The Old Way
A Story of the First People
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, first edition, New York (USA), 2006 (2006)
343 pages, including notes and index
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In The Old Way, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tells us the story of the Bushmen, with whom she stayed back in the
1950s thanks to a family trip
that her father planned. As she explains early in the book, the experience
would mark the rest of her life:
To me, the experience of visiting this place and these people was profoundly
important, as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. I
feel that I saw the Old Way, the way of life that shaped us, a way of life
that now is gone. I also feel that I saw the most successful culture
that our kind has ever known, if a lifestyle can be called a culture and if
stability and longevitiy are measures, a culture governed by sun and rain,
heat and cold, wind and wildfires, plant and animal populations. Any
human culture is a work in progress, modifying as its members adjust to new
conditions, but no matter what conditions your environment offers, no matter
what you use for language or what gods you worship or whether your decisions
are made by group consensus or by a hereditary leader or just by someone
bigger than the rest of you, for those who live in the Old Way certain
elements never vary. Your group size is set by the food supply, your
territory must include water, the animals you hunt will always be afraid of
you, and the plant foods will always be seasonal, so you had better remember
where they grow and be there when they're fruiting.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 6)
For what she encountered when she met the Bushmen (called the Ju/wa in the
book) was definitely a group that lived (and very successfully, indeed) just
like humans did before the Neolithic:
Our human version of the Old Way was born in the rain forests but developed on the savannah. For fifteen hundred centuries, we
kep the Old Rules, then broke them all and erased the Old Way from our lives.
Among the last to lose it were the Ju/wa Bushmen in the Kalahari interior, who in the 1950s were still
living entirely from the savannah, as people had done since people began,
eating the wild plants and the wild animals they caught and killed, making
their clothes from animal skins and their tools from stone, wood, bone, and
plant fiber. They had no agriculture, no domestic animals (not even dogs), no fabric, no
manufactured items, and no metal except for a few lengths of wire and a few
bits of tin or steel that, beginning in the 1920s or '30s, they obtained in
a usurious trade at the few scattered settlements of the Bantu pastoralists at the edges of the
Kalahari. If a Bushman wishing to trade journeyed to one of the Bantu
settlements, the pastoralists might give him a piece of wire about ten inches
long in exchange for fire or six jackal skins.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 15-16)
This lifestyle is obviously dominated by nature and its cycles, which have
little to do with our own:
True, we sometimes hear the laughable suggestion that out on the savvanah
with no trees to climb, we became fast hind-leg runners to escape predators.
This is hardly worth the trouble to refute, as many of our would-be predators
reach speeds of sixty miles per hour, at least for a few seconds, which is
all it takes. True, the predators would have chased the slowest of us,
not the fastest, thus providing a selective pressure for greater speed, but
if that had been the case, most of us today would be faster than these
predators, which we most certainly are not. Then, as now, even the fastest
runner could not have escaped even from a marginally competent predator unless
the runner had a big head start. Even in automobiles, we have trouble
accelerating fast enough to outdistance the rush of a big cat. The ways
people of the Old Way coped with predators will be discussed later, but
unless you had no other option, running was not one of them. You'd never
make it. You'd just excite the predator. You'd be showing how inadequate
you were, how little confidence you had in your ability to defend yourself,
and you'd be presenting your vulnerable back, making it easy for him to grab
you.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 30-31)
Compare that with her own family:
We had tents, cits, sleeping bags, folding chairs and tables, maps, a compass,
cameras, film, recoding equipment, reference books, notebooks, pens, inks,
pencils, disinfectants, antivenin kits for snakebites, brandy, cases of
canned foods, boxes of dry foods, dishes, cooking pots, frying pans, knives,
forks, spoons, cigarettes, matches, spare tires, auto parts, inner tubes, tire
patches, jacks, toolboxes, winches, motor oil, drums of gasoline, drums of
water, bars of yellow soap, towels, washcloths, toothpaste, toothbrushes,
coats, sweaters, pants, boots, sneakers, shirts, underwear, socks, reading
glasses, safety pins, scissors, a sewing kit, binoculars, bullets, a rifle.
