The link is the finding from genetics that the Hadza speakers and the !Kung are two of the most ancient populations in the world. All peoples are of course the same age in the sense that everyone is descended from the ancestral human population. But some populations are viewed as older than others because they lie on longer branches of the human family tree. In a recent survey of African populations, Douglas Wallace of the University of California at Irvine found that three of the most ancient peoples in the world were the Biaka pygmies of the Central African Republic, the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo, and the !Kung San.
The !Kung possess several lineages of mitochondrial DNA, Wallace and his colleagues found, but their principal lineage forms the first branch of L1, the oldest of the three divisions of the human mitochondrial tree. This lineage, Wallace notes, “is positioned at the deepest root of the African phylogenetic tree, suggesting that the !Kung San became differentiated very early during human radiation.”72 In other words, the !Kung San split off from the ancestral population at an early date, and have remained a reasonably distinct population ever since.
Two Stanford researchers, Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain, recently compared the genetics of the !Kung with that of the Hadzabe, as the speakers of Hadza click language are known, a foraging people who live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. They discovered that the Hadzabe too are an extremely ancient people. However, the Hadzabe belong not to the L1 division of the mitochondrial DNA tree but to L2. Because L2 and L1 mark two of the first forks in the tree, the !Kung of L1 and the Hadzabe of L2 are two populations that separated almost at the dawn of human time. The split between the ancestors of the two groups “appears to be among the earliest of human population divergences,” the Stanford researchers say. Based on measurements of their Y chromosomes, the two populations are more distant from each other than any other known pair of African populations.73
This genetic discovery provided a plausible reason why the two click languages, !Kung and Hadza, are also so different. Because the two peoples have been separate for so long, both their genetics have become very different and their languages have lost any resemblance to each other, save for the clicks.
The !Kung and the Hadzabe are both hunter-gatherers, and their nomadic lifestyle in the wilderness may explain how they have preserved their isolation from other groups for millennia. But that leaves the puzzle of why, when everything else in their language has changed, they have still retained the clicks.
Some linguists see this as a case of independent invention. They argue that there is nothing special about clicks, since a child can learn them, and that click sounds may have been lost and reinvented many times in language history just like the other features of language.
But on that theory clicks should be used in languages all over the world. In fact they are spoken only in Africa, with the exception of Damin, an extinct Australian language, of limited vocabulary, used for ceremonial purposes by the men of the Lardil tribe of Queensland. Clicks do not seem to have spread beyond their original speakers, with the exception that some click sounds have been borrowed by the San’s Bantu-speaking neighbors. They are used for special purposes, such as in hlonipha, a respect language practiced by Nguni women to avoid the syllables of their in-laws’ names; one way to avoid these taboo syllables is to substitute a click for one the consonants.
Though speakers of non-San languages may occasionally borrow or invent clicks, Anthony Traill, a click language expert at the University of Wit watersrand in South Africa, believes that “it is highly improbable that a fully fledged click system could arise from non-click precursors.”74 One reason is the difficulty of attaining fluency with multiple clicks. A single click is easy enough, but rattling off a whole series is another matter. Like double consonants, clicks are easy to stumble over. “Fluent articulation of clicks in running speech is by any measure difficult. It requires more articulatory work, like taking two stairs at a time,” Traill says.
Another reason is that clicks seem easier to lose than to gain. In the ordinary process of language change, certain kinds of click can be replaced by non-click consonants, but Traill has never seen the reverse occur.
Given the laziness of the human tongue, why have clicks been retained by click speakers? “That is a major problem,” Traill says. “All the expectations would be that they would have succumbed to the pressures of change that affect all languages. I do not know the answer.”
If clicks are generally only lost, not invented, and if two of the oldest known populations in the world, the Hadzabe and the !Kung San, speak click languages, then it’s possible that clicks were part of the first language spoken by the ancestral human population. “The divergence of those genetic lineages is among the oldest on earth,” says Knight, the anthropologist on the Stanford team. “So one could certainly make the inference that clicks were present in the mother tongue.”
Tracing the Boundaries of Eden
Since the San, on the basis of both genetics and language, seem to be among the earliest human populations, it’s of considerable interest that they once occupied a much larger area of Africa than they do today. In the seventeenth century they inhabited all of southern Africa. Archaeologists believe that much earlier, in Paleolithic times, the San occupied the eastern half of Africa, with their domain stretching up through Ethiopia to the northern tip of the Red Sea.
In support of the archaeologists’ view, geneticists have found that the DNA of Ethiopians living today retains evidence of the San’s ancient presence in their country. Men of the Oromo and Amhara peoples have a small proportion of Y chromosomes that belong to the first branch of the Y chromosome family tree. This branch is rare elsewhere in Africa except among the San, 44% of whom carry it. The Oromo and Amhara must share an ancestral paternity with the San, and the first branch must have been “part of the proto-African Y-chromosome gene pool,” writes Ornella Semino of the University of Pavia in Italy.75 The mitochondrial DNA from women of the Oromo and Amhara peoples also indicates that Ethiopia, or at least east Africa, is the place from which the first modern humans left Africa.
