expedition arrived, the central Kalahari ecosystem was intact. Bushmen
were the only humans around, and they had been living much as the
Marshalls found them for millennia. For the !Kung Bushmen of the
central Kalahari, it could be said that the Paleolithic period did not truly
end until about 1965. Thomas was nineteen when she and her family first
arrived there and, while her ballerina mother, Lorna Marshall, fashioned
herself into a world-class ethnographer, and her eighteen-year-old
brother, John, began work on what was to become a classic documentary
film, she observed and wrote.
The Bushmen they lived beside and traveled with were small people,
lightly clothed and armed, whose lives were structured around a series of
dependable waterholes. Their diet was surprisingly varied, running the
gamut from melons to meat, and one of their staples was the mongongo
nut, which, like the Korean pine nut, was both plentiful and durable.
Hunting was done most often with poisoned arrows, but, because this
poison (one of the deadliest on earth) takes time to act, each hunt
necessitated two rounds of tracking—the first to find the game, and the
second to find the game again, once it had been shot. The process could
take days, and sometimes a hunting party would arrive at their kill only to
find that lions had gotten to it first. What struck Thomas was how these
hunters dealt with such daunting competition: rather than abandoning the
animal, or shooting arrows at the lions, the hunters would approach them
calmly, telling them that this animal wasn’t theirs and that they needed to
go away. If the lions resisted these firm but collegial requests, a couple of
clods of dirt might be tossed in their general direction. That was all it
took for these hunters, who were in some cases greatly outnumbered by
lions, to reclaim their prey. The absence of drama might be a letdown for
the modern reader, but it sheds a bright and different light on our historic
relations with legendary predators.
What is important to keep in mind here is that everyone involved had
known one another, effectively, “forever.” The lions had been raised—for
millennia—with an awareness of Bushmen, and the Bushmen had been
brought up with an understanding of lions. Each was part of the other’s
larger community and whatever imbalances may have existed were
ron
(Ron)
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