The Ju/wasi had sticks, skins, eggshells, grass.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 62)
Needless to say, the comparison has grown even more clearcut in the last few
decades. We can barely leave our homes without a cell phone.
So, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas goes on to tell us how the Bushmen lived, about
their culture, how they hunted, their environment, etc. Their is a
lifestyle directly linked to the land where they lived, in spite of the fact
that their was a nomadic
culture that had never known even settlements beyond a few families:
As we looked into the situation more deeply, we learned that ownership of
a place was conferred in a rather straightforward manner. You had the right
to live where you were born, assumng that your mother was not simply passing
through at the time of your birth. You had the right to live with your group,
they who were the kxai k'xausi. You held a n!ore strongly or
weakly, as the Ju/wasi put it, depending on whether you stayed there or not,
depending on whether close relatives stayed there. If you didn't stay on
your n!ore, and if your relatives were no longer there o no longer
living, you would hold the n!ore weakly, and after time your
ownership would fade.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 74)
It is, therefore, a culture strongly linked to the land which, as I said,
may seem paradoxical for people who are, after all, nomads. What we quite
often miss when talking about nomads is that they do in fact move from place
to place, but always within a certain area or region. So, over a very long
period of time, they end up evolving a set of customs and social habits that
are perfectly adapted to their environment, something that we completely
lack in our modern industrial culture. As the author explains a bit
further, the borders of the n!ore are actually quite blurry:
What is a territory or a n!ore to a group like that? Not what it
would be to use, a carefully delineated piece of proprety that can be bought
or sold, with marked-off boundaries. A Ju/wa territory belonged to those
who were born there, whose rights were acquired through a parent who was born
there, on back through time. The ownership could not be transferred, and
the land had no formal boundaries but faded off into no-man's-land on the
far sides of which other, different groups might hold equally extensive
territories. Thus the importance of n!ore derived less fro its
condition as a tract of land and more from the plants and animals that lived
on it, the firewood that could be found there, and, most of all, the water.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 79)
A strange concept, indeed. At least to our minds, used to maps, contracts
and legal definitions. We rely on carefuly demarcated properties to avoid
social conflict. But then, that is precisely because we have a far more
individualistic lifestyle. The Ju/wasi only had to figure out the border
between their own territory and that of other tribes. We, on the other hand,
have to make sure that our own next-door neighbor knows fully well where
his property ends and ours begins. It is a completely different mentality.
A different lifestyle. As a matter of fact, the Ju/wasi stay away from
the concept of private
property, especially when it comes to the land, adopting instead an
almost socialist
lifestyle that extends to other areas of their life too:
When dividing big game, the hunter did not distribute the meat. That role
belonged to the person who provided the arrow that actually killed the
antelope, or, in other
words, the owner of the poison that had its effect. By the Ju/wa system,
anyone could own an arrow or arrows (although only the hunters used them),
so that an old man or a woman or a boy like Lame ≠Gao, the k'xau
n!a of /Gautscha, who had little chance of ever being much of a hunter,
could give an arrow to a hunter and become the distributor of important meat.
This custom emphasized the importance of these foods, as it was intended to
enhance fairness. Anyone could find slow game and vegetable foods, anyone
could set a snare, but only the strong adults could bring food in quantities
large enough to feed the entire group. Without the formal system of
sharing, the same people, the strongest people, would always be distributors,
and over time, unfairness could emerge. My mother put it this way:
"There is much giving and lending of arrows. The society seems to want to
extinguish in every way possible the concept of the meat belonging to the
hunter."
