realm of uncontrollable wildness and freedom.  They have power.  According to The Dark Mountain Manifesto, “Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history.  Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings.” 

If they had grown up in a nature-based culture, some of them might have been known as shamans.  All wild cultures had shamans.  Everywhere around the world, descriptions of their methods are remarkably similar.  Adults in a tribe can readily recognize the boys and girls destined to become shamans, because their power is easy to see.  They sometimes have so much power that it’s hard for them to function in society.  Older shamans take them under their wing, and teach them how to carry their power, and use it well.

Ordinary children have no memories of other times, lives, or realities, but young shamans do.  They tend to be introverted, and closely allied to nature.  They may have powerful dreams or hallucinations.  They can communicate with the spirit world, and see things that the others cannot.  Sometimes they play important roles as messengers, bringing back wise instructions from ancestral spirits, when the tribe is confronted with challenges.  They have a strong spiritual connection to life.

For the sacred task of envisioning a sustainable future, people with shaman-like powers could help us remember who we are, and where we came from.  Whatever we call them, they must be people who have a passionate relationship with the natural world, who excel at clear thinking, people who can effortlessly think outside-the-box.  This sort of crowd has power.  They can break spells.

Donella Meadows devoted a lot of thought to the notion of envisioning a sustainable future.  Our society is enacting a vision of perpetual growth, and this drove her crazy, because it’s so stupid.  This stupid vision thrives because alternative visions have yet to gain momentum.  Most folks have no interest in greener visions, because they are perceived to require sacrifice, a life of less.  Less what?  Less stupidity?  Less waste?  Less anxiety and depression? 

I recently saw the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the ancient paintings at Chauvet Cave in France, discovered in 1994.  Many of the paintings were done about 32,000 years ago, and they depict profound reverence for life.  In those days, France was a healthy paradise filled with wild aurochs, horses, rhinoceros, bears, lions, bison, and many others — a world that was spectacularly alive and well.  The paintings may have been made over a period of 5,000 years. 

Can you imagine a low-impact way of life that lasted 5,000 years?  Can you imagine living in a society filled with awe, amazement, and overwhelming love for the natural world?  Can you imagine living in a world that wasn’t on a high-speed path to self-destruction?  Was this era of abundant freedom, wildness, and vitality truly “less” than our modern suburbia?  Wouldn’t it be precious to wake up in a sane and healthy world?

Our wild ancestors always resisted the aggressive intrusion of outsiders.  The Sentineli still do.  They inhabit North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman archipelago of islands, in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of India.  These people are a Stone Age society of Negrito pygmies who survive by hunting, foraging, and especially fishing.  No signs of agriculture have been observed.  They have a long tradition of welcoming visitors with a shower of arrows and insults, and they are skilled marksmen.

Amazingly, the Indian government protects the Sentineli, and allows them to live in wild freedom.  They remain free because the island isn't that big, doesn't have much valuable timber, and mineral treasures are unlikely.  The island is surrounded by treacherous reefs and treacherous seas — safely getting there by boat is nearly impossible.  Once a year there is one location that becomes theoretically accessible to those who wish to take their life in their hands and fight the powerful currents. 

The Sentineli enjoy a good life in a healthy, stable, and sustainable culture.  They need nothing that they don’t have.  They want to be left alone to live in peace.  Imagine what a terrible “sacrifice” it would be to live a simple life on an island paradise, in balance with nature, in a world with no strangers.

To be continued.

Lightning Bird

There is no such thing as coincidence, right?  Sitting here in Oregon, I wrote a story about a guy in New Jersey, sent it to a site in England, where it was read by a guy in Greece, who pointed me to a story from South Africa, about a man I’d never heard of: Adrian Boshier (1939-1978).  His life was described in Lightning Bird, a biography by Lyall Watson (1939-2008).  Watson was the inventor of “the hundredth monkey,” a magical thinking meme that once went viral.  The book was just what I needed: a visit to an old-fashioned society.

Boshier was an Englishman who moved to South Africa when he was 16.  He was a reckless, brainy, and extremely lucky man who had a short, fantastic life — a whirlwind adventure in rewilding.  He lived in the bush for most of his first six years in Africa.  Unlike other whites, Boshier walked wherever he went, ate what natives ate, and drank their water.  He would head off into wild country with nothing but a pocketknife and a bag of salt (for trading), and live off the land for as long as he wanted. 

He became highly skilled at catching and befriending dangerous snakes.  Walking into a village wrapped up in a 14-foot python, he terrified the natives, giving birth to his reputation as a powerful magician.  He would catch an eight-foot cobra, milk its venom, and drink it before a wide-eyed crowd.  They called him Rradinoga, the father of snakes.

By and by, Boshier met Raymond Dart, the archeologist who discovered Australopithecus africanus.  Dart took him under his wing, and arranged museum work for him.  The lad also made some money selling snake venom to labs.

