WEDNESDAY, DEC 7, 2022: NOTE TO FILE

Man the Hunter Transcript

Talk on the San by Helga Vierich, Anthropologist

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: ODUM, FROM THE WIRES, LIFE'S WORK, FUTURE

Abstract: The San are a people numbering about 105,000 (a remnanant population, but today the great majority of ǃKung people live in the villages of Bantu pastoralists and European ranchers) living in the Kalahari as nomadic hunter-gatherers living in bands (camps) as normal humans did for millions of years until a small group of expansionist humans arose in East Africa 50k to 60k years ago to rapidly expand within and out of Africa as an invasive species. The San, Hadza, and Pygmy populations alone were not assemelated into the expansionist collective, form of civilization, as evidenced by their having a greater genentic diversity of any humans, far more all the descendances of the expansionists (we Anthropocene modernists). The San are the most genetically diverse, hence they are the true people of place, the most like all hominins prior to the great out of Africa expansion that we expansionists must learn from to renormalize.

COOS BAY (A-P) — Watch the video. The transcript is not complete and is a first draft. Parts of the discussion were inaudible due to technical issues. Making the transcript involved copying the plain text Google auto-generated captions and parsing into sentences, capitalizing first words, punctuating and, so on.

 

 

Transcript:

So I'll just formally welcome Helga Vierich. We're incredibly pleased to be able to welcome to these series of radical anthropology seminars. Helga really represents a kind of four-field anthropology approach. I think that's fair enough to say, with both a cultural anthropology, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics type of background.

It's a sort of interdisciplinary approach that we've always tried to follow in radical anthropology group, so we're really interested to to hear what you have to say on this question of sex division of labor and your general experience and thoughts of the matter.

So over to you and talk for as long as you feel like, and we'll then have discussion.

Yep, so I'll just introduce myself a little bit, a little bit more detail I did my doctoral program at the University of Toronto. I initially was going to go into archaeology. I did a summer dig at a place called Nasherini in Lebanon with the team put together by Bruce Schroeder and that research, that dig was one of the last ones done there, because of course the Civil War and everything else that happened since then made it impossible to go back and so Richard Lee who was another one of my instructors there, said why not, since I had funding and you know grants, and so on, why not, why not switch and do something in ethnography of hunter-gatherers, because I was already talking to a man called Hank Lewis. Henry Lewis at the University of Alberta, about fire ecology.

Okay, and I was very interested in the role of ecological engineering among hunter-gatherers particularly as it was to my mind an intensification of this which has actually led to domestication of plants and animals.

In any event I was, you know, thinking about going to Alberta to do research following up on what Hank Lewis had done and then Richard Lee stepped in and said, no, why not go to the Kalahari. I can get you in there and after a wonderful lunch with Pat Draper and Henry Harpending I got the use of a vehicle. Richard set that up, and off I went and I did in the end four, well not quite four years, in in the Kalahari. I did a drought survey towards the end of that time, however I couldn't do fire ecology because the Botswana government had just initiated a law against all kinds of belt burning and people got fined and jailed and stuff if they set fire to the landscape so I couldn't very well do interviews on that and it took me a long time to actually get the data on that, you know, until things kind of calmed down, and so I had to switch and I, I wound up being really interested in the interface between hunter-gatherers and the the farming and pastoral people and I wound up doing my PhD on that and what I found out was very interesting to my mind.

It was that the interface was really a zone of shall we say economic experimentation on the part of the Bushman. Okay, I call them Bushmen because in the end they told me they wanted to be called Basarwa. Well this stuff about salon and poisson and everything, it's kind of politically correct, but they never even heard those terms so Basarwa just means Bushman in Bantu.

In the Bantu language and in their own languages they didn't have a term for themselves except the real people.

In other words their language name and then koi which means, you know, the the real people... I suspect every cultural group has a similar feeling about themselves.

Anyway, okay, so I was very lucky in that this group had long past any kind of Interest or fascination with the hurting and farming culture and the, you know, the sort of outside world that was brought to them more recently, and they were very conscious of the racism with which they were faced in these other cultures, and rejected them.

I still remember one of my closest, I don't know, I would call it a friend or an intern, an informant, Coatre said one day, he said if you ever see me with a chicken, I'm translating now, it's my chicken. I'm not looking after it for some, you know, the Kalahari guy.

You know, and that kind of illustrates to me the rejection of the role of surf or even employee. Okay, most of the people I knew had at some point or other being, you know, closer to working for as a herd boy or as an assistant in a in a agricultural operation, doing bird scaring and harvesting, or, you know, cooking, or you know, looking after kids in a camp or something like that, and they did this. It became very clear they did this because by filling in at times of Labor shortages, they were very much more tolerated by the people who now controlled the main, permanent water points, okay.

Okay now there's another topic I'd like to get into but I can't because there's no time, and that is what happened to their hunting systems, and their interaction with wildlife, and so on as a result of the what they call, the totally stupid hunting practices of the Bantu dogs and, and you know, clubs and hunting on Horseback and everything else, but I'll get into that in another, in another talk if I'm permitted.

Okay, so the reason I am here today is because I think it was sometime last year, in the early part of the Year, there was a report from South America about the excavation of a young person who turned out to be female, but who was buried with hunting paraphernalia. You know, okay, and there were a number of very excited reports about this.

Hang on, I'm just gonna call them up so I can, if they will, oh yeah, one of them, the main research article was published in Science Advances, and that was last November 2020, and it was female hunters of the early Americas, okay, Randall Haws, James Watson, Etc et al., okay and what they, what they basically then did was, say question sexual division of labor among hunters and gatherers they said, you know, this was kind of a standard empirical reality that most people had suggested based on ethnographic data and it was then inferred to be the ancestral behavioral pattern, okay.

so then they suggested that their discovery of this girl with the hunting paraphernalia challenges the 'man the hunter' hypothesis, okay, and of course this was in the Andes, but and it was a burial of that was about 9,000 years old, and so on.

Most of you are familiar with this, okay. It was picked up all over the place on inverse and somebody called Sarah Wells actually wrote, actually ancient big game Hunters were women. Prehistoric hunting wasn't just a man's game, etc, etc, with, you know, predictable and there was a an article which I can't remember where it appeared, but it was a picture of a young girl in a pink dress throwing a spear at a a bunch of wild lacunas.

I guess anyway, so anyway this caused a great deal of excitement and it was picked up here as well, and then it was picked up on Twitter, and everywhere else, and I was, I was almost amused by it.

First of all, you know, there is no 'man the hunter' hypothesis that I'm aware of, okay, that title 'man the hunter' was the title of the conference. The 'man the hunter' conference, the original hunter-gatherer conference, and it was decided by Werner, Gren who were the funders, the book that subsequently followed, edited by Richard Lee and Irvin Devore, was also called that, and I think you know it was not only just for continuity, but it was because it was a kind of a catchy title, and they didn't want to fight with Werner Grant about the funding, Etc, so the thing is that it upset a lot of people who were feminists at that time.

Somebody even wrote a book called Woman The Gatherer and this is very ironic because you know most of you realize Richard Lee in that edited volume and at that conference was the one who pointed out that his research indicated that women were supplying, you know, 75 to 80 percent of all the calories. All right, he even expressed dismay that it was titled this way, and that it got him under it, put him under attack, okay, by people who felt, you know, that the role of women was being minimized, Etc, but there is in our society, and has been through probably the history of civilization, a kind of a glorification of men as hunters.

You see it on the the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs. There they are killing some poor leopard, or you know, Eland or something with their chariots. You see it today when, you know, the guy who runs that what is it, I can't remember which big corporate guy this is, but he goes off to Africa and kills elephants, baby elephants, and stands over them like he's a great hunter.

This is a, this is a meme as it were that has persisted and it has infected a lot of people, and the way that they view hunting as an activity, all right, well when I got to the field and I got a little bit better at the language, I always spoke basically children's language or baby talk, if you will, but because it's a really really hard language to learn, it's got like I don't know how many, I think it was 39 different sounds, and there was clicks and toning and everything.

I once asked a man if I could, you know, I got the tone wrong and left asked to man if I could leave my camera equipment in his wife's vagina like the hot word for Hutton vagina is very very very close. That's the kind of mistake, so I was a subject of considerable humor, I think, but anyway so I started asking the women I knew and that the picture that was put up to announce this talk is very indicative, because the one, the two girls that I'm sitting with became my best friends, okay they were the ones who jolly me off to go and do, to go into gathering with them, all right, and I became more accepted, you know, as as a part of the scene, because of them and Malapai, the middle one, actually ran a trap line at one point so that interested me, and I started to ask about whether or not she and, you know, some of the other girls I knew aspired to be hunters, and felt, you know, kind of pushed away from that by the men, and they laughed at me.

