A touchstone we humans should always return to, to remember who we actually are and how we were meant to be. ( )

The Old Ways

Imagine a digging stick as more important to humankind's existence than a mobile phone. Without an experienced frame of reference, many in today's world would brush aside the thought. Mentally, in our hubristic mind-set, we've pretty much removed ourselves from the natural world that sustains us, for the most part believing we are now in control despite the increasing consequences evidenced.

Over the history of life on earth there have been numerous extinction events (extinctions outpacing speciation), five of which are considered Great Extinctions. There have also been numerous species population bottlenecks, including humans, but current archaeological, paleontological, and genetic data are inadequate to provide conclusive evidence of specific events. We are currently living in an ongoing sixth Great Extinction that is caused by human activity, and at peril.

Why this is pertinent to this review is that at a minimum we are on a course to creating a more primitive environment in which to get by, one possibly not unlike that faced by our earliest ancestors as exemplified in this book.

As late as the 1950s some small bands of hunter-gathers (the !Kung Bushmen) still existed in the Kalahari Desert (in Namibia and Botswana), living much as our ancestors must have fifteen hundred centuries ago. This book is about Laurence Marshall (co-founder of the Raytheon Corporation), with his wife (anthropologist Lorna Marshall), daughter and son, finding these hunter-gathers and documenting their lives. The author is Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the daughter, and her thorough writing reads like a time travel experience.

An example of the documented !Kung Bushmen society is:

"In most ways, women were the equals of men, fully as respected, fully as important in decision making, fully as free to choose a spouse or get divorced or own a n!ore. Most men, after all, lived for at least part of their lives on the n!oresi of their wives, in service to their wives’ families. Men also were the equals of women, fully as tender toward their children, fully as ready to take part in daily tasks such as getting water or firewood. Yet there was a great dividing line between men and women that the Ju/wasi did not cross. For all their equality, they did not do as we do in industrialized societies—the Ju/wasi did not, for instance, have the equivalent of woman soldiers or male nurses—and the division had a biological element that, considering that the people lived in the Old Way, is no surprise. The division came down to childbearing and hunting. Matters of birth were only for women, and matters of hunting were only for men.

"Perhaps the passive power of women was the stronger of the two, but the active power of men was more apparent. It was the men, not the women, who confronted visiting lions, shaking burning branches at them and telling them to leave . . . Men always accompanied women on any trip that required an overnight stay, but only to protect them, not to supervise them.

"By and large, however, women provided the foods that sustained the people, which they did by normal gathering, and men provided the food that people liked the best and valued most highly, the meat of the important antelopes."

Also telling is, ". . . unlike agricultural and industrial peoples who want to influence the natural world, the hunter-gatherers wanted to join with it . . .”

The reader may notice interesting parallels between the !Kung Bushmen Old Ways society documented, those of some other indigenous peoples like the Hopi, and those of some of our cousins, like elephants, lions and bonobos.

Something that may bother some readers is that in the text there is a smattering of repeated material, usually in different contexts, because the author goes to great lengths in trying to explain the Old Ways.

Pay particular attention in chapter 16, and you may gain a better understanding of what we have lost.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" ~ T. S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934

"Since the 1950s, change has been rapid. The San [Bushmen] are no longer allowed to hunt the animals they once did and they have inevitably been caught up in the political changes that have taken place in Namibia and Botswana. They now have access to schools and hospitals, but poverty is their overwhelming lot."

The absurdities and harm we have heaped on these Bushmen in our ignorance reflect our own festering cultures — parallels easily seen now in the cultures of most all indigenous peoples.

All in all, this book was an interesting and informative read. One that shows how far we have digressed in our societies and what we have lost in our hubristic progress. Will we need to relearn the Old Ways again in the alien world we are rushing towards? ( )

Parts of this story are great, but it is mixed in with some overly romanticized dreck. Unfortunately, Thomas's strong bias means that even the great parts need to be taken with a grain of salt. Her descriptions are biased and exaggerated, and I don't know enough to determine how much is real.

