The Near Consensus on North American Prehistory

The Clovis Culture is a Native American phenomenon that occurred between about 12 and 10 thousand years ago (most likely between 11,500 and 11,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years before present).

The key feature of Clovis is the rather extraordinary “Clovis Point.” There is another, similar looking, point that goes with the Folsom Culture, which is about as old as the Clovis culture, but a bit younger, and there are a couple of other less common named forms. We refer to them all as “fluted points.”

Unlike some other so-called “projectile points” (many of which are knives or spearheads, many perhaps not even mounted in use) fluted points are rarely found in large numbers anywhere, but are represented over a very large region; They are found across the United Sates and Canada, and as far south as Venezuela.

There is almost no evidence suggesting that any humans existed in North America prior to Clovis times, and this has been known for years. Therefore, “Clovis culture” or more broadly, “Paleoindian” culture has long been thought to represent the first humans to come to North America. Since Native Americans physically resemble East Asians (an observation supported and refined by genetic analysis) it has always been assumed that Native Americans came from Asia as Paleoindians, or developed the Paleoindian culture right after arriving in North America. The dates of Clovis sites cluster into such a tight time frame that it makes sense to assume that these folks arrived on an unoccupied continent, spread quickly over a large area, and subsequently differentiated into diverse groups.

The idea of earlier, pre-Clovis, occupation has long been considered by the occasional daring archaeologist, and even the famous African archaeologist, Louis Leakey, suggested that certain finds in the vicinity of modern day San Diego represented much older human occupation. However, North American archaeologists remained firm on the idea that there is no pre-Clovis, and argued strongly and vociferously against the idea. Indeed, any archaeologist who wished to argue for pre-Clovis risked something close to professional censure, others were so sure about Clovis first.

For a very long time it has been at first quietly, and later less quietly, recognized that there are some problems with the Clovis-First hypotheses. First, even though one might expect the early dates for Clovis, if it represented a sudden and rapid colonization of a world with no humans, to be difficult to interpret, it became apparent that the earliest Clovis is in the far East of the continent, with later clovis being farther west. Recent interpretations of the data have suggested that this may not be true, but those interpretations are tenuous. Oddly, pretty solid dating evidence showing east coast Clovis to be earlier was always rejected as unimportant, while a much less clear argument that Clovis out west is early has been quickly and not very critically accepted, presumably because it fits the underlying assumptions of a sudden colonization from Asia.

Fluted points are way more common in the East, east of the Mississippi, in various Mississippi drainage valleys, and along the East Coast. They are relatively sparse in the west, say, on the west side of the Rocky Mountains, and they are very rare in Alaska. So, the distribution of fluted points is exactly the opposite of what one might expect with a simple model of Asians arriving in North America, suddenly becoming Clovis, then spreading from there.

Of the fluted points found in North America, the oldest style, Clovis, is mainly an Eastern phenomenon, with later styles, such as Folsom, are more in the West. If the so-called spatio-temporal boundaries of these styles is correct, and Clovis is older than Folsem, then it is very hard to argue that Clovis is a primary phenomenon that came out of Asia as the first thing people did in North America.

These observations together with the absence of Paleoindian culture in Asia strongly suggests that the actual history of people in North America prior to about 10,000 years ago was a little more complex than the usual textbook version. Indeed, Clovis would make a lot more sense if there was a pre-Clovis culture that did some or much of the initial spreading, followed quickly by the rise of a Clovis Culture among those people, perhaps in the east, which then spread across the continents very quickly. That would have simply been an early example of a phenomenon we see again and again in New World prehistory, where a material phenomenon of some kind, a type of projectile point, or a symbolic image, or something, spreads in what seems like an instant across a vast area.

Beginning mainly in the 1980s, a number of archaeological sites were discovered and presented as pre-Clovis. These are dated using various means. They occur across the US in Pennsylvania, Souoth Carolina, Oregon, Florida, Alaska, and elsewhere. They are also found in South America in Brazil, Chile, and Columbia. Most, perhaps all, of these sites — there are about 16 of them — are very strongly and forcefully argued to be real, and have varying degrees of evidence on them.

Most of the sites date to either just a thousand or two years, or sometime, just centuries, before Clovis and would easily fit into a pre-Clovis model as suggested above. This would go with the idea that somehow, humans arrived in North America, spread out, then popped out Clovis Culture soon after. Some of the sites are much earlier, but as far as I know, all the earliest sites have very questionable artifacts or dating that is not very secure.

I am not certain, but I think most of the North American archaeologists who so forcefully argued against pre-Clovis of any form have either moved off that position, stopped talking, or died off. Now, I believe, most North American archaeologists accept that there is a distinct possibility that there is what I would call a “near-Pre-Clovis.” But, since there are just over one dozen sites across two continents, one must be reserved in assuming this. Such a small number of sites could represent a small number of aberrant if well meaning interpretations of sites that have something wrong with them. I personally have excavated many, many archaeological sites, and I have seen things that can’t be explained. Personally, I think some of the late pre-Clovis sites are good. But, I would not be surprised if an all knowing alien with a time machine landed nearby and proved that I was wrong.

The CM Mastodon Site: Humans in the New World at 130,000 years?

The Cerutti Mastodon site is in San Diego County, California. The site was excavating in the early 1990s by a team from the San Diego Museum of Natural History. If you ever get a chance to visit that museum, do so. It is one of the many museums of Balboa Park, which also includes the famous San Diego Zoo.

The finds at this site include a juvenile Mastodon, Mammut Americanum, as well as dire wolf, horse, ground sloth, camel, and mammoth.

The site is dated using Uranium-thorium dating on the mastodon bone, to 130,000 +/- 9,400 years b.p.

A recent analysis of the site, just published in the journal Nature, claims that the bones show evidence of human modification, and that some stones also found on the site show evidence of having been used to modify the bones.

The modification suggested is the smashing of bone to extract marrow, and possibly, to make some flakes or otherwise modify the bone to make tools.

