The Old Way

The popular image of hunter-gatherers is of people perpetually on the edge of starvation, and the Marshalls arrived half-believing it. What they found was closer to the opposite. The Ju/'hoansi ate well and ate widely. The bulk of the diet came not from hunted meat but from plants gathered mostly by women — roots, melons, berries, nuts, and above all the mongongo, a nut so abundant and nourishing that one Ju/'hoan reportedly asked why anyone would plant crops when there were so many mongongos in the world.

Gathering was skilled, unglamorous, reliable work, and it carried the household. Hunting was the rarer, riskier business. Men tracked game for hours or days, using arrows tipped with a poison made from beetle larvae that killed slowly; a wounded animal might run a long way before it dropped, and the hunters would follow it patiently across the sand, reading prints and disturbed grass the way a reader follows a sentence. A large kill was an event — but it was unpredictable, and a hunter could come home empty-handed again and again.

If there was one thing the Marshalls came to understand as the engine of Ju/'hoan life, it was sharing — but sharing of a far more demanding and exact kind than the warm word suggests. When a large animal was killed, the meat did not belong to the hunter who shot it. By custom it belonged to the owner of the arrow that struck first, who might be someone else entirely, perhaps an old man who could no longer hunt but who had given his arrows away. From there the meat was divided and divided again, along lines of kinship and obligation that everyone could follow.

This was not generosity in the casual sense. It was insurance, run without banks or contracts. A hunter who shared his kill today was storing credit in other people's success tomorrow, against the long stretches when his own arrows found nothing. Spread across a lifetime and a network of relatives, the system smoothed out the brutal randomness of the hunt. No single family had to survive on its own luck, because everyone's luck was pooled.

What pulled Thomas back to the Kalahari decades later was the growing conviction that she had not witnessed an exotic culture so much as a glimpse of where everyone comes from. The genetic and archaeological record places the deepest human roots in southern Africa, and the way of life she had seen — small mobile bands, gathered plants and hunted meat, sharing as survival, equality as a practical necessity — corresponds closely to the conditions under which our species spent the overwhelming majority of its time on earth. Farming, cities, kings, and property are recent additions. The old way was the long human baseline.

Seen against that span, the stability of the Ju/'hoan world is the astonishing fact. A society without leaders or laws or stored wealth held together not for years but, in some recognizable form, for an immense stretch of time, in one of the harshest habitats people have ever lived in. It did so by reading the land with extraordinary care and by building a culture that kept its own ambitions in check. Thomas's argument is that this was not primitive in the sense of crude or unfinished. It was finished, in the way a thing that has been tested for tens of thousands of years is finished.

By the time Thomas wrote The Old Way, the world she had entered as a teenager was effectively gone. The Ju/'hoansi she had known were fenced onto reserves, drawn into wage labor and government settlements, cut off from the lands and waterholes that had made their way of life possible. The bands no longer moved; the hunt no longer fed them; the long, slow arithmetic of sharing lost the conditions it needed to function. Her family's arrival had been one small part of the contact that ended it, a fact she does not hide from.