They said why would you want to be a hunter, you know, I mean young men do aspire to be good Hunters, that that seemed pretty clear to me, so I I said, well why, why wouldn't you and they said, well for one thing, and I don't I suppose they've been told about this or perhaps some of them had tried it in any event, for one thing they said you walk around all day either with your, you know, instructor, you know, the person you're apprenticed to, or by yourself

If you're supposed to be trying to hunt by yourself, which is the aim, I guess ultimately, of becoming a good Hunter you walk around all day in silence. You can't talk to anybody; you can't even sing; you have to be careful even to sneeze. In case you scare something and and you know most of the time you come home empty, empty-handed, and it's hot, and you're covered with thorn scrapes, and mosquito bites, and you know, and you're miserable.

You come home miserable because again you didn't succeed, like the hunting success ratio, the average is one hunting in four is successful, okay, what that means. Well, that's just the average the success rate of men over 35 you know, was higher. It was sort of like one in every third or second hunt. The success rate of the youngest men who were just learning was way lower. It was like one in seven hunts, okay, now can you imagine what that's like? You know, you go out and and it's hot because they hunt during the day... that's another story. That uh I'd like to explore, you know, when did this night hunting with dogs start, but anyway you hunt during the day. You hunt as quietly as possible. You wander around for hours. You follow tracks, you try to get close enough to animals to hit them with a poison arrow, right, and at that point you know the animal will continue going on, probably sort of itching, and bruising at that spot until it feels the paralysis coming on, and then it will seek someplace to go lie down.

In the meantime, you hear back to camp and you get, you know, all the men that you can to come with you to make sure that it gets tracked properly, because if you're a young hunter, your tracking skills are not that good. Okay, it's very hard to learn to track properly in this kind of sandy environment, and you're going to need assistance in first of all preventing other predators from zeroing in on this animal.

Okay, and also to, you know, butcher it and get it home. All right, so then, okay so that was the goal and if you manage that you were, it was clear that it was a group effort, okay, it wasn't some great hunter, you know, being the supplier of meat or anything. It was a lucky hit in fact. Most of the time what I heard, and I was able to tag on, tag after these guys when they went after such an animal a couple of times, was that, you know, this was an animal that had sacrificed itself for the sake of the children in the camp. This was an animal that had decided, you know, to help its Brothers, the humans, and I remember one day the first time I went out, one of the older men stopped when we came insight of the animal which was down. Now it was down under a tree and he saw it, and he said, 'oh, oh, it's her'. He knew this animal, he'd known it for years, he'd seen it have babies, you know, and on this occasion, this was the one that that caught the arrow, you know, so that's the, that's the atmosphere all right so then I asked you know but you know, okay, so it's hard, and it's, you can't talk very much, but you know and it doesn't give you very much kind of benefit at the end of the day, and the what the girl said then, and she said, 'well that's why we let the men do it'. Because it's, you can't talk, you can't stain, you can't joke, you can't tell stories, you can't gossip while you're doing it, like you can when you're gathering.

I mean I've been on those Gathering trips, I mean the ones where they didn't want me to come, were ones where I guess either they were talking about me or they were discussing very, you know, delicate matters of, you know, love and marriage or whatever and didn't didn't, you know, wanted privacy but the times that I was able to go gathering with them, not that I gathered much, I mostly just carried my camera, but it was just endless chatter, jokes, especially talking about the guys, you know, and gossip that pe,ople have picked up, and and just little dances, impromptu, and singing and stuff like this, and that it was a lively, fun outing compared to, you know, the the way that hunting was described, and the most important thing of all was that you always came home with plenty of food.

There were no, like, failed gathering trips. Right, even I've got to go out there and go, oh I don't see any nuts in the trees, I don't know where the roots are, no they knew this whole area like the back of their, like a garden, in fact they called it a garden, in fact. They have gardened it in the sense that well, they were making the landscape more productive with every trip. You know, for future, for the future when I was walking along the first few times, I was really puzzled to see women taking some nuts or some berries, you know, out of their pouches. We'd just been gathering these things, right, and I, and I had to stop because they were healing the bunches of the ground and they did like three or four times, on our way home, and I said, 'what are you doing'? You know, and there of course, you know, because I always ask questions and I was hot and bothered and they said well we have to give something back to the Mother. Right, but if you consider the consequences of just that, okay aside from all the times that stuff sort of fell out of their, fell out of their crosses, every time they plunk them down to dig a root or something, okay, because there would always stop falling out.

I used to be trying, trying to be really helpful, I'd scoop stuff up and try to put it back in and they laughed at me, and they said don't, so all of this stuff, the whole you know provisioning expedition of gathering, scattered seeds and berries and nuts. In other words, the babies of the Mother everywhere and if you think this is women do this, maybe three times maximum a week because they gather enough to last for two days, for their household, okay the, the, the mathematics, I once try to figure it out, just for the the group, I was with which was about a thousand people, all in you know, the whole language area, and within you know, within like a hundred years they would have planted like 10 million plants.

That's minimum, assuming just six per trip, okay, but if each woman is doing this. Just do the math in your head. This is major ecological engineering and most of it's done without even planning anything. Okay it's about gratitude it's about reciprocity at that point. Okay so the gathering activities, and this isn't even counting the sort of ecological hot spots that are created around every one of these temporary camping sites, because people spit stuff out, they, they throw things into the midden, the withered little roots, and stuff that don't get eaten, they go into the midden. Their little kids are told, 'put that thing away in the middle before it dies', okay, so the, the, the, the old camping sites were just immensely productive after probably, after a 10-year period or so. You could always count on finding edible roots and, and berries and nuts and, and certain kinds of trees and and so on, growing there, and we would actually, during the winter, during the dry season, we would actually sometimes zigzag among old camping sites on our way back just to sort of fill up on on stuff easily because in the winter you know there wasn't that much in the way of of fresh fruit, and so having a lot of different growths that you could go to was really beneficial.

The other thing was root crops. It was full of root crops because these things have been replanted. Okay, so looked at in terms of the subsistence economy and division of labor of hunter-gatherers, what women do gathering is not only more fun, always productive, and you know relatively, relatively, should we say unarduous really. I mean they carry a lot but they're they don't seem to worry about the weight of it because, like heavier guests, the closer they are to camp, right, and then they can rest for two days, do other stuff in any event what the women do, is not only, you know, dependable and fun, but it's also ecologically completely critical to the hunter-gatherer relationship with their ecosystem. All right, and I think looking at it from a kind of, you know, division of labor point of view, there another thing becomes clear at least to me, and it was clear to them too because it was a, it was a San, I can't remember which one said it, I was doing hunting interviews because I did tons of these interviews on hunts, and, and one of them just said, well you realize you know that if if we didn't have the women gathering, we couldn't afford to waste all this time hunting. They said that he didn't say waste, he said to while away our time, translating badly, but in other words this, this, you know, obligation to bring meat into camp. That was it, was enough to actually depress young men when they were unsuccessful, when they were young. A lot of the transdances that I saw were retreating people who were so depressed by their lack of hunting success that they'd fallen into a depression, and they'd refused to get up, and they were still lying in their, in their, on their, you know, crosses for days and days and then the whole group would get together and they'd have a transdance, and a big celebration, and and and and and this person would be kind of jollied back into a state of hopefulness, you know, like we, we're, we're gonna cure your bad luck. You're gonna keep trying and so on. Hunting is hard, right, because it's the least, the least rewarding of the activities that hunter-gatherers undertake. That is my impression, and I know that this contradicts the view of many of the archaeologists who are excavating, you know, sites a hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, no three, well, yeah, a long time ago of our hunter-gatherer past because what they get is the lithic remains of the hunting toolkit, right, and some of it has, I think, been misinterpreted as a hunting toolkit because some of these scrapers and other other things could just as easily be used to process and dismember plants.

But the thing is, hunting was not done as a, as a male activity that excluded females. All right, men were perfectly happy to come gathering. It's the women didn't want them because they wanted to gossip about the guys. Sorry that sounds awful, but you know, it was not necessary for the man to come, plus young men did not apprentice with their, you know, female relatives to learn where every type of plant grows, to learn, you know, how to, how to gather all these different things and and and and and and to learn that, that part of the landscape.

They were more encouraged to learn, animal behavior to understand aspects of, you know, how to make how to make arrows, so they fly straight to target, practice, and especially to handle the poisons, you know, and so on. They, this division of labor, I think function not because of, you know, male domination or anything, but because it was practical and from an ecological standpoint what hunting did, and I think this is really important, what, what hunters do when they're, when they're out observing animals trying to get, you know, close to them and so on, is they keep very good track of, of the status, the health status, the reproductive activities of these animals.

