BUSHMEN
The Bushmen, San, Sho, Basarwa, Kung, or Khwe are an indigenous people of southern Africa that spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. They were traditionally hunter-gatherers, part of the Khoisan group and are related to the traditionally pastoral Khoikhoi. Starting in the 1950s, through the 1990s, they switched to farming as a result of government-mandated modernization programs as well as the increased risks of a hunting and gathering lifestyle in the face of technological development.
The Bushmen have provided a wealth of information for the fields of anthropology and genetics, even as their lifestyles change. Genetic evidence suggests the Bushmen's ancestors predate the genetic changes of the rest of the human population — making them a "genetic Adam" according to Spencer Wells, from which all humans can ultimately trace their genetic heritage.[1] The broad study of African genetic diversity headed by Sarah Tishkoff found the San people had the greatest genetic diversity among the 113 distinct populations sampled, making them one of 14 "ancestral population clusters".[2] But arguably, their Haplogroup A is not the oldest DNA itself, but the oldest divergence from the "genetic Adam"'s DNA. If so, they represent an isolated genetic group, and not a common ancestral group to the rest of humanity.
The Bushmen, San, Sho, Basarwa, Kung, or Khwe are an indigenous people of southern Africa that spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. They were traditionally hunter-gatherers, part of the Khoisan group and are related to the traditionally pastoral Khoikhoi. Starting in the 1950s, through the 1990s, they switched to farming as a result of government-mandated modernization programs as well as the increased risks of a hunting and gathering lifestyle in the face of technological development.
The Bushmen have provided a wealth of information for the fields of anthropology and genetics, even as their lifestyles change. Genetic evidence suggests the Bushmen's ancestors predate the genetic changes of the rest of the human population — making them a "genetic Adam" according to Spencer Wells, from which all humans can ultimately trace their genetic heritage.[1] The broad study of African genetic diversity headed by Sarah Tishkoff found the San people had the greatest genetic diversity among the 113 distinct populations sampled, making them one of 14 "ancestral population clusters".[2] But arguably, their Haplogroup A is not the oldest DNA itself, but the oldest divergence from the "genetic Adam"'s DNA. If so, they represent an isolated genetic group, and not a common ancestral group to the rest of humanity.
Rock paintings from the Western Cape
The Bushman kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small, mobile foraging bands. The kinship system is also comparable to the Eskimo kinship system, with the same set of terms as in Western countries, and also employing a name rule and an age rule. The age rule resolves any confusion arising from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. Since relatively few names circulate (approximately only 35 names per gender), and each child is named for a grandparent or other relative, Bushmen are guaranteed an enormous family group with whom they are welcome to travel.
Preparing poison arrows
Starting fire by hand
Traditional gathering gear was and still is simple and effective: a hide sling, a blanket, a cloak called a kaross to carry foodstuffs, firewood, smaller bags, a digging stick and perhaps a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby. The women would gather, whilst the men hunted using poison arrows and spears in laborious days-long excursions. Children had no duties besides to play, and leisure was very important to the Bushmen. They spent large amounts of time in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances.
Villages ranged in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring, when people moved constantly in search of budding greens, to formalized rings when they congregated in the dry season around the only permanent waterholes. Early spring was the hardest season - a hot dry period following the cool, dry winter. Villages were concentrated around the waterholes, most plants were dead or dormant, and supplies of autumn nuts were exhausted. Meat was particularly important in the dry months when wildlife could never range far from the receding waters.
Traditionally the San were an egalitarian society.[14] Although they did have hereditary chiefs, the chiefs' authority was limited and the bushmen instead made decisions among themselves, by consensus, [15] and the status of women was relatively equal[16].
Because of their low-fat diet, women typically had late first menstruations and did not begin bearing children until about 18 or 19 years of age.[17] Births were spaced four years apart, due to lack of enough breast milk[18] and requirements of mobility that made feeding and carrying more than one child at a time difficult.