On Ju/wasi unimaginably vast knowledge of their environment,

> Over the millennia, inaccuracies were filtered out, leaving the oldest and purest scientific product—solid, accurate information that had often been put to the test.

For example, she lauds the Ju/wasi for the great care they take in securing their poisoned arrows from their children. Never in her whole stay was anybody accidentally killed. They are so much more careful of human life than we Westerners with our guns. (If people her neighborhood are being regularly shot, then this is understandable. Where does she live?!) Then again, a hundred-odd pages later, she describes one incident where a child kills someone else with a poisoned arrow, and then a second incident where she herself is stabbed by a child with a poisoned arrow. Huh?

Unlike dirty Westerners, the Ju/wasi bushmen valued their elders:

> the Ju/wasi felt differently, for a very good reason. The older someone is, the more that person remembers about what happened before the rest of the group was born, events that, without written records, would be lost if someone couldn't describe them

A few pages later, Thomas describes how after someone is too old to contribute food, a group might abandon them to be eaten by hyenas. Oh.

Several times Thomas talks about how we are all descended from chimpanzees. She often speculates wildly about how the "Old Way," practiced by the Ju/wasi, is a better and evolutionarily more fit way of life. The ending, about the end of the Ju/wasi's culture, is rather sad. (It is also poorly written, with Thomas trying to describe in words a documentary that her brother made.)

> A man went off alone into the veld and crawled into an aardvark burrow. Obviously, he was not entirely sane. When people passed by, he would burst out of the burrow and shout at them. The passersby were very startled, of course, which others later said was the disturbed man's intent—he wanted only to scare them away, not to hurt them. Nevertheless, the people pondered what to do about this man in his burrow and eventually decided that he was too dangerous. So a few of the men sought him out and killed him. … Thus as I see it, if my minuscule sample counts for anything, two of the five known killings were safety measures, conducted out of necessity, not as the result of anger or loss of control.

> It was the Old Way, the dark side of the Old Way. We were not sure what happened to this man, but we didn't see him again. Better to marry, because your partner will help you. Better to connect to your partner's people, because they will help you. Better to connect to the next generation by having children and grandchildren, because they will help you, and their partners will help you, and their partners' people will help you. Better to be part of the social fabric. That, too, was the Old Way.

> The farmer captured many of the people and made them get into the back of his truck. Among his captives was Toma, who was too weak to resist. The farmer took these people back to his farm.

> Perhaps firm marriage belongs to the Old Way. It certainly was the way of the Ju/wasi. My mother wrote, "Divorce is untoward, disruptive; it can cause trouble. Anything other than peace and harmony in human relations makes the Ju/wasi uneasy. The instances of strife (that we observed) were breaks in their predominantly peaceful, well-adjusted human relations."

> the Ju/wa children were every parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more confident children.

> when babies first talked, they didn’t use the clicks. That also was developmental and came later, first with just one click, which some babies seemed to substitute for all the clicks

> With the possible exception of certain articles of clothing (the Ju/wasi did not have spare clothes), almost every object in Nyae Nyae was subject to xaro, received as a gift from someone else, to be given as a gift to another person later. … You could never refuse a gift, although it obligated you, and you had to make a gift in return, but not immediately. A return gift made too soon would seem like a trade, not like a gift made from the heart, and thus would not strengthen the social bond, which was its purpose. This concept was so strong that the Ju/wasi never traded with one another. Trading was acceptable, but only with different people. ( )

'The Old Way' describes a hunter-gatherer's life from the most ancient of times until the very recent past. ( )

Read by the author, who is somewhat scratchy, but she's earned it. A more personal look at Thomas and her family as they sojourned among the Bushmen (not San, as she explains) in the area that is now Namibia. Thomas interweaves personal experiences with anthropological notes. Some of her assertions and questions seem right on target, while others cause me to raise a doubtful eyebrow because they seem too general, too reductive, or insufficiently supported, but it's clear that the tone is intended to be conversational and speculative. Often funny, often critical, and ultimately pragmatic, it is an enjoyable book alongside other longitudinal or contemporary accounts of southern Africa. ( )