They know what can be harvested, to what extent. They also keep pretty good track of all the kills made by lions and other predators in the environment, and one of the things that this does, I think, is it means that they hunt in a, in a, in a conscious way to not over harvest certain species that are vulnerable.

I once sat through like a, like a three hour, no it was longer than that, debate or discussion or whatever it was that was occasioned by the fact that a man had actually killed a female Eland and the, you know, instead of, instead of letting the Eland calf come to, come to life as it were, and that was, that was a No-No. Okay, if you were gonna hunt, you tried to hunt selectively so you were hunting a healthy animal because you didn't want to pick up the diseases carried by sick animals. Right, you wanted an animal that was sort of in, in you know, good fitness because you wanted the fat that the animal carried, and so you know you valued the activities of your fellow hunters, the lions, the leopards, the cheetahs. Why? Because those animals, and this has been shown now, thank goodness, by wildlife ecologists in Canada, they selectively prey on animals that are sick, okay.

Prion diseases especially are very dangerous as you probably know. They survive cooking because it's not actually an organism, right, it's a misformed misaligned protein of some kind, and prion diseases, you know, the danger exists worldwide and it's only lately that we've come to realize how, how bad they can be.

In the United States right now many of the wildlife services are recommending that people do not eat venison because there's such an epidemic of what's called chronic wasting disease among the deer. Well, what brought that on, it's they killed all the cougars, they killed all the wolves, so the disease is just rampant among these deer, and it's spreading fast. Okay, the Bushman knew, they told me, they said these animals are our brothers. They keep us healthy because they keep the animals healthy, and I'm not the only person that's ever been told this. This was explained to, what was his name again, Farley Mowat who did some book on People of the Deer, on caribou hunters up north, and they told him too that the wolves kept the deer healthy. The herds, you know, needed them, and this this deep ecological understanding, this symbiosis, that is going on here is really important, you know, and so I'm not saying that hunting as such is an unimportant part of the hunter-gatherer economy, but I think in terms of our understanding of how the whole hunter-gatherer culturally, ecology worked, how it evolved, that this was, both of them, were critical, you know.

I tell this story sometimes, so if I have time I'd like to repeat it. It's about giraffe. Is that okay? You're familiar with this one, okay, well, as you know, Lorna Marshall's son made a film called The Hunters, and it, and it follows some some people up in gummyland, you know where, where much of the field work has been done, among a language group different from the one I was with, about 800, almost a thousand miles to the north the west. Anyway, he follows a giraffe hunt, okay, and so there, they hit the giraffe and of course poison arrows, that's your answer anyway, so it's a long long hunting in the end you know they kill this giraffe with spears, actually, they pulled it down with the truck, but that, or shot it, with a, but anyway never mind.

So I had seen this film and I was very impressed, you know, and so when I came to the Kalahari there were plenty of giraffe. I mean not plenty plenty but I certainly saw giraffe quite frequently in the area where I was doing field work, but you know, what nobody was hunting them, no, none of the, none of the Kua were hunting them, and so after a while, during, you know, after X number of you know 100 hunting interviews, I asked about this, and I was told, oh, well it's, it's for a very good reason and some of them are a little hazy about this.

I was told to go speak to somebody, this lady who lived, you know, like about a hundred miles to the, to the east of where I was doing these interviews. So I eventually got out to see her, and she was this little, little granny, right. She's sitting there in a camp. The other women have gone gathering. A couple old men are sleeping under the lean-toes and she's kind of, got the kids around her, and so I went ahead. I explained what I was interested in. I wanted to ask her about giraffe. She brightened right up. She was so pleased, you know, I think most people in her society probably really tired of hearing her talk about giraffe because she's one of these obsessed people, you know, from childhood. She wanted to know everything about giraffes. She, anyway, so I asked the question. I said why shouldn't the giraffe be hunted? I've noticed that the young men here don't hunt the giraffe and she said, oh it's the, it's the midwife of the acacia.

Okay, so I go okay, and I write this down, you know, I'm thinking, and then, you know, I asked her more questions, and it gradually came out, you know, she had noticed that acacia seeds would pass through the giraffe, be deposited, at quite distant, quite distant, and then sprout. In fact, that's seemed to be the main thing that was spreading these acacias.

By the way they're not scientifically labeled as acacias anymore, but you know, what I mean, these big you know sort of fan-shaped giant trees that you see in the in the Central African savannah regions. Okay, so, and then she told me she said God made the giraffe tall enough to take the babies of the acacia, in other words, the seed pods and spread them. Okay, that's why we say it's a midwife.

It was only years later that I learned that the acacia is a legume. It fixes nitrogen in its roots with a symbiosis with the bacteria right and it is because of the spread of the acacia that the Kalahari remains as green as it does. In other words, you know, spreading nitrogen. This is a very, very sandy soil type, and not not, not really rich in nutrients, but having these trees that are basically giant, you know, like legumes really opens up the environment to to other species of of plants and, and that of course leads to more animal diversity as well.

There's another thing. There's the so-called marama nut which is also a legume, okay, and by the way marama nuts were, what these women were often dropping on their, on their gathering trips, so you know just think of the observational and knowledge. That sort of sums up, like she didn't know how to explain why the acacia was the essential plant in the Kalahari and that the the animal that spreads this plant is vital, vitally important, okay, but she knew and I think that sums up like hundreds of years, thousands of years of observation and discussion, and you know, what we call wisdom, if you will.

It's the first science of mankind. Is ecological engineering, and I won't even get into fire ecology unless there's time, okay, does that, does that open up if I talk long enough?

I can't hear you, yeah, no just a mute, yeah, well that sets things up. I mean perhaps if people ask questions you can come up respond and that that will get things going that, that was already a really great picture. I think it's that's fantastic, with the giraffes, there, does anybody have burning questions to ask at this point?

Yes, well it's just that I've, I first knew of your work when I heard the the story of the trickster story about God's testicles.

Yeah, yeah, and you were mentioning how, how the women when they're gathering, they laugh a lot and I just wondered if you could tell us that story, and you know, anything else around that whole topic, because of course the issue of whether hunter-gatherers are sort of cowering in the face of kings, in the form of their gods, or whether they're actually, their divinities are are tricksters, has been quite a controversial topic recently.

Oh well, that it's actually an important question. I appreciate it because there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, um they had when I, when I was able to get that depth of, of interview going they had a concept of a single Creator, okay, a kind of a spiritual creator of the entire universe who sort of animated everything.

They said the two things that came from the immaterial, the spiritual, the unknown side of reality, was fire and love, okay, and love was not just love. Love, right, it was it was the anime, it was life, okay, it was what made things alive, all right, and so you know I, I finally got the name. I can't even remember what it is now. Can it, and it's unimportant because they told me it, if we don't know the real name of the Creator, because how can we know it?

It's, it's, it's, it's immaterial. So then my next question, because I had my copy of, you know, notes and records with me, was what would be the, you know, is, is your god male or female?

They couldn't believe such a stupid question. They said what!? Well if it manifests on Earth, you know, when quite often, if it's human, or, or any other species of animal, then it's going to come out as male or female, but that's just what happens in a material form. An immaterial being does not need genitalia, they don't pee they don't screw, you know, they don't, they don't, they don't have sex. What are you thinking? And I realize how stupid that question was, you know, okay, so, so there's that now.

Here's the thing. There are a lot of, sort of, stories that I was told were sacred, okay, and one of them was the story of the bees chasing testicles. Now that, with that, you know, introduction to it, I had to ask that it be told to me, of course.

And the story goes that God, this immaterial Creator being, was looking down and on, you know, the world, and he was following for some reason, maybe they mentioned his name, I don't know, or her name, who knows, following a group of gathering women, and he was particularly entranced by one young woman in the group, and basically wanted to, wanted to get closer to her, and as a result he, he he popped into material existence as a small human.

Now I don't know if this was like a homunculus, like a miniature man, or whether it's supposed to have been a child. They didn't describe it in any event. This little being popped into existence and he was following these women as they were gathering and everything. That he saw them gathering, you know, if they stopped, it not a nut grove, and got a bunch of nuts, he would follow and eat a bunch of nuts as well, and as he was eating everything that they were gathering, as he saw them gathering, he was growing into, you know, full human size.

Okay, at one point he was already quite big, probably the size of a 10 year old kid or something, and the the woman he really liked, the young woman he really liked, dropped her kaross to dig out a root. Everybody else was doing it so what he did is, he snuck inside it because he was getting really tired. That was what was said anyway, and when she was finished she picked up the kaross. It was a little heavier, but you know, she didn't mind and so while she was, and then they all decided to go home, and so when she, when she um oh that's the other thing, she dropped in on top of the kaross this great big heavy root that she dug up, and it knocked him out.

