The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (6 page)

Netsilik meat-sharing partnerships could become hereditary. When two adult hunters became habitual partners, they often arranged for their sons to be future partners. If one partner were to die, he could be replaced by someone with the same personal name. This act followed logically from the premise that any two people who shared the same name were magically linked.

Let us now consider the implications of seal-sharing partnerships. The Netsilik did not have clans or, for that matter, any social grouping larger than the extended family. Clearly, however, they felt the need for a widespread network of allies on whom they could rely to share resources when they were scarce. They created such a network using only their language and the magical power of the name, choosing respected acquaintances to be their sons’ “hindquarters,” “kidneys,” and so forth. And once that network was operating, they allowed parts of it to become hereditary.

Twelve meat-sharing partners is admittedly a small group compared to a clan. But when we consider how many partnerships there were, and the likelihood that a set of brothers might belong to several, we can picture a mutual aid network covering thousands of square miles.

PROVIDING ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIME DEPTH

The Netsilik data suggest that foragers without clans sometimes created extensive networks of cooperating nonrelatives. Can archaeology detect similar networks among ancient societies?

To answer that question we turn to the prehistoric Folsom culture that occupied Colorado 11,000 years ago, near the end of the Ice Age. Colorado had no caribou, but it did have
Bison antiquus,
a creature some 20 percent larger than today’s buffalo. Assuming that its habits were similar to the modern bison, this beast would have migrated north to the High Plains in the summer and back to the southern plains in the winter.

Archaeologists Mark Stiger and David Meltzer have excavated a possible winter camp made by Folsom hunters, 8,600 feet above sea level near Gunnison, Colorado. There they have found the remains of circular huts, roughly the size of the mammoth hunters’ houses at Mezhirich. The best-preserved one had a basin-shaped floor sunk more than a foot below ground surface; a ring of postholes suggests that the hut had a conical roof, made of branches and daubed with clay to protect the occupants from wind and snow. The fact that the huts found so far were laid out in an arc makes one wonder if they were arranged around an open area, set aside for communal or ritual activity. Such an arrangement was common among foragers.

Some 2,000 feet lower, in the foothills of the mountains near Colorado’s border with Wyoming, lies the legendary Folsom site of Lindenmeier. Eleven thousand years ago it was the scene of multiple hunting camps on a low ridge, overlooking a wet meadow that attracted migrating bison. Lindenmeier, excavated by Frank H. H. Roberts in the 1930s, was painstakingly reanalyzed by Edwin N. Wilmsen. One of Wilmsen’s most exciting conclusions was that at least two different groups of bison hunters, each with its own style of tool manufacture and its own widespread network of partners, had converged on Lindenmeier to collaborate in the hunt.

Folsom hunters possessed the spear-thrower known by its ancient Mexican name the
atlatl.
The flint points of their spears are considered technological masterpieces. Folsom hunters made the edges of the point sharp and symmetrical by delicately removing tiny parallel flakes. As a final touch, they skillfully struck off a long channel down each face of the point, making it easier to insert in a wooden shaft.

Both groups at Lindenmeier made points of this type. The hunters in one encampment, called Area I, gave theirs gently rounded shoulders and trimmed the edges with small overlapping flakes, taken off at a 90-degree angle to the long axis of the point. Hunters who were camped 330 feet away in Area II, however, gave their points more abruptly angled shoulders and trimmed the edges with nonoverlapping flakes, taken off at a 45-degree angle to the long axis. Each group, in other words, appears to have come to Lindenmeier from a region with its own tradition of point-making.

Nor did the differences end there. While each of the encamped groups made most of its stone artifacts from flint, each had brought to Lindenmeier a small quantity of obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Obsidian, while less readily available than flint, would have been preferred when hunters wanted extremely sharp cutting edges.

One can track obsidian to its source by analyzing its chemical trace elements; this was done to the Lindenmeier obsidian, with surprising results. The obsidian in Area I was mostly from a volcanic flow near Jemez, New Mexico, 330 miles to the south of Lindenmeier. The obsidian in Area II was mostly from a flow at Yellowstone Park, 360 miles to the northwest. Not only did the groups camped at Lindenmeier have different point-making styles, they evidently belonged to different networks of trading partners that gave them access to distant resources.

Archaeologists have found no evidence that Folsom society possessed clans. In the case of the Lindenmeier site, Wilmsen reconstructs the individual camps of Area I as consisting of 14 to 18 people; those of Area II he estimates at 13 to 17 people. Clearly these extended families had created networks of trading partners and allowed other families to share their best hunting locales. We do not know if their meat-sharing resembled that of the Netsilik. We have seen enough, however, to conclude that widespread networks of nonrelatives are not a recent development but a long-standing behavior of small-scale foraging societies.

WARM-WEATHER FORAGERS

Not all foragers, to be sure, had to cope with ice. Even during the bitterest cold of 30,000 to 18,000 years ago, equatorial Asia and Africa would have been temperate or even frost-free. At warm latitudes there were thousands of edible plants, and the economic role of women was different from that in the Arctic: often it was the women who harvested the bulk of society’s food.

Until about 1,700 years ago, much of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was occupied by foragers. Anthropologists believe that many of them spoke languages whose consonants included clicking sounds that we are forced to write with punctuation marks. Today the speakers of these “click languages” are largely confined to regions no one else wants. They were unable to defend their territory against larger-scale societies, beginning with the Iron Age farmers, herders, and metalsmiths of the so-called Bantu migration. In the rest of this chapter we look at two foraging groups whose lands have been reduced by tidal waves of more complex societies.

