I took some of the coloured beads and laid them out on the cloth between us. ‘This is red … yellow … and green,’ I said. ‘What do you call them?’
Matay understood and tried to teach me the words for the three colours but I found it really difficult. There were clicks in the middle of words, sort of on top of other consonants as well. And not only that, but the clicks were not all the same!
An elderly woman – she must have been at least seventy – came over to see what I was doing. Her face was deeply lined and she had only a few teeth left. The other women and children treated her with great deference. She held out her hand and I gave her the fragment of beadwork I had made. She turned it over and inspected the threading carefully, then handed it back to, beaming with approval. The other women nodded and smiled as well. Although I felt quite isolated by my lack of understanding of the language, this was a form of communication that did not need words.
Later in the day I had a click-speaking lesson from Bertus. We sat on low wooden stools in the doorway of one of the shelters. Inside the hut, bags and clothes hung from wire hooks, and there were a few reeds with guinea-fowl feathers attached. (This was a traditional game called djani – or the ‘helicopter game’ – a winged toy, with a short thong-and-resin weight at the bottom. Thrown into the air, the reed would spiral down like a sycamore key, and the player would try to catch it with a long stick. One of the hunters later gave me a demonstration.)
Bertus explained that there were four clicks in Ju/’hoansi (pronounced something like ‘Voo–nwasee’, with a click in the middle). The Ju/’hoansi are a group of Bushmen living around the border between northern Namibia and Botswana.3 They are the same group that anthropologists used to call ‘!Kung’. (Although the indigenous people of the Kalahari know themselves by their individual, tribal names (such as Ju/’hoansi), they are happy to be known collectively, and refer to themselves in English, as Bushmen. Fifty years ago, this was a term that many anthropologists avoided, as it was one given to those communities by the first European settlers and it was considered to be derogatory. Anthropologists therefore sought another, more acceptable term, and they settled for a word used by other southern Africans to describe the Bushmen: ‘San’. This word has become common but itself has derogatory overtones as it apparently means ‘cattle thief’.)
Bertus went through the four clicks, accentuating the shape of his mouth and repeating each of them so that I could see where he was placing his tongue in relation to his teeth and soft palate. So here they are:
1. / The dental click: made by placing the tip of the tongue against the front teeth then snapping it away. It’s like a tutting noise.
2. ≠‚ The alveolar click (I found this difficult because it sounded so similar to the first one, but the tongue is placed in a slightly different place: just behind, rather than against, the front teeth).
3. ! The alveolar-palatal click: the tongue is placed against the hard palate just where it starts to dome up – behind the ‘alveolar’ ridge. (For those who are interested, alveolus means ‘cup’, and so the word ‘alveolar’ applied to the upper and lower jaws refers to the part of the jaws that bears the cup-like sockets for the teeth.) When the tongue is pulled down quickly, it makes a loud ‘nop!’
4. // The lateral click: the tongue is positioned as for the second click, but only the side is released. ‘Like if you call a dog,’ said Bertus. To me, it sounded like a noise you might make to gee up a horse.
Genetic studies of people speaking click languages, looking at both mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome, have shown that the Ju/’hoansi have remained quite isolated from populations around them, while other Bushman groups and the Khwe people have mixed extensively with Bantu populations. The Ju/’hoansi have unique, deep-rooted genetic lineages. A recent study found that the branches leading to different groups of click-speaking people appeared very early in the family tree of modern humans. It’s impossible to prove, but geneticists suggest that click languages may have been around for tens of thousands of years, originating before any movement of people out of Africa.1
For years anthropologists have debated whether or not the Ju/’hoansi have roots going back into the Later Stone Age, or perhaps even earlier, in the area that they still inhabit.3 In the 1950s, anthropologist Lorna Marshall found that the Bushmen believed their ancestors to have lived in the region forever. The genetic lineages of the Bushmen suggest that they are indeed descendants of very ancient inhabitants of the area.
