The Wayfinders (3 page)

BUT WHO WERE THESE
people who walked out of Africa so many thousands
of years ago? What were they like? If we can track their subsequent journey
through inherited genetic markers, presumably it should be possible to find
a people still living in Africa, a people who never left, and whose DNA
therefore lacks all evidence of the mutations that occurred among the
successive waves that spread our ancestors throughout the world. As Spencer
Wells’ research again highlights, such a people have indeed been identified,
and they are a culture that has fascinated anthropologists for decades.
Living today in the searing sands of the Kalahari, 55,000 strong scattered
across some 84,000 square kilometres of Botswana, Namibia and southern
Angola, the San have long been considered the descendants of a people who at
one time inhabited the entire subcontinent and much of East Africa.
Displaced by successive waves of agriculturalists and pastoral herders, the
San survived as bushmen, nomadic hunters and gatherers, men and women whose
precise and exacting knowledge allowed their people alone to survive in one
of the most forbidding and parsimonious desert landscapes on earth. This
extraordinary body of adaptive information, this intellectual toolbox, is
encoded in the words and sounds of a native tongue that is a linguistic
marvel, a language totally unrelated to any other known family of languages.
In everyday English we use 31 sounds. The language of the San has 141, a
cacophony of cadence and clicks that many linguists believe echoes the very
birth of language. Indeed, the genetic data suggests that this may be the
case. The absence of key markers indicates that the San were the first
people in what became the family tree of humanity. If the Irish and the
Lakota, the Hawaiian and the Maya are the branches and limbs, the San are
the trunk, and quite possibly the oldest culture in the world. When the rest
of us decided to travel, the San elected to stay home.

Certainly until the early years of the twentieth
century, when the impact of alcohol and education, and the false and twisted
promises of development, shattered many of their lives, the San had followed
the rhythm of their natural world for perhaps 10,000 years. They had little
choice. Their very survival depended on their ability to anticipate every
nuance of the seasons, every movement of the animals, the very sounds that
plants make as they grow. Water was the constant challenge. In the Kalahari
there is no standing water for ten months of the year. Water has to be found
in the hollows of trees, sucked from beneath the mud with hollow reeds, or
cached in ostrich eggs, plugged with grass and marked with a sign of the
owner. For most of the year the only source of water is liquid found in
roots or squeezed from the guts of animals.

During the dry season, May through the end of
December, the San are constantly on the move. Though they think of
themselves primarily as hunters, they survive by eating plants, with each
adult consuming 5 kilograms of wild melon a day. When the melons wither, the
San find they must dig, and in a desert environment where the body loses 3
litres a day in sweat, it takes more than twenty large tubers, each dug from
the sand, to keep a person alive. In the worst months, the Season of the
Brown Hyena, the San scrape hollows in the ground, moisten the earth with
urine, and then lie completely still beneath a sprinkling of sand, tormented
by flies, as they wait out the heat of the day. The sun is not a source of
life, but a symbol of death. The time of greatest privation is also the time
of promise, for in October begin the Little Rains, the first teasing
raindrops heralding the end of the period of drought. For three months, from
October through December, the land is tormented by this promise of rain,
which is never enough. Those fortunate to live around permanent water huddle
in small encampments. The majority forage by dusk and dawn for roots. The
heat continues and dry winds sweep over the brown grasslands, and the
spirits of the dead appear as dust devils spinning across a grey and yellow
horizon.

Finally, in January arrive the rains and for
three months the people celebrate a season of rebirth and regeneration. But
in the Kalahari, rain remains relative. Sometimes the clouds swell into
massive thunderheads, and crack open the sky to pound the earth with 8
centimetres of rain in an hour. But there are years when the rains simply do
not arrive, and precipitation for the entire wet season is as little as 5
centimetres. The people must dig as deep as several metres beneath the
surface of the earth to reach an impervious layer where water may sometimes
be found. The possibility of dying of thirst is a constant, even in the
season of the rains.