The authors of the paper suggest that there are, as commonly agreed by North American archaeologists, four criteria that a site must meet to be considered a candidate for early pre-Clovis human evidence:

1) archaeological evidence is found in a clearly defined and undisturbed geologic context;

2) age is determined by reliable radiometric dating;

3) multiple lines of evidence from interdisciplinary studies provide consistent results; and

4) unquestionable artefacts are found in primary context

They argue that all of these are met. From the abstract:

The CM site contains spiral-fractured bone and molar fragments, indicating that breakage occured while fresh. Several of these fragments also preserve evidence of percussion. The occurrence and distribution of bone, molar and stone refits suggest that breakage occurred at the site of burial. Five large cobbles (hammerstones and anvils) in the CM bone bed display use-wear and impact marks, and are hydraulically anomalous relative to the low-energy context of the enclosing sandy silt stratum. 230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicates a burial date of 130.7?±?9.4 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of an unidentified species of Homo at the CM site during the last interglacial period (MIS 5e; early late Pleistocene), indicating that humans with manual dexterity and the experiential knowledge to use hammerstones and anvils processed mastodon limb bones for marrow extraction and/or raw material for tool production. Systematic proboscidean bone reduction, evident at the CM site, fits within a broader pattern of Palaeolithic bone percussion technology in Africa, Eurasia, and North America. The CM site is, to our knowledge, the oldest in situ, well-documented archaeological site in North America and, as such, substantially revises the timing of arrival of Homo into the Americas.

That the site is in a good geological context is apparently beyond question, as far as I know. The “refitting” referred to is where bits and pieces of one thing that was broken apart can be glued back together, showing that since the breaking event not much has moved around, which helps to argue that the site is not too messed up by geological processes. The dating seems good. Everything seems good.

Yay, an early site showing humans in North America way before we ever thought!

But wait, not so fast …

Why this site could be real, and other comments on the early Americas

Archaeologists have a conceptual problem with discontinuity. They don’t believe in it.

Say you are working in a previously unstudied part of the world (there are none, but pretend). You find a site with some pottery on it, and date the site to 1,000 years ago. In the same area, you find several sites, of various dates, from 1,000 years ago to 4,000 years ago, but they are all sites with chipped stone tools on them and no pottery. But then, you finally find another pottery bearing site. The pottery looks different, and the site was fairly deep down, so when you get your dates back from the lab and they are about 4,000 years old, you are not surprised.

And, now, you know that pottery using people lived here from 4,000 years ago to 1,000 years ago, right?

Wrong. It is possible that people showed up here with pottery, and left, leaving behind non-pottery using people, then came back later. Or, people moved here with pottery, or invented or were introduced to pottery, 4,000 years ago, then stopped using it for some reason, then pottery made a return, somehow, more recently. The problem is, most archaeologists will not accept that once something happens, it can unhappen, even though we actually do know of places in the world where pottery was brought there with the first people, then forgotten about or rejected for some reason, later.

So, here’s the idea. During warm periods, like the interglacial of roughly the age of the CM site, and the present, hominins tend to spread. Even the ones that like warmer regions, maybe not even humans, spread around during warm periods, and spread north. So, naturally, some of them get to the New World somehow, and these are them. They don’t even have to be chipped stone tool using humans. They could be bone breakers. They could be bigfoot! They could be anything.

Now, this may seem like a crazy idea, and it almost certainly is. But, the rejection of occupation as early as 130,000 years ago because we have no evidence of anything half that old requires that the new world can be occupied in only one way: something or someone shows up, then they never leave. This is in direct conflict with the known migrations of large mammals, many of which migrated either to the New World from the Old World, or the other way round, several times over that last 5 or more million years, and most of which do not exist in the place they migrated to now.

Why the Old World makes the CM site highly unlikely

I know an archaeologist who once said this. She said, teaching her class, that the discovery of a house structure at about 5,000 years ago (by the way, it might have been the house structure I discovered, which for a time was the oldest one in North America) tells us that by 5,000 years ago, Native Americans had a concept of building a house, like a wigwam, and the technology to do so. I once read an archaeological monograph that suggested that the presence in some 3,000 year old pottery of impressions of woven material show that by that time Native Americans could weave cloth. One textbook refers to the earliest fire in North America (several thousands of years back) indicating that we now knew that by that time, at least, Native Americans had fire and thus could possibly cook their food.

I’ve read and heard North American archaeologists say things like this over and over again. These statements assume that the first proto-Native American people to come to the new world, say as just-pre-Clovis people, must have arrived naked and technology free!

People in the Old World had chipped stone technology, whereby stones were used to break stones in a very systematic (and not too easy to learn) way to produce, ultimately, tools. Our ancestors had this technology before the genus Homo existed. In fact, it may be the case that our ancestors were stone tool chipping bipedal apes for as long before the rise of the genus Homo as after (this remains to be pinned down). Modern humans have existed on this planet for only a fraction of the time that hominins were making chipped stone tools. Until the abrupt and dramatic near perfect elimination of chipped stone technology in recent centuries, chipped stone tool technology was as much a part of human behavior and culture as walking on two legs was.

We know this because of all that Old World archaeology that has been done. Despite the limited understanding of world prehistory by many North American archaeologists, the truth is that a human (even a non-fully modern human) presence in the New World would have chipped stone tools with it.

If a creature was at the CM site with a culture that lacked chipped stone tools, but that used hammer and anvil stones to break up bone, it was an ape, not a hominin. It was Gigantopithecus, or something. Bigfoot! CM is potentially believable as a site if it occurred in a larger time horizon with definitive human evidence. In other words, a bunch of chomped up elephant bones down the way from clear unambiguous human occupation on a landscape with many sites of that date might be acceptable as a human site, but not this. Not just pounded bones with no other cultural manifestations.

Now, I want to add new rules to the ones listed above.

5) The artifacts have to include evidence of proper chipped stone tool technology, as this is a ubiquitous trait of Homo and proto-Homo

6) Among the chipped stone, there must be both flakes and pieces that are flaked, because many natural processes will produce one or the other (usually flaked pieces) without human engagement.

7) The flakes must exhibit many cases of clear striking platforms, the part where the flake is hit to make it fly off the parent rock, and those striking platforms must be mostly below 90 degrees angle, because that is the experimentally established difference between “natural” flakes (including those made by cars running over rocks and rocks falling off cliffs, etc.) and human made proper flakes.

8) If flaked bone is invoked as an artifact type, the flakes must be numerous and have the same low angle of percussion, and there must as noted above, also be stone flakes.

This is the underlying fact that must be understood by people considering the CM site as human. Humans bust up bones, but busted up bones in the absence of any other evidence of human activity does not constitute unquestionable artifactual nature. Ever.

Just to make sure that I was still up to date on bone breakage taphonomy, the study of how to interpret bone breakage, I asked Professor Martha Tappen of the University of Minnesota, a bone taphonomist, for her opinion about the site. She told me, “I would say that the breaks appear to be consistent with human breakage, but quite possibly other causes, too, such as backhoes and perhaps other scenarios involving trampling. Other evidence is needed to support the idea that people reached the new world at this early time.”