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 101)
And yet, as it tends to happen in other hunter-gathering societies, gathering actually played a
more important role in their diets than hunting:
For all the excitement of hunting, for all the importance that people placed
on meat and especially on the meat of big game, the mainstay of people's
diet was vegetable food, and most of it was gathered by women. I found
it interesting to compare the vegetables we ate, especially the ones we
brought with us, to those found by the Ju/wasi. We had potatoes, sweet
potatoes, onions, and carrots, plus dry beans, canned pears, and canned
peaches. The Ju/wasi ate about eighty kinds of plants, including
twenty-five kinds of roots, seven or eight kinds of berries, five kinds of
nuts, sixteen or seventeen kids of fruits, three or four kinds of melons,
four kinds of leaves of which two resembled spinach, eleven kinds of tree
gum, and two kinds of beans from pods. They also ate palm hearts.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 106)
Not bad for some "primitive" people. There are a couple of issues that
are well worth emphasizing: first, that, in spite of the traditional image
we have of people like the Ju/wasi living mainly off what they hunted, in
reality vegetables were the main part of their diet; and, second, that their
diet was actually more diverse than ours. This latter point is
especially astonishing, since we tend to view our contemporary civilized
lifestyle as offering so many choices that we fail to realize how, in
essence, they all boil down to a bunch of boring choices, although the
wrappers are different colors. In other words, the array of "choices" we
have is quite misleading.
During the years we spent in Nyae Nyae, every man, woman, and child (with
one notable exception, mentioned later) observed the rules of safety. No
instance of carelessness was ever noted, and for as long as anyone could
remember not a single human death in the entire Nyae Nyae region resulted
from carelessness with grubs or arrows —not one. What's more, the
care was so ingrained in the culture of everyday life that it seemed
effortless. Very rarely did anyone make anything of it or talk about
it. They just did it, as easily and naturally as breathing. It was part
of the Old Way. I'd offer a comparative example from our society if we had
one, but we don't. We certainly don't treat guns with such competence. But
then, the loss of just one human life is a terrible thing in tiny
communities such as those of the Ju/wasi, where everybody is essential,
where people rely on one another in the struggle for existence. We in
the Western
world give human life plenty of lip service, but in reality, we as
individuals don't matter much and the feelings aren't the same.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 135)
Avoiding a problem is preferable to combat. At /Gauscha [a source
of water], for instance, the lions and hyenas seemed to visit the
waterhole at different times of night so that they didn't encounter one
another, thus avoiding possible conflict. And the people and the
predators moved about the veld at different times, the predators taking
sunset to sunrise, and the people taking the middle of the day, when the
lions and most other predators were sleeping in the shade. These habits
were extremely important for avoiding conflict. Moving away was a
version of this arrangement and an excellent method for solving many
kinds of problems. It's true that in the rather crowded game
parks of East
Africa, different species of predators battle one another —most
of us have seen the nature films of lions making war on hyenas, and vice
versa. But game parks are not entirely the Old Way, and the losers of
these battles might have moved if they could, if there were somewhere
else to go that wasn't already occupied. Relocating could be difficult
in the game parks. But in the past, relocating was not difficult in
sparsely populated Nyae Nyae. One of the most important things that can
be said about the Old Way at Nyae Nyae is that there was plenty of room.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 160-161)
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 [the equivalent of a
property right]. 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.
Matter of birth were only for women, and matters of hunting were
only for men.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 175)
I stumbled upon something very interesting when I was with the
Ju/wasi in the 1950s. I happened to offer the people something
called the
Porteus Maze Test. This and the
Rorschach Test were given to me by a professor of psychology at
Harvard. I no longer remember why he asked me to administer these
tests to the Bushmen. All I know is that it was to further his
research, not mine. Nevertheless, I agreed to oblige him. The
Rorschach Test went poorly. The women declined to try it. A few
of the men gave it a go, all finding meanings that in those early
days of psychological testing would have branded them as
schizophrenic, or so I had been told. "Normal" people were
supposed to see each ink blot as a unit, but the Ju/wa men saw
them as composites, finding one little thing here and another
little thing there. But this, of course, is the best way to view
the environment, not as scenery, as landscape, as we view it, but
as a series of small, very distinct messages —a freshly
broken twigm flattened grass without dew where an animal was
resting, the footprints of a certain kind of beetle that begins
to move about after the day has reached a certain temperature,
each tiny item an important clue as to what has taken place in
the vicinity. The tiny items produce the whole picture, and
these men were hardly schizophrenic. They were accomplished
hunters and trackers, and the test was not cross-cultural.