Okay, so he came to about halfway back and he's been, he's walking, he's been aware of the fact that he's being carried along and he's very hungry again, so he eats almost everything that's in the kaross, and she gets home and by this time he's quite big and she's very tired and so she takes the big root out and she sets it to cook, and doesn't, doesn't notice him, okay, and so he creeps out of her kaross still eating everything that's left in it except for the root, and, and, and sort of hides behind the, behind the, I don't know, it was at the back of the hut or behind the hut. I'd have to check my notes with how, how that was worded, but anyway, meanwhile she goes next door to the to a hut, like you know, 30, 20 feet away and says, oh by the way I did get that really nice marama root and I'm cooking it right now. Can I bring it over and we can share it because I guess with her mother's, or her sisters household, or something, that that she had next door and so they said oh sure, okay, and then she, in the meantime, because she had taken it out of the fire to cool before she went to give this generous offer, the guy had found it.

God had found it and eaten it. It was gone, so she gets her, and she looks around where where is it, and she goes, she goes around to the, to all the households, or like four other households in that camp, and accuses everybody of stealing it. You know, and they all say no we wouldn't do a thing like that. We've got plenty of food, you know, you're crazy, kind of thing. She says, well what happened to it? Oh, and they are all mad at her, and everything, so she goes back to her hut and she's really, she doesn't even want to bother eating now, and then she lifts her cross to see if there's some berries. There's nothing left in it. They've stolen everything, so now she's really pissed off, and she decides I'm just gonna go to sleep, so she gets into bed. It's evening now, the fire's dying down, everybody's quieting, and goes to sleep.

And at this moment God now, the sides, were full-grown, you know, human male, I guess creeps around and gets under her blankets with her. It's, oh you're so beautiful, you so beautiful, and she says who are you? Right, you're not, and she gave me some name. It was the name of her, I don't know, her young husband or her fiance or something. The man that she was going to be marrying soon, that's why she had a separate hut, thank you, who are you, and he, you know, he didn't care.

He just wanted to get his way with her. He was going to rape her, essentially, and so, no she wasn't having any of this, you know, she pulled out her knife because they all have knives, and stuff, right, for cutting roots among other things, and she just cut off his testicles, just like that, and he went, ah, and popped right out of existence.

I'm telling you the way the story was told to me with all the sound effects. Anyway, so then so then the balls in their little sack were left behind, right. She looked around, she said where'd this guy go, right, and she saw these little balls hopping along, right.

And so she called upon her friends the bees, and, I said, well wait a minute people don't talk to bees, and they looked at me, the you know the storyteller, to me says this is a myth.

In other words it's a story, you know, get with it, so okay, so she calls the bees to sting the testicles, okay, and what you have to picture here, the bees are stinging, right, the little sacks are popping up and down, every time they're stung, and they're trying to get away and you have to picture something like a sack race now, okay, I mean that's how it was described to me, and, and she saw them disappear over, you know, the next little sand dune and um, and thought good riddance.

You know what was that, and, and she couldn't figure out what had happened, and so she again went to all the other huts and accused everybody, all the men there, of having tried to rape her. Okay, now this was just too much, and now everybody was really mad at her, and they were all telling her off, and so by this point she said all right, I'll prove it, and so she went out and she looked for these balls, okay, she tracked them, wasn't hard you know, a little sack anyway she finally found them.

They had buried themselves in the sand to get away from the bees, all right, so she pulled them out and in the meantime I guess they died, or something, I don't know, anyway she she went and showed them to people, and said, see here, here are his testicles, and everybody handled them and looked at them, and sniffed them, and they said, yeah, they they do smell, they might be good to eat, right, and so they cooked them and ate them and they were delicious.

They were the first Kalahari truffles, the origin of the Kalahari truffle one of the most expensive of all truffle varieties, just look it up, okay, I, I just about fell over backwards when he hit that punch line in the story. I couldn't believe it, you know, but that's the story, okay, so now here you have to remember this story was told on one of the times, at one of the times that I had a bunch of families invited for dinner at my camp, okay, and it was told in front of a whole range of children. It wasn't just an adult story, okay, and the children were reacting to it, some of them may have heard it before, but I started thinking about later, I thought, you know, what are these children learning?

Well for one thing they're learning that, you know, once you are incorporated as a material being, even if you're, you know, the creator of the universe, you can really screw up, you know, you can really do, you know, silly things, and have crazy ideas, and all this that's a sort of trickster model, right, but as a result of your mistake, good things can happen, like every every little hole that oozed sperm right from from those balls is, the bees were stinging them, and they were trying to get away, gave rise to the Kalahari truffles to spread them all over the place, you know, so there was that, and then the other thing, that was really really clear to me, is that the girls were learning that you share food that's good, you don't accuse people of not sharing or stealing, or trying to rape you, because people in that society take that very seriously and it's usually a wrong accusation at least in that Society is, it's you know, it's not the right way to deal with each other, as you know, for men to deal with women, and vice versa, so God didn't even know how to, the first thing about falling in love, or wanting sex.

God was so ignorant he completely screwed up and got his balls chopped off, okay, so the children are learning that, and they were also learning that you don't rape women, or they'll chop off your balls. You know, you don't. Even God can't do that, okay, now this is a very, very different message from the story of little Virgin Mary who gets knocked up by God, and then is informed by his lieutenant, you know, some angel he sends down to tell her to go ahead, you know, she's going to have this baby, and it's going to save the world, and everything be fine, you know, excuse me but as far as I'm concerned Virgin Mary should have just done with this little story, and told, you know, and then we wouldn't be, oh, I don't know, the idea of God the Father impregnating a teenager without her knowledge and then getting her to go along with it, and marry some other guy so that, you know, and that all of this is so sick compared to the story I just told.

I'm sorry but you know it's, it's such a different view of the, of the autonomy and and rights of both young people, both men and women, to interact as individuals and not on the basis of, of domination, and and subjugation, you know, so to me that story says a lot about that kind of culture, you know, and the hunting interviews, frankly with the, with the girls and the, and and the boys, the men and the women in older age groups, also taught me that, that it's not a matter of, of domination, the choices that people make in that environment are practical, and logical, and ecologically sound, and that was what I learned, you know.

Division of labor is, is a way of expressing it, that doesn't even come close to the original form that it took, you know, if, if you think for instance of collecting clams along a seashore. This is something women could do with predictable results. They could also manage clam beds and things like that, or oyster beds, I don't know which which one. They, they would be or, or other kinds of shellfish there would be, other kinds of activities where women could participate for instance, in blind hunting where you're driving animals towards a hidden location. This is the technique most often used with migratory animals that are moving in big herds.

The women participate quite happily in driving, in driving the animals towards a few concealed hunters, you know, but it's not a division of labor based on an idea of one sex being superior, okay, and I think that's really important. Does that satisfy you Chris?

Oh more than satisfied telling of a story and probably the best story I've had it a long time, thank you so much. It's absolutely welcome, that's incredible stories, okay.

Helga can you say more about the young hunters and issues like bride service are young men coming into the girls camp and then kind of learning to hunt with that camp, or yeah.

Well let's put it this way, bride service, it's made, it makes it seem like such an institutionalization, right, but in fact what I saw was that the, the people who had the most interconnections, who had a lot of social networks and so on, both male and female, marriage into their kind of circle, was very desired, okay and some of them were, had all these interconnections because they were, you know, very reliable hunters, okay.

You know, as you get older a man of, you know, 60, 70 who's, who's got a hunting kill rate of like one every second hunt, that, that's going to be a camp, you know, where you're going to learn a lot. It's going to be a camp where there's going to be a lot of, a lot more regular meat supply. Kids are going to be healthier, and it's going to be a bigger camp because everybody wants to learn from him, and live, live there, right, so you get these, these kind of network hubs and they're not all men, you know, by any means, but, but in a case like that the daughters of such a person will be magnets of young men who want, who want to be in, involved in that, and all their parents too, because, you know, the, the thing is that, that if you have a charismatic, diligent, generous, diplomatic, courageous person who's, who's really learned how to hunt well, okay, and the same is true of anybody who's really learned how to, how to heal well, or somebody who's a tremendous creator of new music.

By the way, but anyway in the case of a hunter, no his daughters will attract suitors in part because they want to be in his camp, okay, and Malapai, the young lady in the middle of that picture that you posted, she actually got married before I left to a young man called Saintly who was from the, he was from a group of camps near the borehole and he, you know, given you know the paucity of game and all the, the problems of trying to hunt near the borehole, he had never learned to hunt, and he idealized it, you know, the life of the hunter-gatherer.

Also, also sick to death of the racism from, you know, the the anti-speaking people there, and, and he, he focused on her. They fell in love, they got married and here he was in camp, okay, and she was really disappointed because she really liked the fact that he had access to the borehole, and all the radio music, and the, and the Goomba Goomba dancing, and everything, and she thought by marrying him she would have more access to all this exciting outside world.

