All people can trace their roots to the savanna of East Africa, the home of one of the first members of the human species — Homo habilis. Archaeologist Bill Schindler and survival instructor Cat Bigney face what early man did as they work together to survive in the wild savanna just as these primitive people did 2.6 million years ago — without any weapons or fire. But they soon find that living like our ancestors is harder than they expected.

Great Human Race premieres Monday, February 1, at 10/9c on National Geographic Channel.

Photo at the top of the post: NG Studios

NGS has asked me to participate in a roundtable (here is the link to the roundtable) focusing on this documentary, specifically addressing this question:

Do you think that experts today can accurately replicate the challenges that Homo habilis faced thousands of years ago? And do you think that experts today could survive and thrive as Homo habilis did?

This is very much my area, and I’m glad to contribute to the discussion. The short answer is, of course, no, this is too hard. But, we can try and in so doing, we can develop some interesting thinking about early human evolution.

My contribution to the conversation centers on two rules of being a human hunter gatherer. Homo habilis was not, of course, a human, but we assume that this early hominin had some incipient human traits, further developed with early Homo erectus/ergaster. The two rules of being a human hunter gatherer refer to important aspects of living off the land that my research indicates apply to modern humans living without agriculture or animal husbandry as a source of food. I don’t know if these rules applied to earlier hominins or not … that is the $64,000 dollar question.

Rule 1: If you don’t know where it is, you are not likely to find it.

Much of the story in the first episode of The Great Human Race has to do with the two scantily clad protagonists, a professional survivalist of sorts and an “experimental archaeology” expert, set lose in the African Savanna to see what would happen, searching for various resources. I won’t give you a spoiler, but the episode ends with their discovery of one of the most important resources they need to survive, with that discovery realized in a very spectacular way.

I spent a lot of time in the 1980s and early 1990s living with, and studying the foraging patterns of, the Efe Pygmy foragers of the Ituri Forest, Zaire (now Congo). One of the things I discovered and documented is the simple fact that most of the resources they use are not really found by them, as though they had no idea where they might be. They already know where most of the stuff they can eat either will be, or are likely to be.

Bot men and women gather plant resources, but this is more of a woman’s job. In most cases, the more important plant resources are well known fruiting trees or concentrations of trees, or patches of wild yams that are frequently exploited. Women catch fish in streams that they have fished repeatedly before. This involves damming the stream at two points and removing the water from between the dams so the fish are easy to harvest.

Men seasonally hunt honey, and much of the honey is taken from trees they have exploited in the past, and check on a regular basis to see if the bees have settled in that cavity again. They do occasionally cut down a honey tree, but this is fairly rare (it is very hard work).

Even hunting, which one might assume is somewhat random, is done with a great deal of expectation based on knowledge. One type of hunting (not the most revered but among the most predictable) is to take porcupines or other small mammals from cavernous areas beneath rock piles that are found here and there across the landscape. If you find a rock pile and try to get at the animals hiding in it, even with the use of dogs, the animals can easily escape as they have many hidden exists. But if you return to the same rock pile repeatedly, you know where many of these escape routes are and can block them with wood or stone. A repeatedly used rock pile can be exploited with a high degree of confidence in success.

One of the most productive methods of hunting is the ambush. A well known tree that produces a fruit eaten by small ground mammals such as duikers is identified as currently producing the bait. A nearby tree which is climbable is used as a hide, where the Efe man waits for his prey, shooting it from the tree. The Efe almost always camp in locations that were previously used as camps, so at any given location where they are living, any of the men can easily point out the location of excellent ambush sites, rock piles, and nearby potential honey spots, and the women, and some of the men, can easily point out the locations of nearby fruit trees or yam patches.

There is uncertainty as to what resource will pay off, and not every resource is so easily predicted, but most of the wild foods the Efe gather and hunt are exploitable because of this knowledge.

The information is probably shared among people in a group, but remarkably little conversation centers on this topic. You don’t hear Efe talking about the location of this or that resource more than you hear, say, Americans talking about the locations of this or that grocery story. Certainly, such things are part of the normal conversation but do not make up a large percentage of it.