In good years the rains bring relative abundance.
Pools of water form on the sand, and equipped only with digging sticks,
collecting bags, woven nets and ostrich shells to carry water, the people
move about in small bands, extended family units that occasionally come
together in larger concentrations to celebrate a harvest of fruits or seeds,
the presence of game. These wanderings are not random. Each passage
traverses known ground, time-honoured territories that resonate with
narratives, each granting ownership of a particular resource to a band of
people — a resource that might be a tree or shrub, or a recognized source of
honey, the most highly prized of nectars. The Mother of the Bees is the wife
of the Great God who created all things. A fount of honey is protected by
name, and to violate another’s claim is a crime punishable by death.

The favourite time of year is the month of April,
the Season of the Hunter. Though plants comprise the bulk of the San diet,
meat is the most desired food, as it is the hunt that transforms a boy into
a man. By April in most years, the rains have driven away the heat, and the
bitter cold of desert winter has yet to set in. There is ripe food
everywhere — beneath the ground, upon the vines, on every limb of every tree
and shrub. The antelope, having calved their young, are fat and plentiful.
Territory is forgotten as the men range across the desert in small hunting
parties, walking as far as 60 kilometres in a day, returning to the fire and
the families each night. They travel light: short bow and a quiver of arrows
made from root bark capped in the scrotum of the prey; fire-making sticks; a
hollow reed for sucking water; a knife and short spear; a blob of vegetable
gum to make repairs; a sharpened stick for holding meat to flame.

Hunting in teams, the San men watch for signs.
Nothing escapes their notice: a bend in a blade of grass, the direction of
the tug that snapped a twig, the depth, shape, and condition of a track.
Everything is written in the sand. Adultery among the San is a challenge
because every human footprint is recognizable. From a single animal track,
San hunters can discern direction, time, and rate of travel. Armed with
ingenuity, and living in direct competition with serious predators such as
leopards and lions, they manage to kill an astonishing array of creatures.
With pits of poisoned stakes they lay traps for hippos. Risking their lives,
they run upon the heels of elephants, hamstringing the enormous animals with
the swift blow of an axe. Hovering near a lion kill, they wait until the
animal is satiated, and then chase the sluggish cat from the carcass of the
dead. Birds are snared on the fly with nets. Antelope are literally run to
ground, often over a period of days. The San bows are short, with little
power and an effective range of perhaps 25 metres. The arrows rarely
penetrate the prey. They nick the skin, but generally this is enough, for
the arrows are tipped in deadly toxin derived from the grubs of two species
of beetles that feed on the leaves of a desert tree,
Commiphora
africana
. The San find the beetles in colonies and excavate the
cocoons, which they store in containers made from antelope horn. They roll
the grubs back and forth between the fingers, softening the insides without
breaking the skin. These they squeeze to exude a paste. Sun-dried, the
venom, once injected into the blood, provokes convulsions, paralysis, and
death.

The hunt is the metaphor that brings us into the
very heart of San life. A man who does not hunt remains a child. To marry, a
man must bring meat to the parents of the bride. A first antelope kill is
the high point of youth, a moment recorded for all time in the skin of the
hunter by his father, who makes a shallow incision with bone, and rubs into
the wound a compound of meat and fat, scarring the right side of the body if
the kill is a buck, the left if a doe. The tattoo marks the boy with the
heart of a hunter — a potent source of magic, for the San do not simply kill
game. They engage in a dance with the prey, a ritual exchange that ends with
the creature literally making of itself an offering, a sacrifice. Every hunt
ends in exhaustion, as the antelope realizes that whatever it does it cannot
escape the pursuit of man. It then stops and turns, and the arrow flies.

