The world’s last true hunter-gatherers

Posted on 30 March 2012

I once came across a comment by anthropologist Irven DeVore, writing about affluence. The common understanding of it, he said, is a society in which all the people’s wants are easily satisfied. The obvious –and increasingly problematic – way is to produce ever more stuff to gratify our needs. But another way is to desire less. Want little, lack little. This seemed so alien to modern life that I filed the comment away and forgot about it.

A few months ago, while sitting under a tree in northern Tanzania pondering whether to accept a piece of half-cooked baboon meat, I had reason to recall DeVore. The area is magnificent in natural wonders: Ngorongoro Crater, Olduvai Gorge, Serengeti and the lakes of the Great Rift Valley. But I was where few tourists venture – a wild plain encompassing shallow, salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Rift.

The people I’d come to find, the Hadza, are among the last of the true hunter-gatherers on Earth. Without our guide and translator, Gitewi Surumbu, we’d soon have been lost in the trackless scrub of their homeland.

Earlier we’d met Sambargwa Domdu, a blacksmith timewarped in from the early Iron Age. His bellows were cowhide bags, his anvil was a rock and his only tools were a battered hammer and a beat-up chisel. With these he turned out lethal arrowheads for the Hadza and had suggested it might be possible to visit them.

The Hadza were highly sociable and seemed to take our arrival as entirely normal. In their world, what happens simply happens. We sat with a group of men smoking cannabis under a tree near their domed grass shelters (which looked like upside-down birds’ nests) and were offered meat and a puff of the pipe.

Hunter-gatherers are people whose food is wild and they have to follow and find it. Around 10 000 years ago our ancestors domesticated plants and animals on the road to cellphones and paper clips. But our species is far older than that. In fact, for about 95 per cent of our time on Earth we were hunter-gatherers. This is how our more distant forebears, Homo habilis, were surviving two million years ago. So sitting around me hacking meat off a carcass were, in fact, representatives of a long, noble tradition.

The Hadza were extremely laid-back and very keen to chat. They hunted when they were hungry, they said, slept in their temporary beehive grass huts or in caves when it rained or just under a tree, moved when they felt like it and never, ever, let their bows and arrows out of sight. When I asked about the number of animals they bagged in a week they were puzzled; they had no concept of numbers beyond four and no idea what a week was.

Their clothing was an antelope skin apron or old shorts. They wore sandals fashioned from wildebeest hide or went barefoot and were bedecked with beads strung on sinew.

A social anthropologist named James Woodburn, who spent time among them, noted that they ‘meet their nutritional needs easily without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organisation’. They were, he found, free of jealousy, resentment, elitism, tyranny or any concept of private property. They stored no food, carried all they needed, buried their departed where they died and found the idea that anyone could own land to be incomprehensible. For women, there’s none of the forced subservience of many other cultures. They’re frequently the ones who initiate a breakup – and woe to the man who proves himself an incompetent hunter or treats his wife poorly.

Indeed their lives aren’t ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ as philosopher Thomas Hobbes had described primitive people, but were mostly relaxed and happy. The only time the Hadza were unhappy was in 1964 when the Tanzanian government provided brick houses, schools, piped water and a clinic and insisted they stay in one place, plant crops and become ‘civilised’. Many got sick and died from unaccustomed food and boredom. Within 10 years they had all returned to nomadic life.

They’re gentle stewards of the land and their life appears to be one insanely committed camping trip. They’re also the only tribe in Africa that’s never paid taxes.

With DeVore in mind, there’s something we of the modern world could learn from them. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has noted every time a human population overtook the carrying capacity of the environment, it was forced to innovate and ‘bounced’ upwards through exploration, innovation and specialisation – or died out. Which means that modern civilisation is the product of adversity, hunger and stress, which seems, paradoxically, to grow with affluence. Nearly a billion people live in abject poverty and go to bed hungry. The Hadza take only what they need, so never run out of food and are perfectly adapted to their environment.

For thousands of years they’ve been living the simple life and are today, in DeVore’s words, the original affluent society. What this suggests is that happiness isn’t linked to what we have, but what we think we require.

 

Travel to Tanzania
My trip to Tanzania was organised by Jenman Safaris. Email [email protected], www.jenman.travel.

 






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