The children thought my attempts to speak Ju/’hoansi hilarious. There were plenty of children in the village, of all ages. And the older kids of nine or ten were looking after the toddlers; some were carrying tiny ones round in shawls tied to their backs. A few small boys were pushing round model cars, made of coat hanger wire, with such great attention to detail that some even had wire ‘treads’ on the wheels to make authentic tyre tracks, and grills on the front. One was unmistakably – in skeletal form – a Toyota Hilux. Theo said that each time a new vehicle arrived at the village it was only a couple of days before an accurate wire model of it appeared on the scene.
A few of the boys were playing a game on the edge of the village, with the thin sticks I had seen them whittling earlier, at the airstrip. They were throwing the sticks, hard, at a small grass-covered mound: the sticks ricocheted off and sped away like arrows. There didn’t seem to be any particular aim to the game, and no one was scoring, winning or losing. Theo said this was a way of doing things that permeated Bushman society: they were not competitive. Anthropologists visiting Bushmen communities remarked on the lack of inter-group violence as well.2
Two men were sitting beside one shelter, attending to their hunting equipment. One had a small bowl of water with sinews soaking in it, and he was wrapping these shiny, silver ligaments around the ends of his bow, to help keep the string (also sinew) in place. The other hunter was inspecting his arrows, holding each one up and looking down the shaft to check that it was straight. They were composite arrows, with a shaft made of a thick grass stalk, and a detachable end or foreshaft. Theo explained that this was designed to break off from the rest of the shaft once the arrow had found its quarry; the remaining, shortened arrow would be less likely to get knocked out as the animal ran on. About 10cm of the shaft just behind the gleaming, beaten, steel wire arrowhead was covered in a black substance. Theo cautioned me not to touch it: it was poison. The hunters used the larvae of Diamphidia beetles to anoint their arrows with a deadly mixture. Hunting would involve tracking an animal until the hunters were close enough to fire poisoned arrows into it, then they would carry on, tracking it at leisure, until the quarry weakened from the poison and exhaustion and the hunters could approach it and deliver the coup de grâce. Theo introduced me to the hunters. They were brothers-in-law, !Kun and //ao, and they were going to take me out – right out – into the bush the following day.
That night I slept in my tent at the lodge and was woken up regularly throughout the night by the incredibly loud, explosive noise of Zambezi teak pods popping. And if it wasn’t the teak, it was the sand camwood. And if it wasn’t the camwood, it was all sorts of weird noises that were quite frightening when you didn’t know what they were. But I was in a safari tent with a door, and I was quite secure. So each time I woke up, I snuggled down a little further under my duvet (it was quite chilly) and was soon asleep again.
The following day we set off early, driving 13km away from the village to the nearest waterhole. In the Kalahari there are small rain showers in November and December, and then plenty of rain with summer thunderstorms from January to April. The rest of the year is almost entirely rainless. I was visiting Namibia during the hottest, driest time of the year. Bush fires are common, and in fact there had been one quite close to the village; Arno had driven out to help fight it the night before. The smoke was still rising into the sky behind the ridge. Theo said that Bushmen used to start fires on purpose so that vegetation would send out new shoots and attract the ga
me, and also because it cleared the bush and made it easier to track game. This practice was now banned in Namibia, because of the danger to the people and animals of the Kalahari.
The Kalahari Basin is a huge area, extending across the borders of four countries: South Africa, Angola, Botswana and Namibia. It is ‘semi-desert’: very sandy and dry but still supporting a wealth of plants and animals. What it really lacks is surface water, and, weirdly, this is what seems to have facilitated the survival of the Bushmen and their way of life. In less arid parts, Bantu have moved in to farm the land – and the Bushmen have moved out. But in more arid areas, the Bushmen are well adapted to life in this environment, which seemed so incredibly harsh and unforgiving to me.