Well, whereas he just wanted to get away from it but anyway, so there's, there's that, but one of the main reasons he was there was because he wanted to learn from her father, okay, her father being the fellow who said that about the chicken, right, if I ever have a chicken, okay, so hunting, being an expert hunter, was to some extent a statement of ethnic identity, okay, okay just as being a knowledgeable gatherer was a statement of ethnic identity, and the wild foods, and I've written a little paper on this somewhere in the past, it, it hardens as it were the differences between ethnic groups when you get an ethnic boundary emerging like that.

And so this marriage that I saw was part of that phenomena. Now of course in other places I saw marriages take place, and almost invariably the young couple would reside with that girl's parents, okay, now I don't know if you want to call this bride service or not. Most of it was due to the fact that young women, what they told me was they wanted to be near their mothers during the early years because when they had babies, they they needed the support, and I'll tell you, I mean, I did extensive genealogies in every camp I was ever in and what I found was it was just as frequent under the, such circumstances to have the young man's parents living in the same camp for a while.

Anyways, after the marriage and, and even grandparents and friends of both sides and people would be coming and going and the camp would disperse, and it would regroup in other ways, but what would tend to stay together for the first few years was that girl and her mother, okay, and the husbands they were attached to, so I don't know if you want to call the husband that the young woman was attached to as performing bright service.

I, I know that's how it was described in the literature and the idea being that what he was now hunting with her father for the household and their households for a long time were, were somewhat contiguous, you know, but he wasn't doing any service. He was, he was married to her now, he was part of their household, and gradually as as he learned to hunt better, if, if like in the case of Tatla, he really needed to learn, uh, that household began to think, you know, the young household began to see itself as potentially, what's the word, that sometimes used neo-local, in other words to just go and visit friends somewhere, to go stay with, you know, some uncle that's, that neither of them had seen, you know, for a long time, or, or just to, you know, go visit other people and spend, you know, four or six weeks living in their camping, camping party, okay, but, but by that time they would have had like one or two little children.

They'd want to show these children to various relatives and quite often they would, they would move the furthest, in other words they had distant friends and relatives. In the case of Tetlo, this young man, he he was only sort of a quarter qua, okay, his mother had been a concubine of a Bakalahari man in that, in that settlement, so you know he grew up basically as a, as a sort of mixed blood, but looked down on by everybody because he was, he was, he was not the same, okay, and that's part of the reason the racism, that's one of the reasons he wanted to leave, but his mother's, I can't remember his mother's father or his mother's mother, but had been quick-quay, okay, and they had to periodically visited that, that borehole, to visit that, that young woman living there and and so he, he missed, you know, he wanted to present their, his young children, and his, you know, wife to them, and just before I left the two of them with their little child, plus his, her parents came along too, were headed for a place called Tamo, which is in the very southern edge of the central Kalahari game reserve, okay, it's a quick-quay community, okay and that's when I actually began to realize that a lot of these language groups, you know, they're not unilingual, like they, they all spoke each other's language to some extent, they had friendships and to some extent a certain amount of intermarriage, my estimates were about two percent per generation of all marriages were between different language groups, okay, so this meant that the networks spread all across the Kalahari from this one little group into, you know, regions hundreds of miles away, and it meant too that they could, in a sense, visit these other areas.

There wasn't this, an agonistic boundary, it wasn't us/them, or anything like that. All they had to do was, was show up with the name, who they were, and who their, who their relatives were, and somebody said, oh I know him, he's about, he's camped, you know, a day, a day away from here, your friend, yeah, I remember that and, and you'd be taken on trust.

That's how the networking works you know, and the annual assemblages were where these different language groups get together, are times when these children form these friendships, and they last a lifetime you know, and even if you only get to visit your friend from childhood maybe three or four times every, every decade it still counts. We do it too, yeah, what do you think you know, our visiting and everything else visiting relatives. We visit friends, what do you think our conferences are? Our academic conferences, those are all part of the same kind of networking system.

Anyway somebody else had a question, I think.

Yeah, I don't know Chris has got his hand up. but is anybody else? One to question and then Chris did, he want another question.

Well the trust on bride service, so yeah, so Helga, I think some, some of us in rag, although we know that all these concepts are completely useless and inappropriate, some of us, actually quite like garage service as opposed to the idea of weddings and marriage because it's important to stress that you don't have a wedding, and there and thereafter the man has conjugal rights in his wife, like she can't say no from that point onwards, so I just, perhaps would you just say a little bit about, you know, because even, even the word wife and husband or weddings or marriages, etc, obviously all these are pretty much as useless as the other concepts we've been discussing. But can you just say a bit about what concert it's a wedding and what contributes marriage and what kind of rights or a man does have or doesn't have in the, in the person that way over here according his wife.

Well there's no real wedding. It's a, it's a, it's a coming together. She builds her own hut, okay, she has already been in a relationship with this young man. They're clearly in love, okay, the parents approve, his parents approve, they all come together in the same camp, and they they see this young couple enter their own hut, you know, and then usually the, the mother is really really pleased because this means that this girl is going to get really serious about gathering, and not lie around sleeping all day, or visiting her pals in the next camping site. For the young man it's a point where he has to get really serious about becoming one of the men and learning to hunt properly, you know, it's the initiation. It's like a, you know, you're an adult now kind of thing. You can, you gotta try to be an adult now, in a sense.

I think when, when hunter-gatherers were first studied, you know, when the first ethnography was done as, as Chris just pointed out, terminology was applied that formalized what we saw right, but I think the the main purpose of a wedding, a formalized marriage in subsequent societies, has to do with the rights to claim that any children that are born for your own lineage, and hunter-gatherers don't have lineages, by and large, I mean I know the northwest coast ones seem to have a kind of incipient system, and so on, but they're not tribal, okay, in the sense of having, you know, lineages and sort of senior headmen, and and, and people who can be in charge of things, and who have to somehow assemble task forces from, you know, the young people within the lineage to get things done.

That kind of becomes a necessary form of social organization when you have much, much more work that has to be done in groups, and you know, forming a temporary task force for a, to drive game or something, or to undertake a group hunt that doesn't necessarily produce a permanent leader, okay, it's just the best person for the job. I mean I know that the best tracker always took over the tracking. It was understood and everybody else was closely watching what he was doing, okay, and you know there were all kinds of people who were acknowledged to be the authorities, the people who knew the most about something, like this lady who knew all about giraffes, okay, and, and people deferred to it because most people are not that interested in giraffes, or you know, these, the minutia of how to get an arrow straight.

There was a guy that everybody really liked to get digging sticks from because he had the technique down really really well about how long to leave it in the coals to make it hard, and then to sharpen it really well, and he, he selected the best wood, and on and on, you know, and and everybody could sort of make a digging stick, but digging sticks from him, you know, if you could get one from him as a, as a gift, that was a big deal, okay, so you know, and people would actually go to, to watch him make his tools because he was the expert.

One of the things that really bothers me about recent writings on, you know, the transition to farming, all the rest of it, is that the idea is that individualism and specialization emerged after, yeah, you know, it didn't it didn't. I mean hunter-gatherers even have hobbies, there are people who like watching birds, and they've you know, they've looked at the minutia of all the differences, and they worry about their, yeah, it, this is human, this isn't, this isn't something you know, individualism isn't something that emerged when we became members of State societies or agricultural communities, or anything like that, so yeah, anyway that's good, did somebody, somebody speaking, sorry.

We've got Jerome here. We've got a lot of people here who need to, yeah, is that Denise Arnold? It is Denise on, yes, and Jerome you want to say something, and then, yeah,

Yes, well, thank you so much for that, Helga, lovely to see you again after a few years since Vienna. All right, yeah, that's right, yeah, and that was really so nice to get your sort of explanation of the, well, what's often called para-cultivation this gentle encouragement of the wild resources of a landscape and how human beings enhance these resources, not just for themselves but of course every other animal that enjoys those resources too, and and and I just, have you published anything on that?

Well, I'm trying to in fact, I sent, I sent something to the journal, what to call, now it used to be before farming, yeah I sent something to the, that Journal of Human Evolution and Ecology, and I got turned down. I don't know, I could, I could send it around to you guys if anybody wants to, to too critical, and some comments you know.

Send it to me, because I'm surprised we haven't received that I'm together research and one of the co-editors, so please do send it. I'd be very interested in publishing that I think it's very important.

