Anthropology is the study of humans, their origins, physical characteristics, institutions, religious beliefs, social relationships, and so forth.
New findings in anthropological research do not command the same media attention as breakthroughs in such other areas as biotechnology, microelectronics, or disease-treatment, but as the definition makes clear, anthropology is an important subject.
One interesting area of anthropological research is the lifestyle of early humans. The picture emerging from this work has undergone a number of significant changes over the course of the 20th century.
A prominent approach to the study of the lifestyle of early humans has been to study present-day tribes, living in isolated places and
practising a lifestyle that has remained unchanged since before the development of agriculture. Obviously, such studies could produce valid conclusions only when the tribes studied, and their ancestors, have had no contact with other peoples practising a more modern lifestyle. It now appears that, in several instances, assumptions that this condition held have been unsafe.
Possibly the group that has been studied most is the !Kung people of the Kalahari desert in Southern Africa (the ! represent a tongue click in the San languages spoken by Kalahari peoples).
Other groups that have been studied include the Negritos of southeast Asia, the Pygmies of equatorial Africa and groups in Borneo and New Guinea. These various peoples practise a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, i.e., they gather food both by hunting wild animals and by gathering various edible plants.
The traditional view of a hunter-gatherer culture was of a primitive people living at the lowest state of culture and leading squalid lives in isolated places. It was thought that the subsistence pattern of their existence denied them the leisure time necessary to develop a better adapted culture.
This model of the "starving hunter" was overturned in the 1960s and replaced by the model of "original affluence", largely as a result of research on the !Kung.
The researchers who penetrated the more isolated regions of the Kalahari concluded they had come across a living example of pre-agricultural life. The lifestyle of the !Kung as described by these anthropologists was harmonious, healthy and easy. The people owned their resources in common, had no class distinctions and could live comfortably on the shared harvest of a few hours spent hunting and fishing each week. It was assumed that this ancient way of life lasted into the 20th century because of the remoteness of the Kalahari.
Anthropologists pictured prehistoric culture acting in a self-regulating way, keeping the population in balance with the environment and preventing over-exploitation of available resources. One very influential study was carried out in 1964 by Richard B Lee. Lee monitored the food gathered by a band of !Kung. It consisted mostly of wild plant foods and a small amount of meat. The results convinced Lee that the !Kung could satisfy their food needs by working only two or three hours a day.
Lee stressed the peaceful, egalitarian and well-nourished !Kung way of life, and, in particular, its isolation from the modern world, which ensured that these people had been unaffected by the colonialism that had changed much of Africa.
This rosy picture of hunter gatherer society has not fared well in recent years. Much data has accumulated to show that the life of the individual in such societies is harsh and frequently assaulted by disease. Lee has also revised the conclusions of his study and now acknowledges that considerably more work is required to gather and prepare food than he originally estimated.
The most fundamental challenge to the 1960s model are the studies that dispute the presumed isolation of the various hunter-gatherer groups whose lifestyles were taken as models of Stone Age Man.
Studies have been published that argue that both the Pygmies and various Negrito groups have relied for a long time on trade with neighbouring farmers. There is evidence of contact with neighbouring groups in some cases extending back for several thousand years.
In his book Land Filled with Flies (University of Chicago Press, 1990), Edwin Wilmsen traces !Kung interactions with outsiders since the early Iron Age. He presents evidence that, certainly by the 19th century, they were herding their own cattle, minding herds for neighbours in return for agricultural and manufactured goods, hunting elephants with rifles, and trading with other tribes and with Europeans.
Wilmsen argues that the local Kalahari economy collapsed at the end of the 19th century, the traders withdrew and the whole area became isolated and barren. The !Kung adopted a hunter-gatherer existence in order to accommodate the harsh conditions. Rather than representing a fossilised Stone Age culture, Wilmsen argues that the 20th-century lifestyle of the !Kung simply represents extreme poverty.
It is probably true that no 20th century isolated hunter-gatherer society exactly mirrors a Stone Age lifestyle. It is unlikely that any society will remain unchanged for 10,000 years, even if isolated from outside influences. The evidence that many of these tribes have traded for a long time with agricultural neighbours is compelling, but this needn't necessarily cause very much change in the groups' lifestyle. It remains likely, in my opinion, that much of the documented lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer groups like the !Kung remains pretty much unaltered since pre-agricultural times.
William Reville is a Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.