#!kung

If hunter-gatherers can build large, sedentary societies, why do we assume that they lived in small bands for most of our species’ history? Surely our ancestors preferred lush spots over the dead-looking Kalahari. And, once in those spots, surely they had the same political savvy to engineer semi-fixed, stratified societies. Yet many leading anthropologists still imagine the 100,000 years preceding agriculture to resemble, with slight variations, the lives of the mid-20th-century !Kung. Why? One reason is that stratified foragers are unusual. Look at recent hunter-gatherers, and what do you see? You see dispersed clusters of Inuit families in the Arctic. You see Hadza bands sharing honey in eastern Tanzania. You see the Sirionó traipsing through the Amazon and Mbuti camps assembling for a nighttime dance in the Congo. You see, in short, small, mobile, egalitarian bands. But looking at modern hunter-gatherers is misleading. For one, the more we dig through history, the more we encounter foragers who were sedentary and hierarchical. They covered Japan before agriculture. They dotted the South China coast before agriculture. They inhabited the Levant, tracts of the Nile, the beaches of southern Scandinavia, the central plains of Russia, the coasts of the Atacama Desert, and the grasslands of the high-altitude Andes – all before agricultural peoples dominated those regions. Even today, sedentary foragers live in riverine and coastal regions of New Guinea. Sedentary and hierarchical hunter-gatherers are not unusual. If anything, it’s the profusion of mobile, egalitarian bands that might be the historical outlier. Rather than reflecting ancient ways, these small-scale societies are often products of modern forces. Rather than being untouched, many have been bullied, pacified, employed, enslaved and marginalised by colonial powers and agricultural neighbours. Take the Sirionó of Bolivia, who were studied by the anthropologist Allan Holmberg in 1940-42. Living in small bands and lacking such basic innovations as traps and canoes, they seemed, in the words of the Cornell anthropologist Lauriston Sharp, ‘a still-living Old Stone Age people’ – ‘survivors who “from the beginning” retained a variety of man’s earliest culture.’ But the Sirionó of 1940 were not prehistoric relicts. They were refugees. Decades before Holmberg studied them, smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages, levelling their population from 3,000 people to a mere 150. Centuries before that, the Sirionó might have splintered off from a larger, sedentary, agricultural tribe, the Chiriguanos, following predatory ambushes from a rival group. The cultural effects of the decimation were profound. In 2012, the anthropologist Robert Walker and his colleagues showed that, at some point in their history, the Sirionó suffered a devastating cultural collapse, losing canoes, shamanism, complex social structure and most of their agricultural lifestyle. Did something similar happen to the !Kung? People often treat them as stand-ins for the beginning of societal evolution, as echoes of the Palaeolithic. But is that true? Did they really embody, as Lee once put it, ‘the basic human adaptation stripped of the accretions and complications brought about by agriculture, urbanisation, advanced technology, and national and class conflict’? No. As Lee and the anthropologist Jacqueline Solway later admitted, !Kung society was less a pristine surrogate and more the product of a ‘long interaction between foragers, farmers, and herders’. The !Kung started trading with Bantu agriculturalists between 500 and 1,500 years ago. In the 1920s, Bantu farmers and herders entered !Kung lands so that, by the 1950s, the !Kung were incorporated into a larger pastoral economy. When the Harvard Kalahari Project was set up in 1963, 20 per cent of young !Kung men were working with cattle at any time. During his 1967-69 field trip, Lee recorded 51 per cent of !Kung men planting fields. These interactions shaped !Kung society. According to Polly Wiessner, a leading anthropologist who has spent nearly four decades studying the !Kung, the egalitarianism for which the !Kung are so famous is a reflection not of a general hunter-gatherer lifestyle but of Bantu farmers displacing local leaders. ‘There’s indication that [the !Kung] had much stronger leadership,’ she said. ‘And they had some clan-like system that we can’t understand anymore and a more complex social organisation. We know that. We’ve all tried to reconstruct it, but we can’t. But before the Bantu came in, it would’ve been a somewhat different society.’

Ancient Campfire Conversations Strengthened Human Culture

Ancient Campfire Conversations Strengthened Human Culture