What did the Mardu hunt and gather and how did they go about it? Contrary to expectation, the Mardu were not occupied in finding food in the desert every minute of daylight. Their intimate knowledge of their surroundings allowed them much free time, food-collecting activities rarely occupying them more than half the day in the worst cases. Hunting activities were also leisurely, with little sense of urgency. Decisions regarding what to do were taken each day, by men and women collectively, and depended on weather conditions, how much food was left over from the previous day in the camp, and how far available food sources were located. There was also an element of individual preference.
Men and youths sought large game, on their own or in pairs, while women and children collected plant foods and small animals, such as lizards. The women went out in groups, sharing childminding as they undertook their daily activities; it was these collecting activities that provided the bulk of the diet, women’s contribution to the total weight of food collected being between 60 and 80 per cent of the total. The contribution was not just about total amount; plant foods and small game were also more reliable resources than the dispersed and highly mobile large game. Men may have brought back a kangaroo occasionally but the women provided the reliable sustenance.
Women would frequently gather the seeds of grasses and acacias, which they harvested in wooden dishes which were taken back to the campsite, wind-winnowed and separated from the chaff. The seeds were then ground and mixed with water, making a paste which was eaten raw or cooked. Much of the food preparation and cooking activity, using readily available firewood, was done by the women. While the group typically ate one main meal a day, in the late afternoon, everyone ate snacks during the day while hunting or gathering. Favourite snacks were fruit, nectar, tree gum, eggs, fungi, lerp,15 and honey ants. The youngsters, typically impatient like all children, would eat all they hunted or gathered on the spot, frequently capturing lizards from an early age and skilfully catching birds by throwing sticks and stones at them.
Being nomadic and lacking any beasts of burden, the Mardu were limited by what they could carry with them, especially when changing campsites. Their toolkit could be divided into three basic categories:16 multi-purpose, appliances, and instant tools. Multi-purpose tools were lightweight and easily carried, mostly made from wood. They included some essential items, like the digging sticks that women used, supplemented by small digging dishes. Dishes were carved, usually by men, from eucalypt wood and bark; the latter are less durable. The larger dishes carried food, water, and even small babies. Women also carried a small stone, which was used against large and flat stones or against flat rock surfaces to grind seeds and other foods.
Men had a larger kit that included wooden throwing spears and the multi-purpose spear-thrower which was used not just to launch spears but also as a tray in which to mix native tobacco and ashes or ochre used in body decoration. The spear-thrower was also used in making fire, as a scraper and knife in woodworking and in the preparation and butchery of game, as a percussion instrument, and even as a hook to get fruits and berries that were out of reach. The famous returning boomerang was not used for hunting but was instead a fighting weapon that doubled up as musical instrument. The only stones that men carried were small flake knives which were used in a variety of cutting and scraping tasks. Most were hand-held but, sometimes, a favourite piece was given a small resin handle. The desert people were clearly adept at making tools that could serve many purposes, thus avoiding having to carry too many things.
The second category was appliances, tools which were normally left at a site and reused on subsequent visits. This means that the Mardu would leave the heavier items behind in camps or particular locations which served specific functions, in the confidence that they would be there when they returned months later. Appliances included the large and heavy base stones that were used in grinding food and ochre, hand-held stone pounders used for mashing bones to get to the marrow, hand axes which weighed between ~2 and 3.5 kilograms (4 and 8 pounds), and a reserve supply of stones for future visits.
Instant tools, the third category, were made from raw materials that were readily available and close at hand. They were used when the need arose and were discarded once finished with. Such tools included stone pounders, axes and flakes, the grass circlets that women made to cushion dishes carried on their heads, some objects used in fire-making, and spindles.