Boshier was forced to unlearn his narrow Englishness.  Natives taught him the juicy delights of gobbling three-inch caterpillars.  Eventually, he learned how to chase down a young antelope and strangle it with his bare hands.  When a leopard killed an animal, he would race at it screaming, scare it off, and snatch a hunk of flesh.  He once tried to swipe some fresh meat from five lions, unsuccessfully, but he lived to tell about it.

He was fascinated by native culture, and decided to learn more about diviners or witch doctors.  An elder told him to go to Makgabeng, a mountainous land that was home to fearsome spirit power.  The mountains were so dangerous that you shouldn’t even point your finger at them, let alone walk into them.  Boshier walked into them.  Before long, he gained the respect of the residents.

Their chief introduced him to the keeper of the traditions, who told Boshier that the spirits had brought him to Makgabeng to learn.  Why?  “The lessons that the spirits bring cannot be doubted and they must not be ignored.  If you disregard the experience offered by the sprits, you will fall.  You may even die.  But if you follow the path along which they lead, you will learn.  You will gain power and your sprits will be happy.”

A witch doctor reinforced this message.  She told him that his health problems resulted from his resistance to the spirits.  “The hospitals in your cities are full of the hornless ones, those who have been called and would not go.  No one asks for the spirits and it is not easy to live with them.  Everyone fights in the beginning, but in the end one must obey them and do their work.  You should be dead.  I do not know why they let you live.”

Eventually she taught him the skills of a witch doctor, and he was honored by an initiation ceremony.  But whenever he got too stressed, he would flee to Johannesburg and spend time with the whites.  He straddled two incompatible worlds, and never felt at home in either one.

In the mountains, he visited many caves, and studied the paintings on their walls.  Some were recent, and some were very old.  He met elders who understood their meaning.  They were not just decorative graffiti.  The images recorded information, something like writing.  Tribes who spoke different languages all understood the painted symbols in the same way, because they were like a universal form of communication, archetypal images.

The bright climax of the book occurred when a severe drought came to Makgabeng.  Since he was a powerful witch doctor, the people asked him to make it rain.  He responded in a beautiful way.  He found their sacred drums in a forgotten cave, where they had been hidden 50 years earlier, when German missionaries demanded their destruction.  A black bull was sacrificed to provide new hides for the drums.  To bring rain, everyone had to be initiated in the old ways, and the ancestors fully honored.  The people were united by an empowering healing process.  It rained.  Joy!

“There is in African custom an essential harmony, an equilibrium with the land which seems to be lacking in our lives.”  Africa is a special place.  The roots of the old culture go “all the way back, in one long unbroken line, to the origins of man.”  For all of us, a journey to Africa is a homecoming.  “There are few things in traditional life in Africa that can be identified as distinctively sacred in the sense that they can be separated from the rest of life.  For Africans, the whole of life is sacred.”

The megafauna of Africa did not go extinct, because humans coevolved with them.  Living in the tropics, we needed no clothes or substantial shelters.  A sumptuous buffet was available year round — lizards, snakes, roots, berries, nuts, grubs.  We got by with very simple tools for a long, long time.  This was the normal, time-proven, sustainable mode of human living — a mode that our genetic evolution had fine-tuned us for (with the same genes we have today).

Then, folks migrated out of Africa, to non-tropical lands where living conditions were less perfect, and survival was more challenging.  Dwelling outside of our evolutionary homeland turned us into something like moon explorers.  Without technological crutches, we would have been unable to survive.  Be clever or die!

The dark climax of the book was one of humankind’s big tragedies.  Some old cave paintings that Boshier studied had images of sheep.  Sheep were not indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.  They came from the Middle East, where clever people had reduced strong and powerful wild mouflon into fuzzy, sub-intelligent freaks that could not survive without human care.

Portraits of sheep indicated that the clever moon explorers had returned to sacred Africa, bringing with them domesticated livestock, sacks of seeds, and the consuming mindset of the colonizer and domesticator.  “The introduction of a pastoral economy, starting perhaps three or four thousand years ago, seems to have marked the beginning of a relentless destruction, now almost complete, of the earliest way of human life.  It was the end of a society that had discovered how to live in harmony with — rather than at the expense of — nature.”

The archaeological community was always on the lookout for evidence of the miraculous transition, when primitive hominids, who lived by instinct, crossed the Rubicon and became self-aware Homo sapiens with complex brains — incredible modern humans!  Well, here we are, neck deep in a bubbling cauldron of toxic progress soup, big brains and all.  Success!  These days, the primitive side of the Rubicon is looking more and more like where we really belong — home.  Can we learn something here?

Boshier was an epileptic.  To Europeans, epilepsy was a disease.  To Africans, he was blessed by the spirits, very special.  Near the end of his life, he was having as many as 30 epileptic attacks per week.  On 18 November, 1978, Boshier waded into the waters of the Indian Ocean and died.  The next day, a storm raced into the bone dry Makgabeng, the thunder rumbled, and “it rained and rained and rained.”

See a photo of Boshier here: http://www.williamjames.com/History/SHAMANS.htm

Watson, Lyall, Lightning Bird — The Story of One Man’s Journey into Africa’s Past, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1982.