Free A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Page A

branches together and stuffing them, by then not with rainforest leaves but with savannah grasses, because such nests or shelters protect their occupants from predators. After we lost our rainforests, we lost the safety of the trees, but we seem to have kept the nests, and wisely so, because lions and leopards—especially leopards, the most important predators of large primates—attack from behind when they’re hunting. In the Ju/wa encampments, the shelters faced in all directions so that anything approaching someone from behind could be seen by someone else.
    Why would people keep the same custom for hundreds of thousands of years? Because nothing that lives in the Old Way makes unnecessary changes. Because the shelters did what they were supposed to do. Because the shelters were easy to make, the materials were always available, nothing about them had to be transported, and they offered excellent protection. It would have been madness to make a different kind of shelter, especially a permanent shelter. And nobody did, because the nestlike shelters were perfect.
    As for the antiquity of Ju/wa culture, I think of their religion. They had two gods, both of whom lived on the horizon, one in the east and one in the west. I found this very interesting, as the horizons are areas of transition, day to night, night to day, when the diurnal and nocturnal populations of the savannah change places. The god in the west was involved with the
/gauasi
, the spirits of the dead. His name was /Gaua (
/gauasi
is the plural of /Gaua) and he had to do with death. Evidently he had been around longer than the other god, probably from a time when our ancestral hunter-gatherers had only one language and one culture. Over the centuries the Bushmen divided into five groups, each with a different language and with varying views of the supernatural. But all of them knew /Gaua, which means he was with them before they separated, and may have been the first god in the world. Clearly, he is the oldest god now known.
    I admired the Ju/wa religion. The two gods were not moral policemen, and took little interest in people except to send them good or bad luck for no better reason than that they felt like it. For instance, a god might take the form of a gemsbok, and if a hunter in all innocence shot him, the god would wait for him to eat the meat and then, once inside him, would kill him. Frankly, I thought that was a more realistic view of how life works than the views offered by the more modern worldwide religions.
    Â 
    I wonder about the anthropologist who claimed that Bushmen were a devolved people who lost their livestock and were forced to live on wild foods. If that were true, Bushmen were the fastest learners in human history, because within a very few years their entire population would have learned everything there was to know about their environment, down to the last detail, none of which had anything to do with pastoralism. In later years, professors from universities such as Harvard came to investigate Bushman knowledge, and despite their PhDs, the professors didn’t have enough information to know what questions to ask. For example, no one asked about a weaverbird’s nest, which, according to the Bushmen, had a compartment for a snake. Obviously superstition, of course, or so it seemed until an ornithologist learned that when a snake climbed the baglike nest, its weight opened the snake compartment while closing a higher compartment in which were the eggs or fledglings. The snake would find nothing and leave.
    If you don’t know that, you have no way to ask about it. So the best the professors could do was to see if what the western world knew—the various plant and animal species, for instance—compared to Bushman knowledge, and of course it did, because those who live in the Old Way must be accurate. Their survival did not allow for mistakes. I was wowed by a Bushman man named Ukwane who dissected an antelope