Well, yeah, I think so too and I think part of the thing is maybe I'm too I'm not academic enough in the way I describe it. I, I just, I'm so tired of these dry abstracts and everything else, you know, I'm not, I'm not really good at that but, you know, the other thing I think is that in the intervening year since Vienna I have actually um been, you know, where I presented all that stuff on networking and and dependency ratios and so on, which I didn't even talk about here, now, but since then so much more material has come out on the use of fire ecology, the use of replanting, you know, the whole discovery that the Amazon forest is basically a man-made food forest, you know, and I think that started long before people had, were using slash and burn, there you know the fact that Australian hunter-gatherers had actually managed wildfires there for a century or thousands of thousands of years in a way that prevented massive forest loss, and die off, you know, the fact that the very similar information on, on ecological engineering exists worldwide.

California, Northern Alberta, along the east coast, and so on and it's not just engineering using fire ecology it's management of hydrology, you know, the, the to keep the, the wild fish populations up. Its management of other species like wolves, you know, why, you know, what I touched on before, why not eat wolves and and and lions in in the Kalahari because they keep us healthy, they keep the game healthy, you know that awareness is still not penetrating.

I saw a kind of a horrifying to me report on the Hudson recently. It was on YouTube, it was something about Wild and Free. I can send you the link, and this guy is interviewing these young hadza guys on what's important and how they hunt, and I, I found out from that that they were hunting at night with dogs and spears, and they were hunting baboons, baboons the Bushmen would be horrified by, that they said those, that's okay, eating people you know and actually, I mean, that might be the way as relatives yeah yeah yeah, and the thing is that that must be new, but, but anyway I mean it's, it's sub it's it's like a taboo that that probably kept people healthy because the diseases carried by wild primates are much more easily transmittable to humans, and you really don't want to kill those animals and touch them and get close to them like, look at Ebola where did that come from?

You know, I mean so the the fact that they're hunting baboons, that they're killing and eating anything, that they're no longer hunting with bows and arrows, much, you know, like nothing, nothing subtle you know, nothing involving discontent that would be that really worried me, that, that would be quite recent that, yeah yeah, because they were certainly hunting, poisoned arrows, within I know is I was really horrified, anyway the thing is that that pattern that I saw, and there's a little YouTube video on it, a couple of them that he did actually and presented there the pattern of hunting with dogs and spears at night, right that was emerging in places very close to the Bantu settlements, and that's because the game had a very big flight distance there and they had to kill anything they could, you know, most of the really good game was gone.

Okay, the animals had far too much fear of humans to be approached, to get them with a poison arrow and hunt them quietly. In fact you couldn't get them, to approach them at night, in daytime, at all because the flight resistance was so huge, and the, the only Kua that I spoke to who had this problem and were starting to hunt with dogs and spears were the ones right near the Bantu settlements who had, you know, like the um, the people of the Katlang district and some of the people down in the western Quinang who were in areas long settled by Bakalahadi, and, and they, they had kind of given up with their proper hunting methods because the animals behavior had changed, you know, it takes the estimate now is between 7 and 12 Generations in a population of wild animals is required to eliminate the fear of a certain predator, you know, and the best estimation, the best, the best illustration that I can give you of how that works is what happens in national parks.

You've all been to a national park, right? A place where, you know, wild animals are still living and what happens there. I, I don't know if Algonquin Park, Banff, Yellowstone is that the visitors come and the animals just walk right by them. In fact they come up for potato chips, okay, and that becomes a danger, you know, the bison are no longer afraid of people, the elk, or or you know, Wapiti or sleeping all over the golf course, and people can't play their games, you know.

I've been to these places, Jasper and Bamf, it's a real problem, okay, that means the animals, animals have a culture and within that culture they pass on to each new generation what what critters you have to be afraid of, what things you must be afraid of, and if they go for many many generations without any attacks by humans, humans are fine.

Humans are fine, don't worry about the humans, in fact they'll give you food. That's what, what's told to these young, young animals, you know, and I think our original hunting and gathering system was developed, including the fire ecology, and all the replanting, and everything else at a time when most game populations were extremely endangered, you know, there was a, there were mega droughts in central Africa they, you know, four or five times that were so severe that, like Lake Malawi, was evaporated, like it was, like a muddy little, muddy little Death Canyon, or something, you know.

It was almost gone, that's how bad these droughts were. Can you imagine what the fires were like? They had to defend themselves, they, the people had to develop ways of preventing these wildfires from overcoming them in whatever refuge areas they had, were able to retreat to, where there was still an ecosystem to support them, and of course they didn't just go there by themselves.

All of the game animals and the types of plants that were critical to their survival, those were right there in these refuge areas with them and at that point, if you start, you know, going after, going after a herd of gazelle or dikers or elephants or anything else with a spear, with a bunch of guys, right, those animals are going to disappear.

You know, you can't, you can't hunt animals in a small contained area with great frequency, loudly and obviously, because you know anybody who survives that, that particular hunting experiences, is going to be really frightened every time they see humans after that, right, and predator fear, we now know, there's data, there's quite good data on this, can actually interfere with the reproductive abilities of animals.

Animals will abandon their young, birds will just not even have nests, they'll just, you know, drop eggs everywhere. They won't even, they won't even feed their young if they have any, and pregnancies will end in abortions in wild game animals, much more frequently where there's enormous fear of hunting, okay, so the, the, the Keystone role of the human as a, as a hunter in the African environment, right, was probably good in the same sense that the keystone roll of wolves in Yellowstone, you know, which has now been well documented.

Restoring them to Yellowstone caused a change in behavior of the animals. They didn't over graze, you know, fear of the hunter meant that they moved differently, and the whole ecosystem in a sense revived, because, you know, the areas near rivers and lakes were no longer over graced, and so on. Well I'm sure that humans worked in very similar, in a very similar way. They were added to a suite of predators, okay, but in addition to that they weren't just hunters, as I've just explained.

Most of what they did was, was enriching and diversifying the ecosystem. They created hot spots of plant growth and a lot of the, the material that they were doing, and this is probably true for millions of years, was beneficial, okay, and that's I think one of the reasons why, you know, humanity evolved as a successful species. Wasn't just the man the hunter role, okay, it wasn't just the keystone hunter role. It was the ecological engineering role, and at the point where we had these mega droughts in Africa and central Africa, and people were confined to small refuge areas with the whole viable ecosystem that they were dependent on, they had to learn to look after that ecosystem, and the animals within it, and one of the things I learned was to reduce predator fear if they could, and you only do that by not appearing to be hunting them, okay, and so you learn to hunt very, very quietly.

Little bows and arrows, something which the rest of the herd won't even remember, and you know, that way you reduce predator fear, you reduce stress, sometimes by using fire ecology. You prevent wildfires, so everything they were doing was conserving and preserving those ecosystems, and until we understand this, as a culture, you know, Western civilization as a culture, we will not stop doing the opposite. Logging, overfishing, you know, destroying wildlife everywhere.

We find it all, the poisons that we spread out, it, if we're going to save humanity, the hunter-gatherers are the key.

Discussion:

Thank you. I'll come back to it later, okay, but thank you very much. So William and then Denise and then we'll come back to Jerome, okay,

William: Yes, ah, yes, I had a, is there any information on Two Spirits there, with like whether men would would stay with the women, and women would go with the men.

Uh, you mean homosexuality and transsexuality? Well, yeah, that's, that's if you want to produce Two Spirit. To that, yeah, yeah, sure, in fact such people were treasured. I'll tell you why. Here's a case I mean, I actually observed this. There's these two men who formed a household together. I assumed, you know, I mean nobody ever said anything, and I, I was sort of, you know, I didn't want to give offense, or you appear to inquisitive, just I've never came out, you know, I mean under the same cross.

Anyway they were older guys, and everybody adored having them in their camp. Why? Because they were both decent hunters. They were good storytellers, no, one was a bit of a, you know, he could do some good healing as well, but the, the, they were really decent hunters. They were older, they'd had experience, they, they dropped these, the ratio of no show hunts to, to, to successful ones in the camp quite a bit.

In other words, they increased the supply of meat to the whole camp, because they had no other dependents except each other, right, and so you know the fact that you have the occasional gay couple in a hunter-gatherer camp is such a benefit to the meat supply, and, and you know, the sort of level of security within the whole camp that, you know, as far as I can tell, I mean, I think this was actually selected for in a way.

You know what I mean, you know, I don't, I don't think it was, certainly not, seen as something negative. Now Two Spirit, I'm not sure about, I do know that the, one of the healers, one of the healers I always thought he was really a woman. You know, but you know, was it, was, was accepted as a man, and everything else of course. There would be no question of, you know, medical intervention or operations or hormone therapy, or anything. It was somebody who genuinely was to my mind neither male or female, but tended to adopt a male role, and that was because that person was a healer, okay, in other, you know, in other contexts, and I only met this person twice in the whole time I was in the field because they didn't live with the group the local, a band, conglomeration, or that I, that I was spending most of my time in.