What really happened at CM

I spent a certain amount of time living among the elephants of the African Rain Forest. Well, OK, I wan’t actually “living among them” but I was living there doing archaeology and other things, and they were there too. In fact, I studied elephant movement and trial making, and in so doing, observed a lot of places where elephants tromp around.

Some of the elephants we observed in the Ituri (along with the afore mentioned Professor Tappen) which had been killed over the years by Efe hunters (they are the traditional elephant hunters of the region), died on or near regular elephant trails. Once an elephant is all butchered up or scavenged, I assume the living elephants walk around the remains, though in some areas they have been known to play around with the bones of the dead. But eventually, the bones get incorporated with the undergrowth and the sediment, and get trampled by the elephants. The elephants also trample rocks. I saw locations where the elephants walked a lot, including trails and one location where they had dug a cave to obtain sediment that they would eat, where there was so much elephant trampling of stone that most of the stone looked human modified.

CM site has several animals, including some large ones. Something about this site attracted animals that then died, but at one point were alive. This is a very common phenomenon in paleontology, and is not fully understood. It is very likely that the broken up bones and the seemingly modified stones look the way they do because huge multi-ton animals stepped on them repeatedly.

But what if …

I don’t want to rule out CM out of hand. I don’t want to do this because Archaeology is full of stuff that was ruled out by orthodoxy then later found out to be important or real, but data was lost because of the narrow mindedness of the narrow minded. I believe it is appropriate and necessary to reserve a part of our dogma for possibilities, evidence for things that we are pretty sure are not real but that have just enough credibility, just enough of a question, to allow for a later surprise. I would love to see more large mammal sites of the late Pleistocene excavated carefully to see what they look like. A program of exploration for and investigation of sites during and near the Last Glacial Maximum in the Western US is a good idea, and should yield some very interesting paleontological results. If there was some kind of a hominin running around then — which is very unlikely and indeed almost impossible to imagine — but if there was one, it would eventually be bumped into. Meanwhile, think of all the cool extinct animal stuff we would get to learn no matter what the human prehistoric story turns out to be!

For several years, in the 1980s and early 90s, I lived in Zaire (now Congo) for several months out of each year (generally between May and January, roughly), and for much of that time I was in the Ituri with the Lese and Efe. During that time, I spent much of the time in the forest with the Efe (very few of the researches on that long term multidisciplinary project did that — most spent their time with the Lese for various reasons).

To go from our study site to the grocery store (which was not really a grocery store because they did not exist in that part of Zaire, but a city with markets) was about a week’s trip or more. Only a few days of that was driving, the rest fixing the broken truck, doing the shopping, etc. So, one did this infrequently. There was no local market during my time there, though one opened up 10 clicks away for a while, at which one might or might not be able to buy a chicken or a yam, if you showed up early.

I (and this pertains to most of my colleagues as well, only a few of us would be at the site at a time) would buy sacks of rice and beans and other long term food items in the city, and carefully curate them at the base camp, a small village constructed of wattle and daub leaf-roofed huts and outhouses. When I went to the forest just to live with or observe the Efe, I would bring the exact amount of food I would need to survive if all I did was feed myself. This way my presence would not affect the Efe’s food budget. But, this is a sharing culture and it would have been very bad for me to just eat that food. I feely shared my food with my fellow camp members, and they shared their food, and my food was almost exactly the same as their local food (rice was grown there) except I would have beans and they are not local. Otherwise, the same.

This meant that I ate what they ate.

Other times, I would hire Efe and maybe one Lese to go with me to the forest to carry out research. I’d be careful to hire them for limited amounts of time to not disrupt their lives too much, but there was very little difference between them working for me and, say, getting honey during honey season. I would only ask them to work with me for a few hours a day and they would otherwise forage. On these trips, I brought more food, for them, because our geographic location and the work we were doing interfered with their normal food getting activities, so I made up for that. But still, during these times we ate plenty of forest foods.

So, what do the Efe (and their Lese compatriot) eat?

Locally, the plant diet is insufficient nutritionally, and often, children are undernourished. There is a hunger season during which the plants from the forest and gardens are rare or absent at the same time, and this is often the death season. No one dies form starving, really (though that apparently can happen) but they have another dangerous disease, and the lack of food may put an ill individual over the top. During one bad hungers season, a small family attempted mass suicide, and mostly succeeded.

Locally, there is no beef, or as is the case a couple of hundred clicks away in most directions, commercially harvested fish. They have goats but the are ceremonial and seem to be never eaten. The Lese have chickens, a few, and they are eaten now and then. The wild animal foods they eat are incredibly important. Without that, they would be in very bad shape.

The most common animals they eat, as in day to day and mundane, are a form of antelope called the Blue Duiker, and monkeys, usually Mangabeys. During a certain season they eat a fair umber of another animal, like but not exactly a duiker, called a water Cheverotain. But since food supply is so unpredictable, they are always on the lookout, and they eat everything. A song bird or bat that flies too close may be batted down with a machete, a Honey Badger that stumbles up on a group of resting Efe may be chased own, an Elephant Shrew that happens on a camp will be dispatched by an archer and cooked up. The only time I ever saw the Efe not go after an animal that happened to show up is when a small herd of elephants came along, and the Efe made a lot of noise to chase them off, while at the same time making plans to hide in the nearby hide-from-the-elephant trees (yes, they have them.) And snakes. Something odd going on there with snakes (see below).

One of the focal points of my research was to look at how animals reacted to the Efe’s presence, and it is striking. Since the Efe will kill and eat almost anything they encounter, most of the animals are very careful to avoid the Efe, and even the Efe’s habitually used trails.

There is a certain amount of elephant hunting. Pygmies, generally, are the African elephant hunters, and apparently, have been so for a very long time. The importance of elephant is very under-appreciated by most experts. The data show that most of the food the Efe eat is plant food, and animal food makes up a percentage of their diet typical for tropical or subtropical African hunter gatherers. But those data never include elephant. I’ve estimated that the total amount of elephant meat they eat over medium periods of time, left to their own, is about the same as all the other meat combined. This happens because when someone does kill an elephant (a rare event compared to the daily killing of a duiker or other more common mammal), everyone from everywhere shows up and gorges on that meat for a few weeks.

So, even though most researchers would classify elephant as uncommon in their diet and therefor not a major contributor to the diet, they’ve simply got that wrong. It is a big deal.

Beyond that, the range of animals is huge, because the number of species native to the area is huge. Oddly, the Efe I was with (and these were more than one distinct group) didn’t seem to eat snakes, tough I know that others do. These Efe also often have a particular species of snake as their totem animal, and you don’t eat your totem animal. So, maybe that is the reason.