The Porteus Maze Test was more revealing. This test
involves a series of mazes of increasing complexity, from the
first maze, which is essentially a straight run, to the last,
which even the most capable of us would take a while to fathom.
At the beginning of each maze is a drawing of a rat, seen from
above. The person taking the test is supposed to show how the
rat would get through the maze, which needless to say is not a
problem of consequence to hunter-gatherers, none of whom had
ever seen a graphic representation of any kind before, and
until we came, had not even seen a piece of paper. Even so,
after puzzling over the problem for a few minutes, every
man and boy but one solved all the mazes as quickly and
successfully as any American would have done. They rather
enjoyed the challenge. The boy who didn't solve the mazes
was a youngster of about fifteen who did well enough at first,
then lost confidence and stopped trying. Needless to say, I
didn't press him.
But the mazes stymied the women. Not one of the women or
girls could solve even the first maze, the almost straight
run. The women seemed uneasy and confused and stared
down at the pages blankly, as if they flatly believed that
whatever I was asking of them was impossible. Surely
something very important was at work, a profound psychological
difference, yet what it meant, I couldn't say. When I got
home I gave the mazes and my notes to the professor, but what
he made of them I never learned. Recent research by others
has shown that men in general navigate by orienteering, while
women navigate by using landmarks, which is probably an
insight into the implications of the cognitive abilities
needed for long-range hunting (or to put it differently, for
no fewer than thirty-five thousand years of long-range
hunting) versus the abilities required to successfully
complete a short-range gathering trip, knowing where the
necessary plants are growing, spotting them in their settings,
and getting back before dark. Such abilities may have
pertained to the maze test. Or perhaps when confronted with
something so strange and foreign, the women simply stepped
back. In Ju/was life, it was the men who dealt with
difficult situations.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 176-179)
But then, the Ju/wa concept of marriage is not the same as ours. We see
a marriage ceremony as
the joining of two people. The concept is so strong with us that we can
scarcely imagine any other. Yet the Ju/wasi saw the marriage ceremony as a
rite of passage
that moved the young people into a new state of being. (Western custom
may show a shadow of this concept, with white weddings, wedding gifts, and
major celebrations for the first marriage, and semiprivate, toned-down
weddings thereafter.) Once in the married state, the Ju/wasi remained there,
if not always with the original partner, until they reached an age at which
most people are no longer reproductive. Thus when people found new partners,
no further ceremony was necessary because both people were already in the
appropriate state. The absence of a ceremony when taking a new partner in
no way implied that the couple was not joined —far from it. Ju/wa
couples were fully as joined as the people in Western marriages, or more so.
The couple knew it, the society knew it, and the relationships with others
showed it. A woman who divorced one man and married another, for example,
assumed the entire spectrum of in-law relationships with her new husband's
people, just as she had done with her first husband's relatives.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 182)
We learned little about the sexual behavior of the Ju/wasi. My mother, talking in extreme privacy
with some Ju/wa women, was able to elicit the fact that they enjoyed sex and
experienced orgasm, but
that was about all. Sex with youngsters was of course prohibited, but this
went without saying, as it didn't happen and would be mentioned only in the
context of a young couple's marriage, as the couple would not have sex until
the girl had passed the menarche. Young people might sometimes go out to the bush and fool around,
but because most girls were married by the time they reached the menarche,
there were no single mothers.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 187)
N!ai reached the menarche when she was about seventeen years old, in 1959.
At this time an important ceremony was held for her with eland music and dancing —a much more
important ceremony than her wedding. But she and /Gunda had no child for
three years, not until 1962, when she was almost twenty. This was a very
normal age for a Ju/wa woman's first pregnancy —19.5 years was the
average age. During the next ten years, N!ai and /Gunda had four more
children. In Nyae Nyae in the 1950s, most couples had from one to four
living children, rarely more. Nive live births was the highest number
on record for any Bushman woman, which is much lower than any other human
population that does not use contraception.