Rule 2: If you are doing it right, the use of a given instance of a resource can increase its future return.

This is probably a more important finding than that related to the first rule, and is rather counterintuitive. If the Efe use a resource, they will quickly use it up. This is one of the main reasons they move frequently from camp to camp over the year. But, the value of that resource, both the likelihood that it will produce something, and the abundance it produces, is enhanced by their very use of it.

I’ve already implied a couple of examples. If you block off a few exit ways on a rock pile, you don’t unblock them when you are done. Those escape routes may remain blocked between uses. If you add to your ambush trees a blind to sit on (usually just a few sticks tied on here and there) or modify the tree to make it easier to climb, these modifications may make the use of that ambush spot easier in the future, allowing you to climb and sit in the tree more quickly, more quietly, and more comfortably. Efe will also remove branches that interfere with their view and their shot.

Often, after an Efe man has finished taking the honey and comb out of a bee nest way up in some tree, he will spend a few more minutes making the cavity the bees had nested in larger. This may increase the amount of honey that can be fit into that cavity the next honey season.

When Efe women harvest yams, they tend to keep the “head” of the yam, attached to the above ground vine, intact, and rebury it. The space where they took the yam out will then be filled, with a little luck, with more yam months later.

As the Efe walk along the trails they habitually use to get around in the forest, they maintain the trails to keep them open and passable. it takes an Efe twice as long to traverse a given distance of forest without a trail as with a trail. This is a huge long term enhancement in the return of foraging.

As the Efe walk along a trail, they often grab up fruits from trees along the way. They eat the fruit as they walk, or stop at a resting place and eat it there. I documented five species of fruit tree where the Efe spit out or otherwise discard the seed of the fruit. This process of dispersal, well known to plant ecologists, enhances the number of those fruit trees along these trails, roughly doubling the abundance of these seasonally consumed fruits.

And there’s more, I won’t bore you with now. Much of the energy the Efe put into foraging enhances future return, including the development and maintenance of the basic knowledge of where various resources are.

There is some evidence that chimps do something like this as well. Chimps are probably primary dispersers of some of the fuits they exploit, almost certainly enhancing the abundance of that type of tree or plant. Where chimps use nutting stones (this is rare, but there are some groups that do this), they seem to keep track of the where the stones were left, so finding this rare object is much more efficient.

Given that chimps use prior knowledge and enhancement a little, and human foragers are capable of using these two “rules” a lot, I would assume that some of this would have been going on with Homo habilis.

I should mention that the observations I’ve made with the Efe have since been made among other groups of foragers. This seems to be a general pattern among African tropical and subtropical foragers, and possibly beyond. If you don’t already know where something is, you are not likely to find it. And, once a resource is exploited, foragers are often likely to enhance its future value. The emergence of those two features of modern human foraging must have been part of the hominin evolutionary story.

Now, I’ve been all over Africa, and I’ve sat down in Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho, Botswana. I admit having had a hard time finding a place to sit down in Namibia but that’s because I’ve only been in places with no chairs but there were a lot of rocks. I once sat for a long time on a curb in Rwanda. I’ve never been to Egypt but I’m pretty sure they may have invented the chair there. South Africa is, of course, all about sitting down. Lots of places to do it there.

Having said that, the question of where to sit down is an interesting one when certain things are true. For example, if you go into the deep forest to hang out with the Efe Pygmies siting down can get a little dicey. We can talk about that later. But what she really meant, I think, is that there is no place to sit where there will not be a bug or a spider or something either where you want to sit, under where you want to sit, or flying around where you want to sit.

It isn’t really true though. When I first went to the Ituri some people quite thoughtlessly (i.e., they did not put any thought into what they were saying) advised me to bring bug spray, because the place would be thick with mosquitoes and such. So I brought a couple of small cans of bug spray, and after I arrived, I found the big basket hanging from the roof of the supply hut that contained dozens of unused containers of bug spray that various researchers had brought there over the previous five years or so, only to discover as I had that there was no use for such a thing. “Maybe we’ll have a garage sale someday” I thought as I added my bug spray to the rest.