With a body adapted for mobility, an impressive ecological knowledge which offered a varied diet,17 and a combination of multi-purpose, lightweight tools with heavy items left in select locations, the Mardu were desert experts. Their expertise went beyond the strict ecological knowledge; it also included a deep understanding and an ability to predict the weather. Their vocabulary of cloud and rain types and other meteorological phenomena was extensive. They knew how to predict where and when rain would fall and what that rain might produce. The Mardu also recognized distinct seasons of the year which they gave specific names to.18
When it rained, the Mardu strategy was to disperse outwards from the main water sources in small groups, towards places with temporary water along the edges of the rain-affected area. Clay pans and pools were the first to be used to collect water and the Mardu made the most of the game attracted to the ephemeral pools. As these pools evaporated, they would retreat towards the more permanent water bodies. This makes sense as a strategy that first exploited water that would evaporate rapidly, while keeping the main sources of water in reserve. This way they maximized their water reserves. The subsequent retreat depended on a range of factors such as the location of known or expected supplies of food, direction of recent rainfall, and the position of known chains of water sources.
The population was dispersed in small groups or bands but this does not mean that they were unsociable. Often, when bands detected each other’s smoke on the horizon they would make contact. Sociability was highly valued by the Mardu and they would use contacts to exchange scarce and valued resources. Maintaining friendly relations with neighbours also allowed groups to extend their foraging activities to other territories in times of severe shortage, but this was exceptional as the Mardu tended to hunt and gather in the same general area year after year. Such extensions of territory were met with reciprocal concessions when it was the other group’s time to return the favour.
The success of the desert people lay in a system in which they felt no superiority or independence from the forces of Nature. Instead they saw themselves and Nature as part of a wider cosmic order that included also powerful spiritual beings that could be co-opted to change things to their advantage, as in the hunt. This was the Dreaming. This attitude should not be taken to mean that the Mardu did not have an impact on their environment. They did, through burning the land, digging holes, cutting down trees, uprooting shrubs, clearing campsites, digging out wells, and even placing sticks or stones in the forks of trees to warn of something sacred or dangerous nearby. That the land was not transformed in a major way was in part the product of their religious convictions but it was also ruled out by their technology and the fact that they were few in a vast land.
The Mardu, like the people of Puritjarra in the Pleistocene, represent the most extreme adaptation of Homo sapiens to water shortage, which is why I regard it as such a great achievement. In Australia, as in other arid regions, they lived at the very edge of the spectrum of climates available to people. Humans managed to colonize the entire continent of Australia by sticking to the triedand-tested formula of trees/open-spaces/water, often incorporating rocky habitats, as in South Africa and the rocky regions of Middle Earth. If they could live in the arid centre of Australia, then they could live anywhere else on the continent, from the cool conditions of Tasmania in the south to the tropical world of the north.
A complete contrast to life in the desert is provided by the people who settled along the banks of the Murray and Darling Rivers in south-eastern Australia. While the nomadic desert people reciprocated with their n
eighbours, it seems that those along the Murray River were strongly territorial and exclusive, quite prepared to defend their boundaries with force. The British anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown met these people in the early 20th century in what he described as the most densely-populated part of Australia before the days of white settlers.19 The numbers and densities of the river people were 20–40 times greater than those of the non-river people of the same region. The territorial system along the Murray-Darling Basin may go back a considerable time.
The people living in the area prior to and during the last Ice Age probably hunted the megafauna (e.g. large kangaroos) around lakes and on the plains. They were hunters and gatherers who probably reciprocated and traded with neighbouring groups just like the Mardu did in the arid desert. At the end of the Ice Age, around 21/22 thousand years ago, the landscape changed, with slower-flowing rivers and a change from grasslands to savannah; the megafauna was extinct.20 People started to bury their dead in formal graveyards and some of the large cemeteries of later times, such as those at Kow Swamp and Coobool Creek, began to be used—an indication of a direct association with the land. This link becomes firmly established after 9 thousand years ago, when there is a notable decrease in the size of the people buried in cemeteries, and a high incidence of cranial trauma, in both men and women, which is indicative of violence. This violence has been linked to the defence of territory.
