The Hunting Apes by Craig B. Stanford

Author:Craig B. Stanford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Hunting People

When you come home empty-handed, you sleep and you say to yourself, “Oh, what have I done? What’s the matter that I haven’t killed?” Then the next morning you get up and without a word you go out and hunt again.

A /Xai/xai San hunter, quoted in R. Lee,

The !Kung San (1979)

In a few scattered pockets of the world, there are people who continue to live in intimate contact with the land, using only a relatively simple technology combined with their considerable environmental wisdom and intelligence. These societies, which we call hunter-gatherers or foragers, are nearly gone; the total world population of foraging societies today numbers only in the tens of thousands. It includes people in the Canadian arctic, the Amazon basin, and the savannas and rain forests of Africa. These people have been widely used as portraits of what our ancestors may have been like. They teach us about the interaction between human behavior and environment, and in doing so inform us about the range of possibilities of social adaptations found in their, and our, ancestors. They gather plant foods, honey, insects, and many varieties of small animals from their habitat, and they also hunt (table 5.1). In nearly all foraging societies that have been studied, men do most of the hunting and women do most of the gathering. They are, in a sense, humans living in their natural habitat.

Before describing the hunting and meat-sharing patterns of modern foragers, there is an important question to consider. Is the depiction of modern people who live with simple technologies as “primitive” tainted by a flawed romanticism, and perhaps even racism? While foraging societies possess a simple array of technologies, it would be a profound mistake to consider them “primitive” societies. Rather, these are people who subsist upon the land, without connection to a cash economy.

It has become fashionable for anthropologists to criticize the use of foraging people as models of human evolution, citing all the ways in which they are not appropriate illustrators of early human behavior. If we compare modern hunter-gatherers to a likely portrait of early humans living one to three million years ago, major differences exist that should serve as caveats to drawing evolutionary conclusions from modern hunter-gatherer behavior. First, early hominids possessed a different anatomy from modern people, which no doubt influenced every aspect of its behavior. Earliest humans were technologically far simpler than modern foragers, and were probably closer to what a wild chimpanzee does with tools today. Although we like to think that hunter-gatherers live in a primeval environment, that is almost certainly untrue. For hundreds of years most foraging societies have been in contact with other, nonforaging people. The !Kung, for example, were long considered to be ideal models for the roots of our own behavior. We now know that they had trading relations with the outside world for hundreds of years before their contact with European and American anthropologists.1 The Efe pygmies of the Ituri forest of eastern Congo appear to be the ultimate forest people.

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