Because Efe live the life they live, one without the privilege of access to unlimited supplies of cattle flesh, swine meat, domestic birds, and commercially caught or raised fish, they have a wide dietary niche. Because they live in a remote part of the African rain forest, this list includes a lot of animals many may have never even heard of, or that most regard as exotic, though they are very common there. They live a life where the plant foods often fail them, and collectively do not provide a sufficiently nutritious diet, so they do not have the privilege of eschewing meat, and in fact, perhaps with the knowledge that meat is the real hunger-killer in their environment, they prefer to spend as much time as they can chewing meat.

And I spent a lot of time sharing their culture and ecology with them, and in so doing, had the privilege of getting much closer to truly experiencing another culture than most ever get. Close enough, in fact, to know that I wasn’t even close, and knowing that is a privilege the dilettante missionary or subscriber to National Geo can not have.

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.

I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to the world’s most “remote” research site to be found among human settlements anywhere on the planet. Jack’s research involved looking at what happened to Efe Pygmy “camps” after they were abandoned. The Efe hunter-gatherers were known to move camp an average of once every two weeks or so. An archaeologist would want to know what happens to a camp once it is abandoned because many of the ancient sites we excavate are exactly that, abandoned settlements. Jack had been tracking Efe movement and camp abandonment patterns for one year, and the expectation was that I would continue his data collection for another year, as he and his wife returned to Montana to write up their results.

“Oh, excuse, me have you moved yet? No? OK, see you tomorrow.”

When we arrived at the camp, which was located very near the Lese villages … the Lese are the farming people who with an overlapping culture and economy with the Efe … there were a lot of people there. This was a camp with several adult couples and a number of kids of all ages from baby up to nearly teenage. Since this was Jack and Helen’s last visit, they brought gifts to give to the people who had helped them out for the previous year. Project regulations and ethics required that any gifts be irrelevant to diet or economics, not usable as tools of poaching, not likely to change people’s status, and be likely to be used up or worn out quickly. So, everybody got plastic green sunglasses, the really cheap kind you buy by the dozen at a party store to use as favors.

It was a party, a good time, lots of conversation, some weeping over the fact that the much beloved Jack and Helen would be moving back to the States, lots of fun with the green sunglasses, lots of data collected. Then, we left, and the next day we returned to map in the locations of the small dome shaped leaf-covered huts and other structures, fire hearths, stick chairs, drying racks, midden piles, trampled central-use areas, and so on and so forth. This is what the abandoned camp of a people known in the literature, and generally to outsiders, as “nomads” looked like. There was lots of stuff there, but all of it was made from materials available on the spot, transformed from wild growing plants to architecture and kitchen furniture, but eventually thrown out or left behind. Everything else was carried by the Efe, in one trip, to the next camp they would build from natural materials. Or almost everything.

And the forest had it’s seasonal cycle as well. During the dry season, which lasted several weeks around November and December, certain animals were easier to hunt because the streams they hid in, or that would impair hunter’s movement through the forest, were very low. Staring in late June and running into August, the famous African Killer Honey Bees (the wild version of our own domesticated honey bee) produced copious honey in nests about 100 feet up in the forest canopy. The Efe men were very dedicated to harvesting this honey.

If you think about that information for a bit you’ll notice possible conflict. For example, the Efe are drawn to the deep forest for Honey Season, but this overlaps with the mid-year harvest and planting. The November harvest and planting overlapped and conflicted with the dry season hunting. You might guess that men and women would have different opinions about where to reside during these periods of conflicts. The women would never stay overnight in a farm village during harvest; they moved each day by foot from the Efe camp to the gardens and back. But as it became more desirable to camp farther and farther into the forest, that commute became longer and longer. We say (usually tongue in cheek) that Western couples fight over certain things, like money or how to raise the kids or what channel to watch on TV. Efe couples argue over where to put the camp in relation to the horticultural villages vs. the deep forest.

I ended up never continuing Jack and Helen’s data collection project. That I would spend a year doing Part II of another graduate student’s thesis was an idea cooked up by our shared advisor, but neither Jack nor I saw the benefit in doing that. He had enough data, I had other things to do. So, instead, I studied the larger scale structure of Efe nomadism, of their movements across the landscape and their use of forest resources.

I discovered that each Efe group possessed (and that is a carefully chosen word) rights to a trail, usually one single trail but sometimes something a bit more complicated, that ran from the villages out into the forest. Along this trail, at intervals of almost exactly 1.5 kilometers, was a potential camp site. Of these camp sites, a handful were used again and again as the Efe moved through their seasonal cycle. Some of the other camps were used only occasionally. This was interesting, because it meant that even though the efe might move over 20 times a year, the part of their movement in the deep forest had them return to the same exact four or five camps again and again for years. They would also repeatedly use the same camps near the villages, but since village farmers often moved their swidden gardens, wiping out grown-over sections of the forest in one area and abandoning a garden elsewhere, the Efe “village camps” … the camps used during planting and harvest seasons … were often destroyed or otherwise became inconvenient.

And now we come to the interesting anthropological lesson that emerges when we look at other cultures, in this case, the Efe and Lese. In books and articles about the Pygmies of the Central African rain forest, the Pygmies (including the Efe as well as other groups with different names) are often called “nomads.” Nomads, we all know, are people who move a lot. The term also invokes, for many, a certain amount of randomness, or at least, uncertainty in where one might be moving next. There is indeed uncertainty, of a sort, among the Efe as to when they are going to move and where to. But this is simply because one does not need to decide when or where until it is time to do so. There is a constant negotiation happening between members of a particular group as to when to move, and which camp to move to. If there is a big enough difference between different families in a camp, they can easily move to two different locations for a while, or one group can stay and others leave. But these differences never lead to the men going one place while the women go elsewhere, even though the biggest conflict is usually between men and women. The point is, their movement is not random, but well considered and systematic, yet in at the scale of days or weeks in advance, not very predictable at any level of detail.

Yet, at the same time, the Efe are the opposite of nomadic. Consider their Lese village farmer neighbors. They live in permanent villages. But, over time, the Lese use up garden space and firewood in the vicinity of their village. Also, a mini-epidemic of disease in a given village will cause people to not want to live there any more. So, over the course of a person’s life, say a person who lives to 70 years old, one might move seven or eight times from one village to another just in service to the agricultural cycle.