The meat of large prey is shared among all
members of an encampment, the distribution determined not by the hunter but
by the owner of the arrow. San men are always giving each other gifts of
arrows. The arrow, with its tip of bone, its elegant shaft, its perfect
blend of poison, represents the highest achievement of San technology. But
its power lies in the realm of the social, for each exchange of arrows
establishes bonds of reciprocity that forge the solidarity of San lives. To
refuse a gift is an act of hostility. To accept is to acknowledge both a
connection and an obligation. The arrow represents much more than a debt
that must be honoured by trade, or reimbursed over time. Rather, it secures
a lifelong duty that welds the individual to the greater social sphere,
brings the youth into the realm of the hunter, and the hunter into the
circle of the hearth and the sacred fire.

If the San associate the sun with death, fire
symbolizes life, the unity of the people, the survival of the family.
Whereas a gift of meat formalizes the betrothal of a woman, divorce is
finalized the moment she simply returns to her family’s fire. A mother gives
birth in the darkness, and announces the delivery by moving back into the
circle of firelight. When an elder grows too old and weak to continue with
the people, he is left behind to die, protected from the hyenas by a circle
of thorn scrub and a fire at his feet to light his way into the next world.
For the San there are two great spirits: the Great God of the Eastern Sky;
and the lesser God of the West, a source of negativity and darkness, the
custodian of the dead. To ward off the God of the West, to deflect the
arrows of disease and misfortune, the San dance around the fire, casting
their beings into trance. The vital force of life that resides in the belly
rises up the spine as a vapour, touches the base of the skull, diffuses
through the body, and spins the spirit into a higher consciousness. The
healing dance ends with the hunters around the fire, having teased the
flames and the gods by placing their own heads in the burning coals.

LANGUAGE, STEALTH, SPIRIT,
adaptive genius — these were the tools that
allowed the San to survive the Kalahari. And these too presumably were the
attributes that our distant ancestors carried out of Africa. But an
ethnographic portrait of the San today, or the San as they lived before the
ravages of modern colonialism, still leaves us with fundamental questions:
How can we reach back in time to touch the essence of these earth wanderers,
these ancestral beings who found their way to every habitable place on the
planet? What did they know? How did they think? What inspired them, beyond
the raw challenges of staying alive? What ignited, as my good friend the
poet Clayton Eshleman has so beautifully inquired, the “juniper fuse” of the
imagination, for surely this must have marked the true moment of human
origins, the unfolding of consciousness that led to the creation of culture.
At some point it all began.

We know that the hominid lineage dates back in
Africa for millions of years: the earliest skeletal remains are those of a
three-year-old girl discovered in 2006 in the Afar Desert of Ethiopia by
paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. He named her
Australopithecus
afarensis
, after the place where she was found and where her bones
had rested for 3.3 million years. Our own species,
Homo sapiens
,
did not evolve until a mere 200,000 years ago. We had direct competitors.
The human population ebbed and flowed, and at one juncture we were very
nearly extinguished, reduced perhaps to a thousand individuals. But
something pulled us back from extinction.

For most of our history we shared the world with
another branch on the hominid tree, our remote cousins the Neanderthals, who
were descendants of the same progenitor,
Homo erectus
. Neanderthals
clearly had awareness. They used tools, and there is evidence of deliberate
burial as early as 70,000 years ago. But whether it was an increase in the
size of the brain, the development of language, or some other evolutionary
catalyst, our species possessed competitive advantages that ultimately would
launch its destiny in an astonishing manner, an explosion of intellect that
left Neanderthal man gasping for survival.

The place to witness this primordial flash of the
spirit lies beneath the ground in southwest France and beyond the Pyrenees
in Spain. By the time the last vestiges of Neanderthal life slipped away
from Europe 27,000 years ago, the stunning Upper Paleolithic cave art,
created by our direct ancestors, was already several thousand years old.
Reaching deep into the earth, through narrow passages that opened into
chambers illuminated by the flicker of tallow lamps, men and women drew with
stark realism the animals they revered, singly or in herds, using the
contour of the stone to animate forms so dramatically that entire caverns
come alive even today with creatures long since lost to extinction.