An Efe camp is usually out in the the forest somewhere, and that is a good place to sample the invertebrate life in that habitat. There are no clouds of mosquitoes or flies in the rain forest, or at least not in this rain forest. Why? There are too many bugs! If any insect tried out the strategy of being in a horde some other insect would come up with the strategy of eating the entire horde, and said strategist would simply wait round, in numbers, under wet leaves somewhere, for the next horde to come along. Really, clouds of insects, like the mosquitoes or lake flies or black flies we get in the northern states and provinces of North America exist because there is a winter, from which the landscape emerges, and into which swarming hordes of insects swarm, one after another, until deadly winter returns again. A set of evolutionary stable strategies resulting in this pattern have developed in the colder regions. If you got rid of the winters (though you could not get rid of seasonality) there would be fewer swarms of flying insects in a highly species rich forest environments. Swarming insects are more likely to be found in habitats with a winter, in low species diversity forests, and grasslands (including marshes and swamps), or areas a more distinct dry and wet season. Not so much in tropical rain forests.

But that does not mean there are not a lot of insects. There are plenty, and even just sitting in a camp is a great way to discover new ones. One day as I sat on my Efe-made “chair” (we can discuss those another time as well) a whopping big slow moving thingie came along and started to climb up the chair leg. I managed to guess that it was some kind of cricket … bear in mind, though, that crickets in the African rain forest are as much like our temperate crickets as an elephant is like a hyrax. I asked the nearest Efe what it was.

He looked. Shrugged his shoulders. “No idea.”

I was surprised. Normally the Efe knew the name of anything I pointed to (and yes, I did verify their knowledge using various techniques … they weren’t usually making stuff up, though that could happen now and then). We kept an eye on the slow moving creature as it explored around on my chair and the nearby ground, and everybody who came along got asked.

“What is that thing?”

“Huh. No idea. Strange looking.”

Eventually, an older man picked the thing up with a stick and moved it several hundred feet into the rain forest and let it go. Why do this instead of ignore it or squishing it? Well, the Efe don’t squish an insect or other invertebrate unless they know what it is. With good reason.

The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …

…that has wandered into their camp if they don’t know anything about it a priori is … according to what they told me …

Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For instance, one does not walk to the right of a young male Canarium tree in the afternoon, because he who shall not be named could be sitting in the tree waiting to put a curse on you, and then you’re screwed. Or, one should not handle the fetus of an antelope if you are a fertile female or if any females in your family are planning on getting pregnant soon. For many insects, killing them is bad because that may affect fertility of someone related to the one who kills the insect.

Generally speaking, this culture is very uptight about babies and fertility issues. Some of this is spillover from the village-dwelling horticultural Lese with whom the foraging Efe share a culture. The Lese have a repressed fertility owing to a number of causes. When a fertility rule is broken, a great deal of effort may be expended to fix it. As the reproductive ecologist Peter Ellison once said, “The Lese and Efe are constantly afraid of overdrawing on the bank of fertility.” (I paraphrase.) One of the most dangerous things you can do is to accidentally have twins. That’s like going to an ATM machine to get 100 bucks and the machine gives you 200 bucks. What do you do with the extra money? Will you get caught? When you check your bank account later, will there be 100 or 200 bucks taken out? Will there be a fee? A fine?

An insect that you don’t know about might be an insect linked to something important like fertility, or if not fertility, something else. Better to just leave it alone and let it go on its own way.

Oh, and there is probably a lot of heterogeneity across the cultural landscape in the detailed beliefs. It is not at all unlikely that an Efe visiting a distant settlement will discover that those people have a different set of beliefs about various insects or other things. The ethnography certainly shows different things happening across time and space, rather dynamically. The Efe do not generally look at beliefs of other people with disdain. Rather, they figure that those beliefs might be valid as well, and try to incorporate them in their routine.

So it makes sense that Efe would assume that an insect they’ve never seen before … and in this very species rich rain forest that is not as unlikely as it sounds, though it is certainly not a daily occurrence … has an importance of which they are simply unaware.

Want to read more about insects in the Congo? Click here: “We live in little houses made of beans.”

A modified repost; stay tuned for more on the Ituri Forest and Insects.