But wait, there’s more. Among the villagers, men and women, when they are married, move to one parent’s village or another for a while, then try to start their own village, and that sometimes does not work out, so they move again. So, around the age of marriage, a person may move three or four times in two or three years. A young man might spend two or three years working at a plantation far from their village, or spend some time in the army. A woman and her children might move to near a chief’s village if her husband is caught doing something wrong and forced into indentured service for a few months. Every now and then the government comes along and moves any village that is too far out in the forest closer to the road so it is easier to tax them. Then later, the government disappears (remember, this is a remote area) and everyone moves back. If grandma gets really sick part of the family might move far away to a mission hospital, because the family is required to supply food and labor to support grandma’s stay in what amounts to a hospice. And so on and so forth.

Betweeen all of these factors, Lese farmers might move 20 times in their life.

Let’s view “nomadism” among the Efe hunter gatherers and the Lese villagers from a slightly different perspective. Let’s ask the question: How many different places have you slept a total of 100 nights or more? That eliminates short forays, fishing trips, very short marriages, etc. Or, putting it a slightly different way, let’s look at the list of places one lives ranked by how many nights one has slept there in a lifetime. Nomads, given our usual conception of them, should have a very long list with a small number of nights at each place, while settled people should have a list with a short number of localities each associated with hundreds or thousands of nights, even if there is a tail of several places with a small number of nights each down hear the bottom of the list.

If we look at the “nomadic” hunter gatherers of the Ituri Forest, the Efe, their list will have five or six places that account for 80% or more of their nights, if we adjust for the frequently destroyed camps in or near the gardens. The Lese farmers, on the other hand, will have over a dozen localities with a several hundred nights in each. By that reckoning, the Lese are more nomadic over a lifetime, even if the Efe are constantly moving.

Minnesotans who go away for college and whose families have a cabin (maybe a series of cabins over time) up north and who spend part of their lives moving opportunistically from apartment to apartment in South Minneapolis are pretty nomadic too. I myself moved once before the age of 16, then about every six months for the next 15 years, chasing relationships, jobs, schools, and doing field work.

Finally, let’s look at nomadism in one more way. If you move every several years, occasionally more often such as around the time of marriage, then at any given time the landscape you know is the landscape you live in, and the memories of details of the landscape of your childhood or other times gone by both fades and becomes obsolete. But if you move constantly, but over the same exact landscape all the time like the Efe do, then your knowledge of every bit of the landscape is detailed an intense and constantly updated and renewed. The Efe know every root that ever tripped them and every rocky pile that ever harbored a small forest animal procurable for dinner and every mature fruit tree and every patch of tasty forest yams in the place they live. The other part of my research, looking at Efe diet, came to this conclusion: There is a fair amount of food in the rain forest, but the only way to find any of it is to know in advance where it is located. Otherwise, the costs in time and energy to discover it excede its caloric value.

The Efe are not nomadic. They are, rather, constant inspectors of their rather large home, centered on their traditionally used trail, consisting of a half dozen venues to sleep and live.

More stuff about the Congo

A while back I wrote a Novella, as a fundraising effort for the Secular Student Alliance, set in the eastern Congo. A cleaned up version of it is available here: Sungudogo

You can read the harrowing real life story of a season of field research in the same region, in a series of blog posts, by clicking HERE (then click through to the next blog post, and the next, and the next, until you’ve read them all!).

And, THIS LINK will get you to a selection of other stories set in the region.

Jack’s research was written up here:

Ethnoarchaeology Among the Efe Pygmies, Zaire: Spatial Organization of Campsites, by J. W. Fisher, Jr. and H. C. Strickland. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78:473–484.

All traditional forager groups incorporate hunting and butchery into a broader cultural context. There is often ritual associated with hunting. Animals, especially mammals, are dismembered in stereotypical ways ways with some sort of meaning associated with the process. In many cases, meat goes through a process of “distribution and redistribution” whereby specific body parts are distributed to individuals based on their role in the hunt, and then, these parcels of meat are redistributed among the group on the basis of need, generally very evenly.

It appears that foragers value meat above other sources of food even if those other sources are more life-staining by being a larger part of the diet. The word “hunger” may sometimes really mean “hunger for meat” more than simple hunger for food. Although anthropologists have tried to link hunting success to reproductive success, this link is unclear. But, some concept of hunting ability or reliability seems to be associated in many cultures with one’s value in the group.

Almost all hunting of mammals is done by men in all foraging societies, with a few exceptions. The exceptions do not make up a large percentage of the meat acquired, and are rare even within the societies in which they occur. A majority of non-meat foods are obtained by females, but a larger percentage of non-meat foods are obtained my males than meat obtained by females. Many reasons have been given for this but few of the seemingly pragmatic reasons seem to hold up well to further scrutiny, such as “hunting is dangerous and women have kids.” Women engage in all sorts of dangerous foraging activities. It may be that the best explanation for the sexual bias in foraging vis-a-vis animal and plant foods is to be found in the cultural roles of hunting.

Dietarily, meat is probably very important for most groups as food for pregnant and nursing women and young children. There are special dietary demands for such individuals that may not be well met with only wild plant foods, but that are easily addressed with meat. Putting this all together, one might suggest that obtaining and distributing meat by men is an important form of parental investment.

The archaeological record shows a long association of chipped stone tools made of selected conchoidally fracturing rock and meat acquisition. Early sites have both stone tools of this type and bones that seem to show marks of butchery with these tools. This has led many archaeologists to emphasize the role of hunting in human evolution. However, chipped stone tools do not leave preservable evidence of use on plant foods or other materials, because these foods and materials are not found on archaeological sites. The wear patterns on the tools themselves can sometimes be studied and these indicate that many stone tools were used extensively on plant material, either food items or objects of use (i.e., digging sticks or some other wooden implement). It may be that most stone tools were used for tasks other than hunting and butchery. Also, both stone tools and cut-marked bones are rare prior to about two million years ago, so piecing together a good prehistory of tools and animal acquisition is probably asking too much of the data. Nonetheless, we see evidence of the use of animal products quite early in human evolution; this is not a practice invented by modern humans, but rather, one practiced by human ancestors as well.

Modern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hunt mammals and eat them. The total amount of meat consumed by a group of chimpanzees over the course of a year is much lower than the typical amount of meat in the diet of modern human hunter gatherers, but it is a regular addition to the diet. There are a lot of groups of chimpanzees for which we can not say hunting is documented, but every group of chimps that has been studied by primatologists exhibit this behavior. There is a large amount of variation across chimpanzee groups in how hunting is carried out and how much meat is typically obtained. Most of the meat is in the form of other primates (monkeys) but other mammals are taken. Non-mammal sources are also used by chimpanzees including birds and eggs and other vertebrates (but no fish, probably). When chimpanzees hunt monkeys, and are successful, the level of attention given to the captured food source is inordinate compared to, say, finding a good source of fruit. Chimpanzees of both sexes are excited about the prospect of getting a bit of monkey flesh.