Three major events in modern human evolution—the perfection of language, the formation of the ancestral human population and the exit from Africa—seem to have happened quite close to each other in time, around 50,000 years ago. The closer in time, the more likely that they happened in the same place and if so, Ethiopia seems at present the best candidate for being the birthplace of modern humans, the real world’s counterpart of Eden’s mythical garden.
Between the Universal People and the Real People
What were the people of the ancestral human population really like? Archaeologists describe them as “behaviorally modern humans,” in contrast with the anatomically modern humans who first evolved nearly 200,000 years ago. But the term “behaviorally modern” refers to people whose traces in the archaeological record are not appreciably different from those left by contemporary hunter-gatherers. Foraging people of very different natures could leave much the same archaeological record.
It seems unlikely that the ancestral people closely resembled contemporary populations in behavior. The human skull and frame were then much heavier than those of people alive today, suggesting that the ancestral human population was physically aggressive, more accustomed to violence and warfare. Its members did not settle or build, perhaps because the social adaptations required for settled life were not yet part of their behavioral equipment. If fully modern language had evolved only recently, it is unlikely that all the other elements of contemporary social behavior emerged simultaneously with it. More probably they fell into place one by one as part of the continuing evolution of human behavior.
Yet the ancestral population, even if generally more inclined to aggression, presumably possessed all the major elements of human behavior that occur in its descendant populations around the world, since otherwise all of these behaviors would have had to evolve or be invented independently in each of thousands of societies.
There are two ways of developing a portrait of the ancestral human population; one is through the Universal People, the other through the Real People.
The Universal People is a concept of the anthropologist Donald Brown, who devised it as a counterpart to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Though most anthropologists emphasize the particularity of the societies they study, Brown is interested in the many aspects of human behavior that are found in societies around the world. These universal human behaviors range from cooking, dance and divination to fear of snakes. Many, such as the facial expressions used to express emotion, seem likely to have a strong genetic basis. Others, like language, may result from the interaction of genetically shaped behaviors with universal features of the environment. Whatever the genesis of these universal behaviors, the fact that they are found in societies throughout the world suggests strongly that they would have been possessed by the ancestral human population before its dispersal.
These ubiquitously shared behaviors define the nature of what Brown calls the Universal People. Among the Universal People, families are the basic unit of social groups, and groups are defined by the territory they claim. Men dominate political life, with women and children expected to be submissive. Some groups are ordered on the basis of kinship, sex and age.
The core of a family is a mother and her children. Marriage, in the sense of a man’s publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman deemed eligible for childbearing, is institutionalized. Society is organized along kinship lines, with one’s own kin being distinguished from more distant relatives and generally favored over those who are not kin. Sexual regulations constrain or eliminate mating between genetically close kin.
Reciprocity is important in the daily life of the Universal People, in the form of direct exchange of goods or labor. There are sanctions, ranging from ostracism to execution, for offenses such as rape, violence and murder.
The Universal People have supernatural beliefs and practice magic, designed for such purposes as sustaining life and winning the attention of the opposite sex. “They have theories of fortune and misfortune. They have ideas about how to explain disease and death. They see a connection between sickness and death. They try to heal the sick and have medicines for this purpose. The UP practice divination. And they try to control the weather,” Brown writes.76
The Universal People have a sense of dress and fashion. They adorn their bodies, however little clothing they may wear, and maintain distinctive hair-styles. They have standards of sexual attractiveness. They dance and sing.
They always have a shelter of some kind. They are quintessential tool-makers, creating cutters, pounders, string to tie things together or make nets, and weapons.
The ancestral human population presumably possessed many, if not all, of the behaviors of the Universal People. It may also have had much in common with the San, who as members of the L1 branch of the mitochondrial tree may be the closest living approximation to the ancestral human population. Just how close is a matter of disagreement among social anthropologists. Some believe that little resemblance should be assumed between contemporary hunter-gatherers and those who lived thousands of years ago—people are always adapting genetically to their environment and there has been plenty of time for change. But foragers have presumably had much the same environment for the last 50,000 years. Chimpanzees seem to have changed very little in the last million years, so periods of evolutionary stability are not out of the question for human societies too. The lives of contemporary foragers are certainly not identical to those of early humans, but probably they overlap in many ways.
It was explicitly to help explore early human evolution that a group of Harvard anthropologists and others began, in the 1960s, a thorough study of the San, who still followed a foraging way of life. The choice of the San would have seemed even better had their ancient genealogy been known at the time. Unlike early hunter-gatherers, the San may have been confined to the less desirable regions of their former range, but even so they have little difficulty gathering enough food for their needs. They practice a foraging way of life that may have been typical of human existence ever since the days of the ancestral population.