They were actually not hunting, they were gathering with the women, okay, so I'm kind of assuming that this was, this, this person had grown up as a female, to treat it as a female child, and I identified that way to a point, but then as they became really, really interested in healing it was part of an identity that was generally considered male or something.

I just don't know what to put of it, but certainly that person was not subject to any prejudice that I, you know, that I could see, right, does that answer your question?

Yes it does, thank you, and I had so many more too because you know I live in Northern California and you, you didn't talk on the fire thing.

Oh, yeah, well I was trying to not talk about too many different subjects.

I was really fascinated by your remarks about the, the feline, as like the, the hunter bar Xmas and the way that people, the hunters themselves, treated felines. What other kind of things did they do in their relationship with felines, and when they had a kill, did they leave an offering of a part of the kill to the felines?

Oh, well, if it was a lion kill, I only saw this once, but at a lion kill they chased the lions away, right, and then they took a haunch, and then they left the rest for the lions because, you know, that wasn't, it wasn't fair to take the whole thing, you know, but there was the haunch, was just too tempting I guess, they came home and everybody got a piece of it.

It was a lot of meat on it it, was I can't remember, if it was a heart of Beast or wildebeest, but you know, they, but the other thing is I don't know if you ever saw this, but there was, there were, there were conferences, this one was held in Panama, of Elders from various tribal and band-level societies and one of the elders came from a part of the Kalahari, and he recounts this thing about just before leaving, just before leaving for the conference, he was, he came out of his hut and he was kind of walking around. He walked around a bush and there was a lioness sitting there and he said, you know, I looked at her, she looked at me, I, I you know he did, he made some gesture of respect, and then he just walked quietly on and then he talks about how the, his people, do not see the Lions as dangerous or bad, they see them as kinsmen.

I can send you, I can send you that, that report, but that's definitely what I found, like I, I know that the quad pulled me after seeing this body compound. They told me that they were horrified by what they saw and what was in the pictures, it was a picture of a lion's head that had been cooked, being eaten by Abba Kalahari man, and his, because he had a couple of other people around him, and he was sharing with them and they just said this was completely unconscionable, you know, but of course the Kalahari have cattle and sometimes lions do attack people and so I assumed this animal was shot by one of the, you know, one of the, the men in the group and they decided to eat it rather than just let it lie there, waste, I don't know what the details were, but I know that the, the, the reaction that I got when I showed people this picture was one of real disgust.

I don't know if that helps, but anyway, you know, most most of the time leopards, oh my, the leopard on my camp, I had a leopard that when, when I, I had a little camp next to Glate's camp, right, and for a couple of nights in a row I heard this, too, other sound right and I realized it was a leopard walking around the camp.

It was curious, right, and, and and I did a very foolish thing I guess, I, I, I walked on the inside and I, and I went back at it, I was kind of playing with it. I, I don't know what I was thinking, but, but it worked, you know, and the leopard eventually left and, and everybody, everybody was very, very amused by this, you know, the leopard was not seen as a danger to either myself or the other group.

Now perhaps if I had been more frightened, or if I'd been, you know, made hysterical by it, or tried to shoot it, or something, the leopard would have thought again about how to interact with humans. I don't know, but I will tell you one thing, there was a, there was a big cobra near the camp where I originally was staying, right, and when I was setting up my Camp one of the women came over and she said she was going to introduce me. okay.

And she walked over and we walked around for a while. She's looking and looking and we finally saw the cobra, and it was just relaxing, you know, it was just lying, you know, under the branches of a, of a of a tree and she said, no you just have to watch this, you don't want to step on this, okay, and I said my God, okay, so you know about the snake. Thank you for telling me why, why camp near it.

She said, oh no it's very helpful because it cuts down on all the vermin, in other words mice, and other little things that come and, and no other you know come around the camp and it deters those.

I had no idea, you know, so if that helps at all. The other thing, come to think of it that, that strikes me about the way hunter-gatherer literature is often viewed is that people you see, you see these statements all the time, that, you know, people couldn't afford to settle down.

They couldn't, they couldn't stay in one place because the food wasn't enough and all this kind of stuff. That's not what I was told at all, nobody left because there was no food ever, not if it was a, you know, intact ecosystem that they were in. They left because they had to go to a party or somebody's christening or they had, they had to go visit a friend or they'd promised somebody else to camp with them.

They had social engagements, okay, they, that it wasn't hunger, okay, and that and it wasn't even that the local food supply was gone, right, that there was plenty I mean, I, I was always, I was sometimes surprised people would suddenly decamp, you know, and because then I'd have to pack up and go along, right, but, but here's the thing.

One of the reasons they gave, now this is kind of creepy, but anyway here we go, one of the main reasons they gave and also one of the reasons why they really really did not like settlements, the Kalahari settlements and the settled borehole areas was, because of, take fleas mites and other vermin that built up there right, okay, and I can speak from personal experience because when I was first in the field a very kind mcleodic headman, when I was, you know, interviewing because I did all these interviews with the book, Kalahari, as well offered me a hut for the night, okay, and unwisely I said oh how nice how kind and and at that point it was early on in my field work and Sigee my guide interpreter, he opted to sleep in the truck, right, and he said, oh well you know, we'd always trade off. I slept not at all because I was so covered in flea bites, and mites, and I don't know what else was biting me all night.

That I would never ever do that again, you know, and I think you know one of the things that you have to remember is that we settled humans, you know, with our civilization and everything else along history, towns, and settled houses, and permanent fixtures, and all the rest of it.

I think we tend to elevate that to a status where we assume that human beings have always wanted to live like this, okay, and I frankly doubt that I think if you have a choice you just go camping and you move frequently, and you visit people all over the landscape, and you have your whole garden around you and you just, you know, you're not going to worry about food or anything like that.

You, you, you spend your whole life camping, is fabulous, what do we do when we're on vacation. We go camping, a lot of us anyways, you know, and if we don't go camping then we we go visit friends and relatives. We fly all over the world to keep up our contacts and we go to conferences, right.

Well they get to do that without, you know, the airplanes and all the rest of it, but they also don't have the housework.

Trust me, I have six huge dogs, now wolfhound crosses, the housework adjusted for, I've sometimes said, oh 40, I was 100 gatherer, you know, I could just move away with dogs and, and I wouldn't have to use the vacuum cleaner or the broom so much, you know, you think it's a lot of work to be a sedentary person.

It's a lot of work, a lot more work to be a farmer. Huge amount of work, you know, and that do you want to come and do.

What's that Jerome? Do you want to go, and then Chris, and then anybody else, okay.

Well my question really is to return to the first thing that you talked about, which is this burial of a young girl with her hunting equipment in you know South America. Now the the critic, the criticism that people like me level against those kinds of extrapolations is that you have one single case, and then you suddenly extrapolate to a whole sort of hypothesis of, you know, women being these big game hunters or whatever.

It is that those archaeologists are saying, but, you know, at the same hand to on the same, uh, in the same way they criticized people like me for elaborating from the basis of extant living hunter-gatherers and their life ways to critique their assumptions about the past, and I just wondered how you deal with that situation, in the sense that you have just offered us a very vivid account of how some, some people engage, and live with their environments as a sort of counter to the assumption that women would have been hunters in the past.

So I just wondered what in in terms of the theory behind what you're saying how can you justify critiquing their assumptions through the examples given by living people.

Okay, well I didn't emphasize it perhaps enough that my critique of that a series of speculations that resulted from that, the finding of that girl, that, that critique arises from economic analysis.

Hunting-gathering is an economy. It's an economic system. In other words it's a particular, pardon me, it's a particular system of interacting with a local ecosystem and it involves the learning of particular skills, certain practices, that lead to a sustainable interaction with that ecosystem.

Sorry, I don't know what I've got, I must have got a frog in my throat and the the analysis of it as an e as an economy means that worldwide. If we look at every single hunting and gathering ethnography that's been done, there are certain consistent elements, okay, and the fire ecology the ecological engineering is one of those consistent elements that's becoming more obvious all the time.

The organization, organization that tends to [???] learn more about 100 particular, the bilateral kinship network, internal logic of the society that follows from that kind of an economy, and I don't think in spite of, you know, all the the stuff that's been in, in spite of all of the objections to this sort of more consistent picture of what makes a hunter-gatherer economy work.

I think that stood the test of time, I mean, how long have we been studying hunter-gatherers and, and the the the essential aspects of it, the fact that it is not associated with starvation generally. It's not associated with a lot of antagonistic behavior because diplomacy and visiting, and exchange of information is a far better survival strategy in an economy like that than than antagonistic encounter, certainly between bands.

You don't see anything like that happening between bands, okay, uh, the, these, these kind of consistencies I think are important and that the fact is that I can see two major areas where people is trying to create, oh, uh a narrative. This one about the div labor which is one we took, right, the one is the, the political, the egalitarian, you know, they're widely, but there's nobody's going to go hungry.

