Translated material
Willow smoke and dog tails
An excerpt from the book “Human Roy. Natural history of society "
Biologist Mark Moffet wrote a book about how people look like ants and other social beings; These evolutionary similarities seem to clarify a lot. We publish about how the chimpanzees arrange for their own night, collecting bunches of grass or folding young trees in "a structure that unclearly resembles the temporary shelters built by the Bushmen."Starting from February 24, 2022, we were all in the face of the advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editorial office of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that the world remains in the world and fiction.
Mark Moffett. Human swarm. The natural history of society. M.: Hummingbird, ABC-Atticus, 2022. Translation from English Svetlana Levenson. Content
Communities
The sun became pale red by the moment when the anthropologist from South Africa Luis Libenberg stopped our jeep next to the Bushmen camp! Kung (“!” Means a clicking sound) in the area of Solonchak Gautcha, Namibia. Louis asked a young man by name! Nani about the larvae of harmful beetles, whom their people use for poisoned arrows. ! Nani replied that he knows several places not far, where you can go on foot; He will show us.
The next morning we, together with! Nani went by car along the plain, the flat space of which was violated only by stunted trees with thorns and rare bloated baobabs. The Bushman’s idea of foot availability is clearly different from ours: the road showing the road already seemed to be many kilometers! Nani finally stopped us near the area with shrubs with glossy leaves. There, using the traditional bushman cap, he dug up dead pale larvae and showed us how to squeeze their poisonous juices to the end of the arrow.
! Nani and his brothers! Kung, like other Bushmen and gatherers around the world, do not engage in agriculture and do not grow livestock. They depend exclusively on food, which can be obtained in the wild: they hunt with poisoned arrows and other simple tools for large game and collect plant foods within the “walking distance”.
For more than a hundred years, every seeking to understand ancient people turned to the written testimonies of the life of hunters-gatherers in the past centuries. Of particular interest was the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers-the movement in small groups called local groups. Each local group moved around the area and defeated the camps, from which they went in search of food and water. I call such associations of nomadic hunters-gatherers by communities, which, as it will become clear from this and next chapters, usually consisted of several local groups. I distinguish between the terms "community" and "tribe". The term “tribe” is usually used (as I do in this book) to describe simple sedentary societies, most of which depended on gardening, where plants were cultivated in gardens, and not in plowed fields; This term is also used to describe more mobile shepherds who care about livestock herds. (The fact that the “tribe” remains a preferred word when they speak of North American Indians, many of whom live in communities.) From the standpoint of studying the origin of a person, gardeners and shepherds, this is a later phenomenon, they have a less important role when it comes to understanding the basic characteristics of mankind. Agriculture is such a recent invention that even modern states must be considered in the light of how the societies of hunter-gatherers functioned.
The archaeologist Lewis Binford once asked the indigenous resident of Alaska to briefly express what his existence in the wandering community means. “He thought for a minute and said:“ willow smoke and dog tails: when we stand with a camp, this is all the willow smoke, and when we move, all that you see in front of us is dog tails. The life of the Eskimos is half of the other. ”
No matter how poetic the words of the old man are and no matter how important hunters-gatherers for anthropologists are, the whole idea is questioned by the question of whether the peoples who have recently lived due to hunting and gathering are an accurate reflection of our past. For centuries, hunters-gatherers either had to adapt to the presence of farmers and cattle breeders, or they replaced them into the harsh lands with a nonsense land. We know that the gatherers could endure significant changes before the first researchers documented information about their lifestyle. Such changes could occur shortly before contact: when the pilgrims arrived in America in order to establish the Plimut colony, the first one welcoming them to the Indian already spoke English (probably British fishermen taught him the tongue). Almost two centuries later, during an expedition to the country, Lewis and Clark stumbled upon tribes that were already riding horses - animals that died out in North America thousands of years ago, but newly imported by Europeans. Undoubtedly, the Indians have repeatedly changed since the appearance of the first photos.
The same story can be told about any hunter-gatherers. Bushmenov, people of short stature, slim, with a slightly casting red yellowish-brown tint of the skin and children's faces belonging to the South African race and differing from the rest of the Africans, are especially appreciated in human evolution studies. They inhabited the open spaces of South Africa - the same area with similar conditions of the desert and savannah, where human evolution passed - and these genetics indicate that they separated from other human populations in our distant past. Nevertheless, for centuries, interaction with Bantu shepherds, who came from the north long before the advent of Europeans, influenced the Bushmen.