How did this happen, considering that the people had no mechanical or
pharmaceutical methods of birth control? In the Old Way, the human
population, like most other populations who live in the Old Way, had its own
regulation. The strenuous work and absence of body fat prevented
hunter-gatherer women from menstruating at an early age, and after the burden
of lactation was added to their bodies, they did not menstruate nearly as
often as do the women of agricultural and industrial societies. They
certainly did not menstruate monthly. It became my impression that many
women, after menarche, didn't menstruate at all. We were able to note the
absence of menstrual periods because the rules for later periods were the
same as for the first —the woman covered herself with a cape, sat
apart, and avoided men— and over the years we saw this only two or
three times. At that, the women were young and had not yet had children.
Even so, the twenty-eight-day cycle was understood by the Ju/wasi, as
menstruation was associated with the moon, just as it is with us. According
to Megan Biesele, menstruation was called "see the moon" or "go to the moon."
A woman with menstrual cramps might say, "The moon torments me."
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 192-193)
In our culture, of course, we dislike old age and do our best to mask it. But to the Ju/wasi, old age
was good. Old people were not burdensome, as the older people continued their
activity for as long as possible, so that some of the oldest women went
gathering with the rest, sharing what they brought with their families as
they had always done. But eventually, as at /Gautscha, where three of
the oldest women did not gather, others gathered for them. Four of the
oldest men did not hunt, not feeling up to the arduous traveling and the
days without food or water. They, too, were given food by others. Even so,
they were valued, as factors other than their labor made them valuable.
They were valued for what they knew.
This was not surprising. That we are here at all is attributable, in large
measure, to the fact that a number of our ancestors lived to old age. No
group of hunter-gatherers has many old people as members, but the more of
them there are, and the older they are, the better. They are the ones who
hold the largest amount of important information.
To us today in Western societies, the facts held in the memories of the old
people seem like unimportant lore. But 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, evens that,
without written records, would be lost if someone couldn't describe them.
In the event of a fifty-year drought, for instance, it would be those in
their sixties and seventies who might remember a way of getting water, or of
getting by without water, something that their own grandparents had shown
them the last time this occurred.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 202-203)
"The [Ju/wasi] are extremely dependent emotionally on the sense of
belonging and companionship," wrote my mother. "Separation and loneliness
are unendurable to them. I believe their wanting to belong and be near is
actually visible in the way families cluster together in an encampment and
in the way they sit huddled together, often touching someone, should against
shoulder, ankle across ankle. Security and comfort for them lie in their
belonging to their group free from the threat of rejection and hostility."
I believe that the importance of the group showed clearly in the way that the
people made decisions. Women were as much a part of this as men. The people
would talk together, for days if necessary, until every point of view had
been considered. Our notions of secret ballots and majority rule would have
seemed unpleasant to them —they preferred consensus, with everyone knowing the thoughts and
feelings of everyone else, and everyone pleased with the decision. Our
notions of individuality would also have seemed inappropriate to the Ju/wasi —they expected
to function as group members.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 210)
No one wanted disapproval. No one wanted to make others jealous, or even
mildly envious. No one wanted more influence or more possessions than anyone
else. What good would it do to have many possessions if others were jealous
and excluded you? The goodwill of the group was one's most valuable asset.
Such respect for the social fabric eliminated many of the ills that plague
our society. Theft, for example, was unknown. Surely it is significant
that, at least in those days, the !Kung language had no specific word for
theft. !Kung speakers could discuss the deed, of course, but unlike
ourselves, with our massive lexicon ranging from pilfer to
larceny, covering every nuance of this cultural feature, the Ju/wasi
did not seem to have named it at all. Theft was not even mentioned as a
perceived wrongdoing, unlike fighting, failure to share, failure to observe
the marriage sanctions. Those things could happen. Theft essentially could
not. We heard of only one instance of theft in living memory, when a man
took honey from a beehive found by another man who was planning to return for
it. The man who found the hive killed the man who took the honey.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 218)
We happened to be present at /Gautscha during an eclipse of the moon and
were mildly suprised when the Ju/wasi made almost nothing of it. (In
fiction, they would have fallen to their knees in terror, bseeching the
white people to save them.) "Don't worry," they said, scarcely bothering
to look up at the spectacle. "The moon will come right back." One man said
that the moon had gone behind clouds. But later, when I pressed him for more,
he told that the eclipse was caused by a lion covering the moon with his paw
to give himself darkness for better hunting. Yet even this explanation had
strong roots in reality. In places such as /Gautscha at the end of the dry
season, when most of the grass is short and sparse, the lions prefer to hunt
during the dark of the moon because the darkness hides them when the short
grass won't. (Not for nothing do the Ju/wasi call a lion "moonless night.")