Insect food is obtained by chimpanzees and also by many other primates. It may be the case that virtually all primates eat some insects (some eat mostly insects), though there are several species not especially known for it.

We think that the last common ancestor (LCA) of chimpanzees and humans was more chimp like than human like. Also, we think that this LCA was more like a common chimp (Pan troglodytes) than a bonobo (Pan paniscus). Since modern chimps across Africa, including those that have been separated from each other for a very long time, hunt mammals, and modern human foragers and their immediate ancestors are clearly documented as hunters of mammals, it is reasonable to postulate that the LCA also carried out this behavior.

Eating mammalian meat and other animal products is probably part of our evolutionary heritage at least since the chimp-human split. Modern foragers and, perhaps, modern chimps seem to attribute an importance to meat greater than one would expect from meat’s caloric contribution to the diet, and in modern foragers, hunting, butchery, and consumption of meat is tied in with numerous cultural practices.

Meat is probably an important contribution to the human “palaeolithic” diet and an even more important contribution to the human cultural repertoire. The invention of certain technologies, starting with chipped stone tools, allowed for the increased role of meat in our diet, though whether or not that increase happened in any given time or place is difficult to ascertain. For well over a century, mostly male archaeologists have held a fascination with the often phallic looking implements of hunting found in prehistoric cultures around the world, and in doing so have communed with the mostly male (we might guess) producers and users of those implements in the past. The human practices of hunting, butchery, and the associated often elaborate technologies are embedded in a meaning-drenched symbolic system that speaks to the role of males vis-a-vis females and children. If systems of kinship, marriage, and social power are characterized by an ever present though differentially strong patriarchy, hunting and butchery, and the tools of that trade, are material manifestations of that patriarchy.

Photograph (c) 1991 by Greg Laden

I knew a guy, an older Efe Pygmy man, with one leg. When I first arrived in the Ituri Forest I was shown by my colleague an abandoned camp that a group of Efe Pygmies has only recently been living in, and told “everyone in this group lived here but the old man and his wife … he’s a bit contentious and there was an argument.” Having read all the literature written in English about Pygmies, I was aware of the fact that these foraging people, who moved frequently — perhaps ten times a year or more — would often change the composition of their residence groups to reflect forming and breaking alliances among people who often, but not always, lived together. After hanging out in the camp long enough for my colleague to collect some data, we went back to the road via a different path and passed the old man, Kobou (pronounced “Ko-bo-oo”), and his wife in a small clearing in a freshly cut garden. “Strange,” I thought, “They live in a square hut. Everyone else lives in a dome-shaped hut. I guess some Efe live in square huts.”

But no. Kobou is the only Efe I ever came across to always build square huts. Maybe somewhere else in the Central African Rain Forest, but not around these parts.

Thin, old, bearded, fierce eyes contagious laugh and one leg. Kobou¹ was the father of one of my main informants. Kobou would come by the research base camp whenever I was there, more or less daily. He’d sit in a chair and chill for a while, then we might chat about one thing or another. Then he’d say “I’ve come to get my plantains” or “I’ve come to get my mohogo” or “I’ve come to get my [fill in the blank with something to eat that we had growing in our fields]”. The base camp did have a rather large garden, and the main purpose of the garden was so that Kobou and a handful of other Efe could come by now and then and claim some of the food.

“You’d better cut your plantains, then,” I’d say.

Kobou had lost his leg to a snake. He had been bitten by a full grown Gabon Viper. The Gabon Viper is one of the scariest of snakes. It’s head is huge, it’s body very stout, and it’s venom is the richest venom known in a snake, both neurotoxic and haemotoxic.

When my friend was bitten by the snake, he was driven by someone from a nearby plantation to a hospital, to have is leg cut off, which was the only way to save his life. In the days I lived there, this drive required many many hours (or a day or two), and would beat the hell out of the truck. But in those days, they were able to drive him there in a few hours. At 120 kpm, it would have been a two or three hour drive.

But the reason that the road was so good is because of the sort of policy satirized in King Leopold’s Soliloquy. In those days, a Belgian Colonial Administrator would drive a vehicle at 100 kilometers per hour down this road with a glass of water on his dashboard. Wherever water spilled form his full glass, he would stop, and his agents would beat and/or maim the nearest villagers. This encouraged the villagers to keep the dirt road in perfect condition by constant attention to any rivulets or potholes, using hand labor and simple tools.

Eventually, the revolution came, in it’s own way, and the Belgians, guilty of a decades-long holocaust, got their due. They were burned to death in the buildings they hid in, they were shot, strangled, and drowned, and a few got away.

At a later time, I stayed in one of King Leopold’s mansions. Well, not really. We kept some of our stuff in the mansion. The mansion had no roof, and was filled with birds and bats, and their guano. It was better to stay in a tent, outside, even though one would risk being trampled by a hippo or hassled by a hyena. This was Ishango, known locally as “The Most Beautiful Place on the Earth.” It is. But they should really tear down those old mansions (Two stood there side by side) and neaten the place up just a little. Leopold had mansions here and there across his Congo, though he never actually visited the place.

I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.

Leopold did not say that. Clemens puts those words in his mouth as a political and social parody. But it is absolutely accurate; had Leopold said those word he would have been speaking the truth.

¹Here and elsewhere, when I write about people in the Congo, I use fake names. There are reasons.

These problems may be overstated. Referring to someone by a physical trait isn’t necessarily considered negative. African Americans are Blacks and Euro-Americans are Whites. But even in these contexts, these references to physical traits can be problematic, perhaps depending on what is meant or who uses the word. “Black is Beautiful” (you might have to be older to remember that phrase). One of my best friends calls herself a “Black Girl.” On the other hand, Donald Trump says he has “a great relationship with the Blacks” and when I’m in South Africa and I hear someone use the term “The Blacks” I become wary, because the next thing the person says may not be very nice. Still, it is not universally the case that a reference to physical features is negative. (I should also mention that in Francophone contexts, “Pygmy” is considered superior to another term often used, “Negrito.”)