Children were very well behaved and treated kindly by their parents and group.[19] Children spent much of the day playing with each other and were not segregated by sex; neither sex was trained to be submissive or fierce, and neither sex was restrained from expressing the full breadth of emotion.[20]
In addition, the San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts on a regular basis rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services. [21]
In the 1990s, they switched to farming as a result of government-mandated modernization programs as well as the increased risks of a hunting and gathering lifestyle in the face of technological development.
[edit] Early history
1000- to 2000-year-old San-paintings near Murewa Zimbabwe
Bushmen had an advanced early culture evidenced by archaeological data. For example, Bushmen from the Botswana region migrated south to the Waterberg Massif in the era 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. They left rock paintings at the Lapala Wilderness area and Goudriver recording their life and times, including characterizations of rhinoceros, elephant and a variety of antelope species (resembling impala, kudu and eland, all present day inhabitants).
Around AD 1,000 Bantu tribes began to expand into bushman occupied areas and pushed the bushmen into more inhospitable areas such as the Kalahari desert.
[edit] In the media
The Bushmen of the Kalahari were first brought to the Western world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post with the famous book The Lost World of the Kalahari, which was also a BBC TV series.
The 1980 comedy movie The Gods Must Be Crazy portrays a Kalahari Bushman tribe's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coke bottle). By the time this movie was made, the ǃKung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the Bushmen hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their abandoned hunting and gathering life.[22] The director of this movie, Jamie Uys, had also directed Lost in the Desert in 1969, in which a small boy, stranded in the desert, encounters a group of wandering Bushmen who help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture.
One of James A. Michener's many works, The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fiction centered on South Africa. The first section of the book concerns a San tribe's journey set roughly in 13,000 B.C.E.
John Marshall documented the lives of Bushmen in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over more than a 50-year period. His early film The Hunters, released in 1957, shows a giraffe hunt during the 1950s. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) is the account of a woman who grew up while the Bushmen were living as autonomous hunter-gatherers and was later forced into a dependent life in the government-created community at Tsumkwe. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the JuǀʼHoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a fierce and vocal proponent of the Bushman cause throughout his life, which was, in part, due to strong kinship ties, and had a Bushman wife in his early 20s.[23]
In Wilbur Smith's The Burning Shores, the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani, and the Bushmen's struggles, history, and beliefs are touched upon in great detail. The Burning Shores is a volume in the Courtneys of Africa series.
The BBC series How Art Made the World compares San cave painting 200 years ago to Paleolithic European painting 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities, the San can help us understand the reasons for ancient cave paintings. Lewis Williams believes that their trance states (traveling to the spirit world) are directly related to the reasons people went deep into caves, experienced sensory deprivation, and painted their visions onto the cave walls.
Spencer Wells' 2003 book The Journey of Man—in connection with National Geographic's Genographic Project—discusses a genetic analysis of the San and asserts their blood contains the oldest genetic markers found on Earth, describing the Bushmen as a type of "genetic Adam". While the Bushmen's Y-chromosomal DNA haplogroup (type A) is one of the oldest, it is different than the Y-chromosome haplogroup that is the least common denominator for the rest of humanity (type BT). Therefore, the Bushmen likely represents the oldest existing population, but it is one divergent from the rest of humanity and not a sole common ancestor. Genetic markers present on the y chromosome are passed down through thousands of generations in a relatively pure form. The documentary continues to trace these markers throughout the world, demonstrating that all of humankind can be traced back to the African continent and that the San are the oldest, most genetically unadulterated, remnant of humankind's ancient ancestors. More recent analysis suggests that the San may have been merely isolated from other original ancestral groups and then rejoined at a later date, re-mixing the human gene pool.[24]
In 2007, author David Gilman published his book The Devil's Breath, a novel partly based on the Bushmen. One of the main characters, a small bushman boy named !Koga, helps the main character Max Gordon to travel across Namibia, using traditional bushman methods to do so.
[edit] Notables
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