THE BASARWA AND THE MAGIC OF THE NAME

Once there may have been 200,000 speakers of click languages in southern Africa. By the 1970s they were reduced to 40,000, many occupying the Kalahari Desert on the border between Namibia and Botswana. Anthropologists love them but cannot decide on a politically correct name for them. Everyone agrees that they should not be called “Bushmen,” as they were for centuries. So scholars began referring to them by their local group names, such as !Kung San, Dobe !Kung, and so forth. Eventually someone decided that they could all be referred to by the supposedly neutral term “Basarwa.” By the time you finish reading this page, of course, Basarwa will probably have become politically incorrect.

By any name, the Basarwa are among the most thoroughly studied foragers on earth. Anthropologists such as Lorna Marshall, George Silberbauer, and Richard Lee were among the pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, by the 1980s, many Basarwa had been converted to an underclass in Botswana society. In our description of Basarwa society, therefore, we lean most heavily on the earliest studies.

The Kalahari provided the Basarwa with endless vistas of brush and savanna, sandy plains, dunes, and low hills. The bedrock was pitted with sinkholes that became watering places, crucial landmarks in a world with only ten inches of rain. Broadleaf trees grew on the land that South Africans call
bushveld,
acacia trees on the drier
thornveld.
Sand dunes supported ricinodendron trees whose nuts supplied the !Kung people with half their plant food. Areas of hardpan supported commiphora plants, the preferred food of the beetles whose pupae the !Kung converted into poison for their arrows.

The Nyae Nyae !Kung believed that the Earth of long, long ago supported a supernatural Trickster who rose to become an omnipotent being in the eastern sky. Using a magic called
n/um,
the great Trickster created the sun, moon, stars, rain, wind, lightning, waterholes, plants, animals, and humans. These first humans, “the Old Old People,” had their own variety of n/um. The !Kung eventually lost this magic, although certain of their ritual songs still had n/um and could move people deeply. Other things that had n/um were ritual fires, the sun, rain, elands and giraffes, ostrich eggs, bees and their honey, blood, milk, and certain medicinal plants.

When the Old Old People died they became
//gauwasi,
the spirits of the dead. These spirits lived in the Upper Sky, doing the bidding of the Trickster. People prayed to the //gauwasi to evoke their sympathy, exhorted them in anger when things went wrong, and feared their wrath. Thus just as in the creation myths of so many foragers, the !Kung were taught morals and proper conduct by a previous race whose authority came from a celestial being.

Like many hunter-gatherers, the !Kung arranged their conical huts in a circle, leaving space in the center for a fire around which they danced on certain nights (
Figure 2
). Each hut was mainly for storing belongings; only during rains did the !Kung sleep inside. Some huts held nuclear families, others widows or widowers, and still others adolescents of the same sex. When a successful hunter had two wives, each built her own shelter of branches and thatch.

FIGURE 2.
   Basarwa foragers of the Namibia/Botswana borderlands had extended families but no clans. During the dry season of 1968, 35 !Kung foragers lived briefly in the camp shown in this diagram. The 12 men, 10 women, and 13 children in this camp belonged to three different extended families. They built 12 huts, arranged in a circle around an open area where dances and other ritual activities could be carried out. The men in Huts f, g, and j were the heads of the three extended families, which were linked by blood or marriage. Although the senior males in this camp were respected, none had any real power or authority; their society was as egalitarian as any ever studied.

A groom was expected to live near his wife’s parents for several years, until he had supplied them with enough game to work off his bride service. That service was cut short if he took a second wife. Many first marriages were arranged by the parents, sometimes with the early betrothal of children.

In the 1950s the !Kung had no groups larger than the extended family, although there are hints that they had once inherited membership in a larger unit called a !
ku-si.
We do not know exactly what a !ku-si was, but it might have been a lineage or clan. We return to that possibility later in this chapter.

A good-size !Kung camp consisted of four or five extended families, linked to each other in the eldest generation by sibling relationships or marriage ties. The head of the camp was usually a senior man, referred to as
kxau.
The kxau was not considered the owner but, rather, the custodian of a 100–250 square-mile territory called a
n!ore.
His job was to make sure that only the people of his group were using the plant foods of the n!ore, although hungry neighbors could petition to share it. Often camps or water holes were named for the kxau. These headmen had no coercive authority and accepted no privileges for fear of arousing jealousy.

!Kung social logic included a premise that we encounter over and over in this book: “We were here first.” The people who had lived at a certain water hole longer than anyone enjoyed the privilege of deciding who else could live there.

Within each n!ore, the !Kung pursued the following schedule. Women collected plants, an activity with a low risk of failure, and shared the harvest only with their immediate family. Men hunted big game, an activity with a high risk of failure, and when they killed a prized animal, they were expected to share the meat with everyone in the camp.

Men—hunting alone or in groups of cooperating brothers, cousins, or in-laws—tried to get within 30 feet of a kudu, wildebeest, or eland, shoot it with a poison arrow, and then track it until it dropped. Each hunter fashioned his own distinctive arrows, and the man whose arrow killed the beast was allowed to decide how the meat would be allocated. In a ritual reminding us of the Netsilik, the carcasses were divided into 11 packages: the breast, left haunch, right haunch, upper back, and so on.

!Kung hunters, like the men in Rousseau’s State of Nature, were unequal in strength, agility, and marksmanship. Thus there was always the potential that one skilled bowman’s arrows would repeatedly be found to have killed the kudu. It is notable how hard the !Kung worked to prevent a meritocracy of good hunters from arising. First, using a system of reciprocal gift-giving called
hxaro,
they exchanged arrows with each other. Richard Lee once examined the quivers of four men who were hunting together. All but one had arrows made by four to six different men, and two men had literally no arrows that they themselves had made. Thus each hunter would eventually have one of his distinctive arrows credited with a kill, whether he himself had fired it or not.