Before contact with Europeans, Australia was one of several main places on Earth, where local hunters-gatherers rarely met with farmers. Aborigines occupied the continent for 50,000 years after the resettlement of the first people of the modern type from Africa. This fact, probably, turns the indigenous Australians into a reliable source of information about the past, and yet the Aborigines, who inhabited the north of Australia, traded and marriage with representatives of the tribes who lived on the islands of Torres of the Strait and grown in the culture of tarot and bananas. In addition, since 1720, the fleet of Indonesian fishermen came to the northern coast of Australia for the Goloturi Providence, and the Indonesians took some Aborigines with them to visit their hometown of Macasar. From the Indonesians, the Aborigines learned to make hollowed canoe and fishing hooks from the shells, they also acquired a tendency to new songs, ceremonies, escanols, smoking tubes, wooden sculpture and painting skulls. And of course, like all nations, the culture of the Aborigines developed; They invented a boomerang and created the cycles of sacred rites associated with the “period of creation” - these objects and performances are not found anywhere else, but are widespread throughout the continent.
After the arrival of Europeans, the diseases and military operations imported by the colonists quickly exterminated the indigenous population, and only primitive descriptions of their societies remained. As one well -known anthropologist summed up, "the traditional local groups of most Aboriginal tribes quickly and radically changed under the influence of Europeans' settlements." For experts involved in the study of how societies retain their identity and isolation from each other, this is a serious problem.
The contact of Europeans with the hunters-gatherers was a cultural shock that it is difficult for us to imagine. He must have changed everything. Before the advent of Europeans, the gatherers hunters probably had their own version of the geocentric system of the world, worldview, which many civilizations adhered to before Copernicus proved that the Earth turned around the Sun. As the researcher of the XIX century said. Edward Mikletaite Carr, “tribes living on the coast, probably represent the world more vast than those that live in the inside of the mainland, and those that inhabit large areas in deserted areas have more advanced ideas about this object than tribes in fertile, densely populated areas.” Carr wrote about the societies of the hunters-gatherers of the internal part of the mainland: "According to their ideas, the world is flat and extends about 200 miles in each direction, and their country is the center of the world." Now imagine what the natives felt when European ships anchored off their coast. It must have been comparable to the landing of Martian on the lawn at the White House. The worldview of the Aborigines, up to the notes of their own societies and about each other, was destroyed, and not gradually, in a few years or days, but at one moment. Any differences between the groups of the natives that once caused strife began to seem small and insignificant. And although the societies of hunting gatherers have survived, it became almost impossible to accurately recreate in their original form a sense of social identity and the idea of how they differ from their neighbors.
Therefore, I will talk about the societies of hunter-gatherers, and then about tribal societies in the past tense, bearing in mind that not people themselves disappeared, but mainly their original lifestyle. Some hunters-gatherers, with whom I were lucky for some time, like! Nani, are already forced to stay in one place and stopped hunting large game. True, there is some confidence that the gatherers who studied in the past centuries can give us a certain idea of the life of our ancestors, at least in general terms. Such different communities as theibs in the Arctic and Hadza in Africa are similar that the idea arises that the nomadic existence of a person had a certain program: the search for food in the vast space was part of the complex, which included other construction bricks to build societies. We will discuss this on the following pages. We will also study that societies meant for these hunters-gatherers and why so many anthropologists either belittled the role of their societies, or did not pay attention to them. The fact that hunters-gatherers lived in anonymous societies in the same way as we are today should become obvious.
Figure-excretion and conditions of human existence
A characteristic feature that distinguishes the community from a different way of life was not hunting and gathering, from which people now enjoy (only if they shoot a deer or dig truffles). Hunters-gatherers were also not exclusively different in that the nomadic lifestyle led. Tribes of cattle breeders, such as the Huns, part of the year could live in camps to protect pastures for their livestock. Most of the communities of hunters-gatherers distinguished the nature of the movements of their members: wandering hunters-gatherers dispersed on the ground through a merger, and people wandered, having significant freedom of action.
Nevertheless, the stray hunters-gatherers of the recent past, as well as, like those who lived before the appearance of agriculture, the merger, as a rule, acquired an organized form. People mainly gathered here and here in local groups. Each local group consisted of an average of 25–35 people and turned on, often covering three generations, somewhat usually not related to nuclear families. A man could visit other local groups, but sought to maintain a long connection with one. The movements between local groups usually occurred without effort, but not often and very different from smooth movements of chimpanzees and other species with a merger-antle, which is characterized by the formation of constantly changing subgroups.