Their diet includes the storage organs of plants that have adapted to the dry landscape: bulbs, tubers and roots. And they are expert trackers of the animals that leave their footprints in the sandy soil of the bush. There are no streams in the southern Kalahari: water beneath the ground surface upwells to feed waterholes: some temporary, just there during the wet season, and some permanent, lasting right through the dry season as well. The Bushmen are tied to the waterholes: between these muddy, life-giving pools are vast stretches of uninhabitable desert. And the waterholes are also where the animals go to drink, under cover of darkness. Starting at the waterhole, !Kun and //ao would be able to track antelope that had been drinking there the night before.
Picking up the tracks of an oryx, the hunters set off at a determined pace, an extremely fast walk that occasionally broke into a gentle jog. As they passed raisin bushes, the hunters would grab the small orange fruits to eat. //ao offered me one: it was tough but sweet and tangy. Every now and then I heard a loud clucking noise coming from low down in the bush: the cry of the southern yellow-billed hornbill. We continued, and I tried to follow the spoor as well. Sometimes, the cloven-hoofed prints were obvious on the sandy game trail, but then the oryx would leave the track and head into the bush. We would strike out, through the sparse grass and evil, low-lying thorns, and I couldn’t believe the hunters were still on the trail. But then they’d point out a snapped twig, a crushed leaf, a pile of droppings or another hoof print, and I could see that they were still right on track. This happened again and again. I was amazed at their intuitive ability to track an animal that had passed this way many hours before. At one point, the hunters stopped dead. They had found a large raisin bush – Grewia flava – with long, straight branches. !Kun took his axe and chopped down four long branches. This was a precious resource: it was the wood used to make bows and spears. Then we were back on the trail of the oryx.
But not long after – perhaps half an hour – the hunters stopped again. They knelt down and I thought they were inspecting tracks, but instead there was a pile of nuts, like large almonds, on the ground. They were both scooping up handfuls of them, shaking them free of dirt and sand, and putting them into !Kun’s antelope-skin knapsack (a whole skin, sewn together with the legs forming the handles), and I helped them. These were Manketti nuts, much prized by the Ju/’hoansi. (I later cracked one between two stones and it was delicious: a bit like a brazil nut.) The neat pile seemed strange – we were a long way from the Manketti groves. But elephants eat the nuts too, although they can’t digest them: the nuts we’d collected had been left behind after a pile of elephant dung had disintegrated. !Kun and //ao were pragmatic in their approach to hunting. While on the tracks of a potential quarry, they would collect wood, berries and nuts as well.
As they were moving and tracking, the hunters would speak softly to each other. I could still hear the clicks very clearly. The geneticists who investigated the ancestry of the click-speaking people conceded that these languages might have survived for tens of millennia by chance. But perhaps clicks had been retained because they provided a great way of communicating while hunting.1 This hypothesis is pretty much impossible to test. All I can say is, having been out with the Bushmen, when they were whispering to each other the clicks were still crystal clear. I don’t think there would be much hilarity generated from a Ju/’hoansi game of Chinese whispers. I can add my own extension of this hypothesis, completely untested (at the time of writing), that clicks, being high-frequency sounds, wouldn’t travel as far as other vocalisations. So a language with clicks might provide a clear means of communication between hunters, moving through the bush close to each other, while being unheard by a more distant quarry.
We had started early in the morning, when the sun was low and the bush was just starting to lose the chill of the night, but the sun soon turned the day from cool to warm to blazing hot. I knew I was sweating, even though I felt quite dry. As soon as sweat appeared on my skin, it evaporated, but I still looked sweatier than the hunters. They were wearing very little, which probably helped in this respect. I had opted for long linen trousers to save my legs from thorns and insect bites, while being cool. As I’d anticipated some running would be in order, I was wearing a sports top and a vest to protect my very white midriff from the harsh sun. I had decided my already tanned shoulders and arms would be safe under a decent layer of high-factor sunscreen. The hunters were wearing very little in comparison: just bead-embroidered loincloths and headbands. But they were also shorter, leaner and much more slightly built than me. Small stature and build makes for a larger surface area to volume ratio: relatively more skin surface for sweat to lose heat from. The idea that Bushmen may be physically adapted to endurance running (or walking) in hot conditions, by virtue of their smallness and consequent ability to lose heat effectively, without sweating much, seemed to be borne out by how much we were all drinking. I could feel dehydration stalking me that morning as we tracked the oryx. I kept up with !Kun and //ao, but I got very hot and drank much more water than they did. While each of the hunters had brought with them just half a litre of water, I had three times as much in my Camelback.