If they're in a hunter camp in a hunter-gatherer society, it's being attacked, right, now what is going on with this recording business, that's really weird right, Chris can you hear Chris, yes, it's, it's, it's simply the fact that my Wi-Fi knocked out and we didn't get an extra person to do the recording, so I'm afraid those bits have gone.

It's annoying, so whenever, so when I come to switch it off, it's just I don't want to switch the recording on because we're going to meet Miss Helga. I'm going to leave it on, okay, I actually, after my experience in the college [???] went you know, went home, and wrote my thesis up and everything else, but I was haunted by the International Crops Research Institute for the semiarid tropics, and I, so I decided to take that job because they wanted to send me to West Africa, and they wanted to send me to West Africa where I would be staying in a in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger mostly, in Brooklyn, and, and studying in detail the economy of pasture people.

They were mostly horticulturalists, so farming people and the pastoralists were classic, you know, mobile pastoralists at least traditionally, and what I wanted to understand was two things. One is did ecological engineering continue, was it consistent with these other economies, okay, was I going to be able to find evidence of, you know, some kind of understanding of fire ecology?

Field understanding of creating small sex, what's the the pastoral secreting ecological hot spots, which is one of my my interests, and with pastoralists I didn't get to do that much research, but I was gratified to see some, sometimes about a year and a half or two years ago, a young woman out of Washington University, um, reported on the fact that in the in the Serengeti where pastoralists had been, you know, creating temporary caps for thousands of years, that they, they were creating ecological hot spots because the manure, concentrated manure of the animals, but probably also for the thing, same things that I was describing among the hunter-gatherers, in other words, they were bringing a lot of food there, spitting out seeds, and all the rest of it, right.

I mean, think about what humans do. We're a provisioning primate, we have a base camp, even if the base camp is New York City, right, and what we do is we concentrate resources in these places, and provision our our dependents, okay. As a result we produce, particularly in the, in these other economies, proliferations of, you know, wild, wild and now domestic plant varieties, animal varieties that, where, that the ones we use the most.

So we've actually been, I think, in the, even in tribal economies, we've been able to produce sustainable systems of, of economic behavior interacting with ecosystems in a positive way that creates long-term sustainability, and also preserves the diversity of the wild resources, you know, the wild animal and plant resources.

And so I would extend, I would extend that, that understanding to all what we call indigenous people worldwide, not just hunter-gatherers, their systems of economic action, within those ecosystems, are not universally destructive, you know, in fact they're the opposite and if if we don't as anthropologists, if we don't get that message across soon, I, I don't know what's going to happen to us as a species.

Thank you. Two more questions, William and Chris. Do you, Chris, do you want to say something and then maybe we're wrapping up.

Yes, so I'm just so glad that I kind of came in from the side and asked you about God's testicles, and I've got another question which also is kind of coming from, so it's, it's about your experience of how time is measured and how future occasions are sort of, you know, so I'm thinking about the Sun and the Moon of course, but in particular we, when you're talking about the lions, I'm sure you're aware of the extraordinary marvelous descriptions by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas of the, what she calls the shift system, between the lions and the humans, where the lions have the night and the humans have the day, and of course, it then makes a very big difference whether the night is a full moon, or the night of the dark moon, and that just, I mean, just, I'm just hoping you, you will add to my fascination of those, those questions.

Day, well, the thing is night time, this is a bit of a digression from what you were saying, but one of the things that I did learn right towards the end of my field work was how incredibly detailed the memorization of nighttime constellations was.

All right, how much attention was paid to kind of predicting, you know, everybody of course knows night day seasonal changes, everything is predictable, and so on. They were interested in predicting, you know, eclipses just like everybody else, but what really got me was the fact that I had paid no attention to night sky as a really important navigational tool, you know, constellations and so on and what got me to understand this was just before I left, a number of the people, mostly kids, gave me ostrich eggs, okay, and these are decorated.

I don't know, if they're decorated in other parts of the Kalahari I understood that they're, they probably aren't, but they had always decorated their eggs. It was mostly kids doing etchings, okay, and so I, I saw this one egg, and I wish I could hold it out for you but I donated them all to the university archaeology lab here at the University of Alberta, but there was a, what looked like a snake on the egg and, and I said oh you know it's just, you know when I asked if it was that cobra kind of thing, and the little kids looked at me and he said, no, it has nothing to do with Earthly things, you know, it has nothing to do with with the common things, and at night, and then he pointed at the constellation Hydra.

That's what it was, wow, and a lot of these designs that they were putting on these eggs were constellations. Some of them were representations of animals, you know, but they were constellations. They were, they were using stories about, you know, various events in a kind of mythological sense to help the kids remember these constellations, and they were practicing them all the time, YouTube by drawing and sound that I sometimes, you're thinking in terms of a numerical sense, or an awareness of recording time and changes in time being aware of the night sky, being aware of the movement of constellations, being aware of, you know, being able to predict these things that, that is definitely highly developed, and it's so far pretty much overlooked in a way then it kind of bothers me.

That you know we've had so many other things take precedence when we study hunter-gatherers, just a very survival now is in question and, and we haven't, we haven't even as far as I'm concerned scratched the surface of their science.

Thank you very much, thank you, great, wait William, have you got one last question and then maybe we're back again.

Yes, it's a quick observation, more than a question, but I would like a, like to see if she, if Helga has an answer I have heard that God's balls stories, before I read it somewhere, and I can't remember the most likely place I read it, was there's a big collection that was done in the late 1800s I think. It was of South African stories among the Bushmen, which story had you heard before.

I'm sorry God's balls, oh really, well I'm sure it's very widespread. They didn't invent it for my, for my bed the more interesting thing is what the, my first inclination, was that I read it in in the raw, and the cook Levy Strauss would mean, it's all the way over here which means it's one of those really old stories, but there are a lot, I've, I've, I should talk to Megan Beasley more about this because my collection of Mythology was very limited.

It wasn't what I was focused on that. I have a couple of other stories, that one in particular, which I call, the, yeah, I don't know what it's called, the poisonous farts. A story, the story of the poisonous farts, which is a story about God coming, coming to Earth to rectify a problem, oh, the first part of the story is called the the Buffalo Wife and the Poisonous Farts, okay, which is even more confusing for you I'm sure, but Megan has a very similar story from, you know, thousand miles away where instead of a buffalo wife it's an elephant wife, and I suspect that this story of, of a human who mates with an animal, marries, falls in love with an animal, and then has to be pulled back from that error, it's very, very widespread, you know.

The mermaid story comes from this, I think, the story in Scotland about Sell Keys, you know, the sea lions that, that come into human society, is a beautiful, you know, beautiful young woman, and, and many, many other stories, that sort of indicate that, that the tie between humans and animals is very, very intimate. Intimate enough that we can in a sense almost see kinship with them, into marrying with them, and that it's only because of God's interrupt, you know, the deities rules and interruptions that we pulled back, you know, and children are children, are pulled back.

There's a, it's a term for it in a sense, I think it's biophilia, the love of Life, the love of living things, and this is so critical to the way that humanity functions. I mean why do we have house plants by the way that's a mini rex. Anyway, I just had about your rabbits, what's that I just heard from Jerome, about you've got rabbits.

Yeah, yeah, so you know the thing is we, we respond, every little child responds at first with wonder and joy even at the sight of, you know, like ants, little, little critters, but we just adore living things, especially baby things, right, and and, and most of the people I know don't even think about this. Why do we have gardens? Why do we bring flowers? I mean really, the genitals of plants, when we go to a funeral, I mean think about it, but it's biophilia. It's like these are the the most extraordinary representative tokens that nature provides us, okay, so the, the love of the natural world I think is something that it, we have to be taught to differentiate ourselves, but also to be, you know, respectful to it, and, and I see this in a lot of mythology, you know.

Anyway, I'm talking too much, maybe, you could have me back another time for anything we've missed today.

We will, yeah, it's been a fantastic talk, and you've covered so many things, and got so many people enthralled, and without PowerPoint, is absolutely wonderful. To just hear people talk, oh, it's fun, it's so nice, okay, so, yeah, we're definitely definitely everyone's very, very thankful for it, we'll definitely want to come.

We want you to come back and hear some more about it all, so thank you so much Helga.

Okay, you're welcome it's been a fascinating insight, and so many things come up that we could follow up. Well I meant to ask, there's this, um, thing about chat at the bottom of the page. I haven't even gone there to, to look at it.

Yeah, I could send it to you if you like. I could say, yeah, no I, I wouldn't mind seeing what people chatted, maybe, yeah, anyway I have to go and feed my horses now, so, yeah, okay, all right, thank you so much, thank you.

 

---

 

Back to Home Page