The term “Pygmy” as used in biology is unfortunate and also causes confusion. I’ve met people who thought that “Pygmy hippos” were hippos that lived where Pygmies live, but ironically the pygmy hippos live in West Africa only and the Pygmy people live in Central Africa only. I don’t want to go into some of the confusion I’ve encountered between “Pygmy chimps” and Pygmy people. One way to solve this problem, of course, is to change the animal names. These are common names (though the word “Pygmy” is sometimes the root for the Latin binomial which is harder to change) and they can be discarded or altered. In fact, that has happened with the pygmy chimps, which are never called that any more for this reason (and the fact that they are not really smaller than regular chimps). You probably know of them as bonobos.

The real problem is probably the use of the word “pygmy” as a derogatory term, including its use as a slur of someone’s intelligence.

This sort of problem is widespread. There are many cases of people who’s “name” is somehow considered negative. One of the more interesting examples is the term used to refer to the traditionally foraging people of southern Africa, including the Ju/’hoansi and Baswara people, but also many other groups. The two terms of concern are “San” and “Bushmen.” The former is said to be a negative term applied to these folks by their cattle keeping neighbors who looked down on them. It may mean something like “wild.” It is part of the phrase “Khoisan” which relates to the term “Khoi Khoi.” Put simply, San are foragers and Khoi Khoi (or just Khoi) are herders, but otherwise the people referred to by these terms share languages and other aspects of their culture, and are physically similar. Khoisan (Khoi+San) refers to all of these folks together. (These terms are mainly South African and older, used in the 17th century and onwards and not used so much recently.) The term “Bushmen” also means “wild” and that is considered an inappropriate term as well.

During the 1980s, when various anthropologists were working with groups of San/Bushmen in Namibia and Botswana to help them organize politically, they (the San/Bushmen) of that area decided to call themselves “Bushmen.” There were two reasons for this. The primary reason is that the word “Bushmen” was widely known and they wanted to use a term that everyone would recognize as they strove for political and cultural recognition and improved status. The second reason is that by this time it was cool to be a Bushman. Bushmen are Beautiful, if you will. So Bushmen is the correct term in that area of Namibia and Botswana. But, to the south in South Africa, the term “Bushman” never caught on among the politically thoughtful. There, “San” was considered to be a better word. Many of these folks adopted the term “San” in South Africa, while their distant relatives to the north eschewed the term. And that’s the simple version of the story. There are many different cultural groups with different languages living in different parts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa who prefer their more local name such as Barwa or Sho or other terms.

So, in the case of the San/Bushmen (let your eyes settle on either of those words depending on if you are from Botswana or South Africa!) one part of the solution was to ask the people what they want. This has been done with the Pygmies to some extent. I did it myself. I have had this conversation with Efe people on many occasions. Efe is the term used, by themselves, for Pygmies that live in a certain part of the Ituri Forest in the Congo. The Efe are both the largest and smallest Pygmies. They live over a larger area of Africa than any other group, and there are probably more Efe than any other group of Pygmies. Since Pygmy stature (they are indeed short) is of such great interest, every group of Pygmies has been repeatedly measured by anthropologists. So, we know that the Efe are the shortest of the Pygmies. Largest (in area) and smallest (in stature).

A local term for the Efe and other Pygmies of the Ituri is “Bambuti” (Singular: Mbuti). The Pygmies that the famous anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived with and wrote about called themselves Mbuti, and they live to the south of the Efe, speak a different language, and have some other cultural differences. Having said that, I did some work in the area of overlap between Efe and Mbuti and the distinction isn’t perfectly abrupt or consistent. Anyway, the non-Efe people of the area often use the word “Bambuti” for the Efe (and the Mbuti) but some people consider “Bambuti” to be a little derogatory. But not everyone thinks that.

The Efe I’ve spoken to know the term Pygmée (the French for Pygmy) and they don’t regard it as derogatory. They never use that word to refer to themselves, however, which makes it inappropriate for local use. The problem is, though, that just like the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia and Botswana recognized, if we want to speak of these folks in a broader context–in classrooms or among those interested in human rights in the area, etc.–we are forced to use the word Pygmy so people have a clue what we are talking about. And, as far as I know, the Efe don’t particularly mind.

I suppose it is more important to be respectful than to speak respectfully.

In the matter of insects:

• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Day of the locust. Yum!
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• The curious world of bugs

Life in the forest

• How to kill a monkey
• How to carry your monkey home once you’ve killed it
• A story of my friend Kobou
• Camp life

Cultural Wanderings

• A look at some traditional medicine, cross culturally
• Total eclipse of the sun and/or moon
• Child safety devices
• Shamans, Surgery, and the Driveway of Doom
• Mail order brides and hypergyny

Odds and ends

• If your finger falls off, grab it before the dog gets it!
• Nyamulagira Volcano and Human Evolution
• Michael Jackson Thrilled The Kids in Zaire

It is rather annoying to have locust descend on your crops. Some years it is not too bad, some years it is bad enough to noticeably affect the food supply. But every year there is the potential for revenge, even if it is mostly symbolic.

I first learned of the locust when sitting around the fire one dryish dry-season night with some Efe Pygmies and Lese Villagers. As we sat there, amid the usual night cacophony of insect (and other) noises, the occasional moth-like creature flying into the flames, and all that, a newcomer arrived on the scene: The katydids. Something largish and green would fly around a bit in the fire-light, and suddenly veer into the flames and spend a few seconds writhing around before being consumed and falling into the coals.

On about the third or fourth fiery demise, someone reached over to a katydid that was at the edge of the hearth, picked it up, held it for a second and popped it in his mouth. Was that a joke? A quirk, of this particular person? Did he think it was a potato chip or something? Or was it a cultural practice? And if so, was it common and widespread enough to be part of the cuisine? Of course, I watched for a while and then inquired, and learned the whole locust story minus a few details, which I picked up later by examining the appropriate literature.

And yes, the folks in this region eat them and take special enjoyment in doing so as a matter of revenge. They are probably my favorites insect; They have a nutty taste and are just oily enough to seem sauteed. Very nice.

Termites are also self-oiled and the winged alates are captured locally during the full moon, especially in the dry season, when termites do a night-time mating ritual that involves everybody flying towards the moon at once. (The moon is used as a reference point to get everyone to the same buggy orgy at about the same time.) To catch the termites, you make a light (of fire, traditionally, or with Greg’s Flashlight if he has batteries and lets you) behind a basket. The termites fly from the nest towards the light and get caught into the basket.

One day we got word, spread in advance by some government herald, that the “King of the Pygmies” would be passing down our “road” (read “slippery footpath”) to visit his people. The ensuing sociological events are worthy of another, and probably sombre, essay. Let’s just say that when those considered by some to be sub-human suddenly have a “king” and all the other folks have is a “chief” that there will be anxiety and even violence can erupt. In this case mainly torture of Pygmies. But as I say, that is another story.

