For more than 95% of the last 100 000 years, most people all over the world followed a hunting and gathering way of life. Until recently, people living by hunting and gathering could still be found in different parts of the world. Over the last century, and particularly over the last thirty years, these communities have been forced to adopt a different way of life.
In the 1950s, several thousand San people were still hunting large game with poisoned arrows and gathering plant food in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. One group, the !Kung, lived in an area called Nyae Nyae (pronounced ny ny, rhyming with high), near the border between Namibia and Botswana.
The !Kung were able to continue their ancient way of life largely because they lived in an area that was very difficult to reach. A stretch of land of about 200 kilometres, waterless for most of the year, lay between the closest farms and the Nyae Nyae area. Travelling across this area - even in trucks - was difficult: vehicles would get stuck in the sand, their tyres would get punctured or the seeds of the tall, dry grasses would clog up their radiators causing them to boil. These factors helped to protect the! Kung way of life from outside influences until about thirty years ago.
In the 1960s, the Department of Nature Conservation began to take over large sections of the traditional hunting lands of the Kalahari San for game and nature reserves. A law passed in 1970 meant that the !Kung lost 90% of their traditional land in Nyae Nyae. Today they have hardly any land on which to hunt and gather.
Although modern hunter-gatherers have changed and adapted to various influences over time, their lifestyle does offer clues to what a hunter-gatherer lifestyle must have been like in the distant past. How can more be found out about how the San, the last hunter-gatherers in Southern Africa lived? This shows more or less how all human beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
A journey into the past
An American family, the Marshalls, spent several years living with the !Kung in Nyae Nyae in the 1950s. They studied their way of life in great detail and wrote books and made films about it. Their work has provided a very clear picture of what a hunting and gathering lifestyle was like for he !Kung.
The Marshalls lived with some !Kung people. One of them was a woman called !U. !U described the !Kung way of life to the Marshalls. Life she describes is of the distant past until the 1950s. Since then there have been many changes.
Actions speak louder than words
Hunting effectively means learning the art of approaching an animal silently. For this reason, hunters use hand signals to let each other know what animal they have sighted.