In international sports African athletes dominate distance running. Investigations have shown that there may be a number of reasons for this. Elite African runners have a greater fatigue resistance than non-Africans – able to run for some 20 per cent longer before fatigue sets in. This seems to be due in part to a difference in the composition of the muscles. Body mass is also an important factor: larger and heavier runners, in a hot environment, will not lose heat as quickly as smaller runners, and will reach the point of overheating to exhaustion much quicker. A study run by a group of sports scientists, including Tim Noakes from Cape Town University, showed that, even in cool conditions, larger Caucasian (European) athletes sweated more and had higher heart rates than smaller, African runners. In hot conditions, the Caucasian athletes ran slower than their smaller African colleagues. This is fascinating because it suggests that experienced athletes ‘know’ their limits when it comes to heat exhaustion and adjust their pace accordingly. The African runners ran, on average, 1.5km/h faster than the Caucasians, without overheating.4
I’m certainly not a trained athlete, so this wasn’t a fair comparison, but after three hours of walking and running in the bush I had sweated a lot, and I had drunk all of my water. !Kun and //ao hadn’t even touched theirs. And the tracks had become confused. The oryx tracks were crossed by a kudu being chased by a hyena. The hunters decided it was time to circle back. I was glad they knew the way. With the sun high in the sky, I had lost all sense and means of judging direction. As we made our way back, I saw a truly enormous bird launch itself from a small tree and heavily flap off through the bush: a Kori bustard.
It seems that endurance running was generally important to our early ancestors. While the Bushmen seem optimally adapted to running in the heat, we all have anatomical features in our bodies that suggest we evolved to perform well in endurance running. There are things about the way our bodies are designed that allow us to store energy in tendons and ligaments as we run, providing us with an efficiency gain. You don’t need to be a habitual runner to have these adaptations: they are firmly there, in the blueprint of all our bodies.
&nbs
p; Take a look at your feet. They are very strange for the feet of an ape (which, strictly speaking, we are). They’re designed specifically for standing, walking and running on. We have lost the ability to grasp things with our big toe that our close cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, still possess. Instead, it was more important for our big toe to have been brought into line with the others, to form a stable platform. We also have arches in our feet: a long arch down each side, and an arch across the foot as well. These arches are held in place by ligaments and tendons – which stretch. When you’re running, each time your foot hits the ground these ligaments and tendons act like springs, stretching, and then giving energy back as your foot lifts off. Our Achilles tendons, attaching to the lever of the calcaneum, or heel bone, are massive: another stretchy spring. Humans also have very long legs, which makes for a good, long stride length. And we’ve had long legs for quite a while. The first hominins were australopithecines; they walked around on two legs, but their limb proportions were like those of chimps: long arms and short legs. Early species of Homo also had chimpanzee-like limb proportions, but by the time Homo erectus came along, at around 1.9 million years ago, long legs had appeared as part of the human package. We also have strong back muscles to stop us pitching forward while we’re running, and very large bottom muscles. Gluteus maximus swings the leg back at the hip joint; it’s hardly used at all during walking, but comes into its own when we run.5,6
Although the small size of the Bushmen makes them able to lose heat easily, and therefore suits them to running in the heat, all humans have adaptations to heat loss which may also be related to keeping cool during endurance running. We have very little body hair, so we lose heat both by convection and evaporation of sweat. And we have lots and lots of sweat glands.
The Incredible Human Journey Page 4