Hearing that the “King of the Pygmies” was arriving soon engendered significant cynicism especially among the Pygmies who have no interest in Kings. But to be polite, I inquired as to what he might like to have as a gift, in the event that he actually showed up. And, since it was termite season, and for some reason I in fact had some batteries that were charged up, “termites” was the obvious answer.

It was timed rather well: The termites were captured and put in a fine hand-woven basket the very night before the king arrived.

It turns out twenty-some years ago an infant King Mobi was taken by missionaries to Italy, where he was raised by Catholic Nuns on a diet of, well, Italian food. As you know, Efe and other Pygmies are of short stature, but what you may not know (and most people do in fact get this wrong) is that their stature is not equivalent to the short stature of the fabled “They were shorter back then” Western ancestors famous for gaining stature with changes in diet and so on. More to the point, if you feed a Pygmy from infancy copious pasta and brochette, he does not grow tall, but he will grow corpulent, and King Mobi was. That may seem like an insignificant observation, but since all Efe are skinny and buff, being hunter-gatherers and all, it was odd, in fact impressive, to everyone.

We gave the King the termites just about the time I realized he would likely not really want to eat them. As it turns out, he didn’t even want to look at them. He did want me to take many pictures of him and he wanted to know what I had to drink. And he was not speaking of water. Living, as we were, beyond the beer line, I couldn’t help him much with that.

I have to admit, though, I’m sorta with The King on this. I love me those katydids, and palm grubs are good, but termites are not my favorite bug. Unless, of course, they are mixed with peanut butter, which is another local product. Anything goes well with peanut butter!

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

The people who lived in this village were very familiar with the idea of an anthropologist, and were aware that we had a research facility a few days walk to the east. Others, while they had heard of us, either had never met any of the outsiders or didn’t care much either way about us.

When we initially embarked on our long trek to the village, we carried enough food to get there, but not much more. I was assured by my fellow travelers that the streets of the village would be paved with food, as it were, and that we would not have to carry much with us, and if we brought just a little cash and some tobacco and salt, we could easily trade for plenty of spare rice to get ourselves back to the road fatter than we had left. Since it was technically the tail end of one of the two seasons of widespread reduced food availability, I didn’t much like that idea but I didn’t have a choice. It was simply impossible to carry enough food to make the trip there and back. So we gambled with the odds against us.

And, of course, we lost. We arrived at the village with a kilo of rice and little else, and there we found there was not much food. Even though the rice harvest was just starting, so people weren’t exactly starving, there was nothing close to an abundance. We knew that we could eat while we stayed in the village … there was enough for that … but clearly we’d have to make the trip home without provisions. We’d have to live off the land for the three day walk home … which would probaby be a four day walk since we’d be starving and you go slower when you are starving. (Another story for another time. It was not a good week to be a monkey along our route!)

The village was traditional and I was a guest, so I was treated accordingly, and had to act accordingly. This meant we travelers needed to divide up into appropriate traditional roles and mete ourselves out among the villagers per spec, and thereafter more or less spend our time that way. The Efe men went to hang around with the Efe that were living in the village and they were also able to sit with the village women when they were outside processing food; Our cook went to work and hung with the village women in the mafika … an open air kitchen building with a roof and food stores, cooking gear, etc. … during the heat of the day. And, as the adult male, I was expected to hang around with the other adult males in the baraza … the open air ramada-like roofed-over sitting area in the middle of the village. As men, we would have important things to do in this baraza. Planning things and stuff.

So, I sat there and did my Ethnoarchaeology, hanging out with the other men, observing things and writing it all down, while the women prepared our first meal together, which would include all of the rice we had brought and whatever the village had to offer.

And what did the village have to offer? There were three things besides our rice. Someone had killed an antelope that morning so there was a bit of meat. The meat was cooked in palm oil traded about noon that day with some Budu merchants who had come by to exchange forest products for oil. (The oil was traded for a forest fruit known as “eme” which is not really food but rather medicine.) Then there was sombe. Sombe is wonderful. It is the very young leaves of the casava (manioc, manihot) plant pounded and cooked with palm oil. The process is much more complex than I’ve indicated. It is the main thing to eat that I miss from the region, and impossible to get outside the forest unless you have connections and live in Belgium.

And the third thing was bugs. To be specific, palm larvae. These are grubs of some critter, and you get them from inside a palm tree, which were eaten frequently this time of year. They are fried up in a bit of palm oil which gives both flavor and color, and some salt is added. They are not very flavorful but they are quite nutritious.

When the food was all prepared, the women came over one or two at a time and gave a plate of food to each man. A woman or women associated with a particular man or men as mother, wife, sister, or daughter had prepared each plate and had brought it to the baraza, so of course, our traveling cook, Maria, brought me my plate.

When she handed me the plate, our cook also gave me a knowing look, because she knew that I was not enamored with the traditional roles of her culture and was somewhat uncomfortable getting served along with the other men in the baraza. I returned the look as I glanced down at the plate, and on the plate was some rice, some antelope, some sombe, and about a dozen palm grubs. But there was a small problem. While all the food types were neatly separated into their own zones on my plate, some of the sombe had moved across the plate and joined the palm grubs. A splotch of green leafy food rested among the larvae of the palms.

Maria was five steps away when I called out.

“Maria!”

She stopped and turned. I pointed at my plate.

“Maria, there is some food in my bugs!”

She was close enough to see exactly what I referred to.

It turns out that some jokes translate and some do not. It is all a matter of available symbolic reference and context. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pointed at a plantain or banana peel laying on the ground (these are a main crop for the region) and said to someone “Hey, don’t slip on that!” Every time I did that I amused myself but the person whom I had warned had no clue that this was funny to me, no image of Woody Allen and a giant banana peel came to their mind. The joke was always a dud.

But this time it clicked. Maria laughed heartily and, pointing at me and barely able to talk, explained the joke to the men in the Baraza. They all laughed as well. Maria told the joke to the women back at the mafika, and I could hear their laughter mixed with phrases like “Those white people… they are so funny sometimes” and that sort of thing. The joke spread across the Ituri Forest and it was also retold among anthropologists. In fact, one famous anthropologist giving the keynote address at a major event celebrating Mary Leakey’s birthday told the joke as part of his remarks. Mary Leakey LOL’ed.

Maria, there’s some food in my bugs!!!! Still cracks me up.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!