Still, the story was not meant to be taken as fact in the way that, say, the
Book of Genesis
is sometimes taken. It was a story, and it showed, among other things, the
profound awareness that the people had of lions.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 251-252)
Quite unlike the gods of some religions, the Ju/wa gods did not worry
about human shortcomings or concern themselves with human behavior. Nor
did the Ju/wasi look to the gods for moral leadership, probably because
a camp full of people who can read tracks is a more powerful deterrent to
antisocial actions than a god could ever be. Hence the gods didn't punish
moral wrongdoing or reward moral virtue. Neither did anything else that
lived on the savannah. Again, it was the Old Way.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, pp. 258-259)
As has been said, the Ju/wa gods did not try to bend people to their will.
No deity laid out a moral code, or sanctioned any foods or behaviors. Even
so, some foods and behaviors were prohibited by rules that had been handed
down through the generations. People knew of these rules because the
old people told them, and kept them because to break them would bring illness
or sometimes death. The gods did not prpmote the rules as, say, the Judeo-Christian God promoted
the Commandments,
so the reason that people kept the rules had less to do with the gods'
displeasure and more to do with practical consequences. Young people didn't
eat ostrich eggs, for instance, not because it was thought that the gods would
disapprove, but because it was thought that ostrich eggs would make them
sick. In all likelihood, no medical reason or personal experience is behind
this prohibition —it is simply a food taboo with origins lost in antiquity. Yet it was the fear of
bad results, not the anger of the gods, that made people respect these
prohibitions.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 264)
The anthropologist and filmmaker Claire Ritchie, who participated in
extensive studies of the transition from the Old Way to the new, points out
that with all these developments, the economic aspect of the culture
reversed itself. Formerly, all the adults had produced food for the
community, sharing with one another, supporting the young and the old. In
the past, women had provided about 80 percent of the food. But by 1980 at
Tsumkwe, only the few men
who had jobs were able to acquire food, either because they were paid in
food or because they bought it. Their unemployed relatives depended on them,
but there wasn't enough for all. Claire Ritchie and my brother made a
survey of the diet of the people of Tsumkwe and found that on many days,
many people ate nothing, meanwhile suspecting that somewhere, some of their
equally desperate relatives were eating but not sharing. Jealousy and anger,
those destructive emotions that once the people had suppressed with such
dedication, flamed into life and infected everybody.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 284)
Over time, however, problems began to arise. Hunting and gathering, the
fallback of the farmers, became increasingly difficult. A sedentary lifestyle is not compatible with
gathering, as any area produces only a certain amount of wild foods, and under
continued pressure these get used up. The small animals that were slow game
were under the same pressures as the plant communities, and big-game hunting,
while still possible in theory, had in the past produced only about 20 percent
of the food. There were othe problems with big-game hunting. On their
own conservancy, the Ju/wa men were permitted to hunt only with bow and
arrow. But the men with the skills to bow hunt were aging, and many of the
younger men did not want to be bound by Stone Age technology. They hunted with rifles if they had them,
or on horseback with spears and dogs if they didn't. The latter method was
only too easy —the antelopes were afraid of people on foot but were not
afraid of horses. A man on horseback could ride right up to an antelope and
jab it with a spear. The method was illegal but, because many people did not
know this, it was practiced anyway, and combined with the commercial biltong
hunting, mentioned earlier, had taken a serious toll of the antelope
population.
(Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: The Old Way, p. 297)
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