It was also unique that the members of the local group were divided into working groups every day, which are confused by the name “detachment”, to search for food. Every evening everyone returned to the place that the local group chose to break the camp, usually for several days or weeks. Such a long commitment to the local group, when each group has a home base, which often changes, is unique for our species. The nearest analogue of other animals with a merger-anticipation is found in wolves and spotted hyenas at a time when a flock or clan brings meat to puppies to the lair. In all three types, the base was sometimes moved both so that the enemies could not smell, and so that the new places of hunting are for representatives of the species within reach.
Ecologist Edward Wilson believes that the possession of a well -protected home base is the basis of our human nature. From this point of view, ancient people were like ants, setting off in search of food from the central nest. I propose to make an amendment to these ideas. Undoubtedly, the local group organized its camp much more carefully than the wolves of its lair, and remained there for some time to give old people, patients and children. Nevertheless, the camps were usually short -lived and not particularly safe. Local groups wandered, partly to protect themselves. Some hunters-gatherers, Ache (Guayaki) in Paraguay and the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands of the Bay Bengal, lived in conditions of constant threat, in this case, from strangers, and often changed the location, sometimes daily. Members of the local group could jointly drive the leopard together, although a herd of pasta, who had attacked the same cat, would act with almost the same success. One could say that many bonfires of many families around the parking lot held predators at a distance better than a bonfire of a single family. But protection at the level of the local group was limited: noticeable, protecting each fortifications appeared only when people began to settle in the villages.
Our life story in stray local groups, which were part of a society with a merger, including a network of movements and relationships, indicates that dispersal had (and has) the same meaning for a person’s success as parking in one place. The time spent in the camps allowed people to improve the social and cultural life based on personal interaction on a wide scale, in a way that is not available to any other type with a merger-lead; At the same time, mobility made it possible for such an expansion of the space occupied by society, which is not comparable to previously achieved by other communities of land vertebrates. A remarkable intelligence was required in order to daily monitor relationships with people in the same local group and, in addition, be aware of the affairs of other people who are far away.
The fusion of other animals looks surprisingly unorganized compared to those in the communities, but the chimpanzees (or bonobo) subgroup and the human local group are not completely different. In fact, certain chimpanzees came close to settling at temporary home bases. Although most chimpanzees are forest residents, some live in the savannah, in those conditions of the environment where human evolution took place. The chimpanzees living in the savannah are given little attention, although their social structures are close to the fact that they are characteristic of local groups of hunting hunters. First of all, they have to walk almost as much as wandering hunters-gatherers. According to the entertainment of Fiona Stuart, the chimpanzees community in Tanzania, consisting of 67 individuals, wanders on the area with an area of 270 to 480 km2: the animals are excessively dispersed, almost the same as the hunters-gatherers were dispersed in such an environment. The subgroups of savannah chimpanzees also have a more permanent composition and location compared to forest communities. Several factors play a role here. Animals cannot, simply wandering, go to the next subgroup, which can be quite far away. The thickets of trees that prefer chimpanzees are rare and are far from each other, and due to the great distance, chimpanzees often remain near the same site for several days before trying to go to another place. The gatherers of the recent past also preferred small groves for their camps in the savannah-not only because of the shadow, but also because there was water and other necessary resources. In addition, the trees in the savannah are rarely strong enough for such a male -like monkeys to arrange a bed in the crowns of trees from branches covered with leaves as they do in the forest. Therefore, chimpanzees are often arranged to sleep on the ground, collecting bunches of grass or folding young trees in a structure, which unclearly resembles temporary shelters erected by Bushmen from grass and sticks. Chimpanzees also spend time in the caves, hiding from the midday sun. Отправляясь на поиски пищи из таких мест отдыха, саванные шимпанзе убивают мелких приматов копьями, сделанными из веток, и палками выкапывают съедобные клубни, в некотором роде подобно охотникам-собирателям.
Несложно представить, что наш общий с шимпанзе предок был способен на подобные действия, не говоря уже о последовавшей длинной череде гоминид. Эволюция социальных навыков, необходимых индивидам, чтобы оставаться с членами одного и того же сообщества каждый вечер; приручение огня нашим предшественником Homo erectus 400 000 лет назад и совместная трапеза перед устройством на ночлег, вероятно, дали людям пристанище, которое стоило того, чтобы возвращаться к нему постоянно. Так появились настоящие лагеря.