Although the San’s mitochondrial L1 lineage makes them only cousins to the people who left Africa for Asia (a sub-branch of mitochondrial L3), they bear some striking physical resemblances to Asian populations, suggesting that both lineages may have inherited these features from the ancestral human population. Many Khoisan speakers have yellowish skin, the epicanthic folds above the eyes that give some Asian eyes their characteristic shape, shovel-shaped incisors (front teeth hollowed out on the tongue side of the mouth, found commonly in Asians and Native Americans), and mongoloid spots—a bluish mark on the lower back of young infants. The !Kung San themselves apparently recognize this similarity since they assign Asians to the category of Real People like themselves, as distinct from !ohm, the category of non-San Africans and Europeans.77
As foragers, the San live off the land. Their principal food is mongongo nuts, but they are excellent botanists and recognize more than 200 species of plant, many of which they consider edible. According to Richard Borshay Lee’s classic study of the !Kung San, some 60 to 70 percent of their food comes from plants they gather and 30 to 40 percent from meat gained by hunting. The !Kung are expert trackers. They can tell the species of animal that made a track and how many hours ago it passed; they can even identify individual people from their tracks. Their hunting bows are lightweight because they poison their arrow shafts with a lethal toxin. They obtain it from the pupae of any of three species of chrysomelid beetle that they dig up from beneath the bushes where the larvae have fed. The pupae stay in arrested development for several months, enabling hunters to carry them around and freshen up the toxicity of their arrows when needed. A well placed arrow will kill a 200-kilogram antelope in 6 to 24 hours.78 In the laboratory, 25 trillionths of a gram of the arrow poison extracted from one of the beetle species, Diamphidia nigro-ornata, is enough to kill a mouse.79
Foraging life is neither as precarious nor as arduous as it might seem. Because of the diversity of resources the !Kung know how to tap, they cope easily with failures of supply by shifting from one source to another. Archaeological records suggest that their way of life in the Kalahari has persisted for thousands of years without a break.
It takes the !Kung 12 to 21 hours a week to gather all the food they need, according to Lee. Including other work activities like tool-making and maintenance, their total work week is 40 to 44 hours.80
The !Kung live in small groups that move camp whenever the surrounding food sources have been eaten out. A family’s total possessions—tools, ostrich shell canteens, children’s toys, musical instruments—pack into two bags. Nothing is stored, since everything they need is obtainable from the environment. Portability imbues !Kung life so thoroughly that it affects even the spacing of children. A woman can carry one child easily along with all her possessions, but two are a burden. !Kung women tend not to have a second child until the first can walk well. Children are not weaned until the age of four and before that age are carried almost everywhere, whether on foraging trips or when moving camp. Lee calculates that !Kung women walk about 1,500 miles a year, at least half of this distance carrying substantial burdens of food, water or possessions. A !Kung mother carries her child a total of 4,900 miles before it walks by itself.
Perhaps because a woman must invest so much care and labor in raising a child, she examines her newborn carefully for signs of defects. “If it is deformed, it is the mother’s duty to smother it,” writes the demographer Nancy Howell.81 Infanticide is not the same as murder, in the !Kung’s view, because life begins not with birth but when the baby is taken back to camp, given a name and accepted as a Real Person. “Before that time, infanticide is part of the mother’s prerogatives and responsibilities, culturally prescribed for birth defects and for one of each set of twins born,” Howell says. Women give birth outside the camp and m
en are excluded by taboo from the birth site; the reason for the taboo is doubtless that the father’s absence makes easier the mother’s decision as to whether to keep the newborn.
Land is owned collectively. Almost everything is shared, starting with the meat a hunter kills. Two character traits strongly discouraged by the !Kung are boasting and stinginess. Hunters are expected not just to distribute their kill but also to be extremely diffident about their success. This is central to the egalitarian ethos of !Kung society. Men in fact vary widely in their hunting skills, Lee found, but because they do not get to keep the extra meat or put on airs, not even the mightiest hunter can raise his social standing above others.
In the nineteenth century the !Kung used to live in groups with names like The Giraffes, The Big Talkers, The Scorpions, and even The Lice. One could only marry outside one’s group. By the time of Lee’s study, in the 1960s, the !Kung lived in more informal groups based around families and their near kin and in-laws. But the groups were small, around 30 or so people, and their size seems to have been limited by the nature of their sociality.
During the winter dry season, many groups would come together, to share goods, arrange marriages, hold feasts and do trance dancing. “But this intense social life also had its disadvantages,” Lee writes. “The large size of the group required people to work harder to bring in food and fights were much more likely to break out in large camps than in small camps.”
Because !Kung groups are strictly egalitarian, there is no authority to resolve conflicts and keep order. !Kung groups do have leaders, but they are informal, with no authority other than personal persuasion. The usual method of expressing disagreement is to vote with one’s feet and leave camp along with one’s family and followers. Lee noticed that large groups of !Kung stayed together for long periods only at the cattle camps of their Herero neighbors. The reason was in part “the legal umbrella provided by the Herero to maintain order among such a large number of feisty !Kung”—in other words, the Herero maintained a social order that the !Kung apparently had difficulty providing for themselves.
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