Free A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

there and probably hadn’t for about eight thousand years. True, they sometimes came during the rainy season, at which time the Ju/wa men hunted them, but Cape buffalo are not like the Kalahari antelopes and must live where they can find surface water and plenty of grazing. Gautscha had not met that description since a long-ago wet period when several huge prehistoric rivers—leaving riverbeds known as omarambas—drained into the Okavango River. These omarambas were perhaps forty miles west of Gautscha and had been dry for thousands of years.
    So I believe that the name Gautscha was as prehistoric as the omarambas. We have places like that too, if not as ancient. Every town named Newton, for example, is now an old town, but the name will remain as long as people live there, which probably will not be as long as people had lived at Gautscha.
    So if Gautscha is an ancient name, it’s no wonder. As has been said, archaeologists were later to find encampments by seasonal lakes that had been occupied continuously since the Paleolithic. My family was to make many expeditions to Nyae Nyae, three of which I accompanied, always visiting Gautscha and the people we knew best, and at one point a young archaeologist came with us and found small stone tools scattered around the edge of the dry lakebed. He identified these tools as from the Wilton culture, which meant they had been lying there for perhaps six thousand years. The Ju/wasi knew about the stone tools but did not know who made them. Unfortunately the archaeologist stopped his investigation at the surface, so no one knows what might be underground. Other archaeologists investigated other long-occupied encampments, but not the one at Gautscha.
    The Ju/wasi used a few stone tools but by then were making their arrow points of bone, which is more easily worked. However, after the Bantu migration from West Africa about five hundred years ago, when Bantu people settled around the edges of the Kalahari Basin (but, because of lack of water, not in the area of 250,000 square miles that attracted my father), the Ju/wasi and other Bushman groups began to trade items such as jackal skins for metal, then passed the metal around among themselves. They cold-hammered wire into arrowheads and sharpened small pieces of metal to make knives.
    It might take a year for a piece of wire to travel from the early Bantu settlements into Gautscha, as we later learned. During our first expedition, my mom gave every woman enough cowrie shells to make a necklace. Before that, cowrie shells were unknown in the interior, but when we returned about eight months later, they were spread all over Nyae Nyae, the six-thousand-square-mile area we were investigating, owing to the fact that the Bushmen exchanged gifts. The population density of Nyae Nyae could be described as sparse—one person for every ten square miles—but even so, those shells had traveled.
    Except for the wire and small bits of flat metal, the Gautscha people were living entirely in the Old Way, as our species had lived for thousands of years. They made their shelters from the branches of bushes stuck in the ground and woven together, then thatched with grass, creating little half-domes which are reminiscent of the nests made by the great apes. If you cup your hand and turn it sideways, it looks like the shelters of the Bushmen. If you cup your hand and turn it palm up, it looks like the nests of the great apes, and it’s made in the same way, by weaving branches together and stuffing them with leaves.
    This suggests that the concept of the Bushman shelters may be older than our species. When a glacial period trapped much of the world’s water and turned the forests into grasslands, the trees withered out from under us. We adapted to the savannah just like the water-independent antelopes. But like everything else that lives in the Old Way, we didn’t change anything unless we had to. Surely we kept on weaving