The population was large, especially when compared to other regions of Australia. A burial site in Lake Victoria contained 10 thousand individuals, giving an idea of the levels of population that the rivers and wetlands of south-eastern Australia held. Cemeteries were established along the banks of the rivers, indicating territoriality based on descent as people defended a land that was a rich larder of fish, fowl, and invertebrates; the river margins contrasted with the barren, parched land of the nearby drought-stricken plain. During drought the river was the only reliable lifeline for food and water and access to these resources was controlled by the resident groups. Ritual practices, notably skull deformation and tooth avulsion,21 were ways of physically demonstrating identity.
One result of territoriality was genetic isolation. The anatomy of the people of the Murray-Darling Basin was different from that of any other group of Australians, the product of inbreeding. The entire population along the river system was also very diverse which reflected the linear nature of the territories that promoted isolation between the Murray-Darling groups themselves. At one level the river people were isolated from the people of the arid lands beyond and shared features in common. At another level, those from different stretches of river were different from each other, too.
Australia has offered us a cameo of Homo sapiens as a desert-dweller, the end point of the 2-million-year-old evolution of the improbable primate. In the people of the deserts of the interior we find the ultimate performance of a species whose ancestry was the rainforest. We have also seen how reciprocity and sharing, a caring and sustainable approach to land, and resource management were a part of the improbable primate’s make-up. But we have also glimpsed here the dark side: when living in a resource-rich land, the population rapidly increased and took on an inward-looking and violent streak as they jealously safeguarded these resources. In this way, the paradoxical nature of Homo sapiens, the improbable primate, is painted for us by archaeology and ethnography. We now need to contemplate the canvas to see the improbable primate within us.
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From Lake Chad to Puritjarra and Beyond
By the 1930s, the Puritjarra Rock Shelter in the Australian desert is silent. For more than 30 thousand years people have lived their lives here. Now they have moved to mission stations and ration depots in the West MacDonnell Ranges.1 They no longer have to worry about where to go and look for food each day as it has all been organized for them. Their stomachs may be full but they weep for the loss of the free life in the wilderness. The ancestors of the settlers had long lost that freedom and, sadly, the settlers themselves could no longer recognize it when they had it in front of them. With the forced conversion of some of the last surviving populations of hunter-gatherers into civilization, humanity lost its soul.
The 6-million-year-long story that had started on the shores of an ancient wetland in the heart of Middle Earth was over; it was replaced by a much younger story which originated some 10 thousand years ago along the banks of another wetland, also in the very core of Middle Earth.2 In the dry desert, the fruiting trees have been replaced by springs and fleeting ponds. Most of the time they are not worth defending and the people of the desert move about in groups, using their vision and brains to locate and relocate places with fresh water across a vast waterless landscape.
Part of the primate way of life involves a close bonding with the natal area.3 The attachment applies just as much to nomadic groups as it does to sedentary ones. The nomads of the Australian desert were attached to their natal home range, which could be vast, and only left it in times of hardship when a system of reciprocity between neighbouring groups allowed for temporary encroachment into adjacent lands. The conditions—highly-dispersed and hard-to-defend resources—promoted reciprocity in favour of aggression and territorial defence. This was not the case in the Murray-Darling Basin. Here resources could be defended and they were to the point of violence as seen by the injuries that many of the people buried in cemeteries endured.
The key point here is that we can end up with a strongly territorial system or a much more egalitarian one simply by changing the conditions. In the case of the Australian Aboriginal comparison it was the distribution and predictability of water which in turn determined the distribution of other valued resources. The people were the same in every respect. What differed were the conditions and the response to these circumstances. The other point is that the observed behaviours were only different from those of the Miocene forest primates in degree. Nomadic or territorial life in Homo sapiens arose from a fruit-eating, Miocene rainforest ancestry.
We often associate large-scale territorial behaviour in humans with the advent of production systems, agriculture in particular, but this was clearly not a prerequisite. Agriculture emerged within a specific set of conditions and is a special case of sedentary life but, as the people of the Murray-Darling Basin show us, it was not a prerequisite of large-scale territorial life.
There are other similar examples of sedentary behaviour without agriculture and we ought to recall these briefly here. Twenty-three thousand years ago the people of Ohalo, by the Sea of Galilee, lived in a village of brush huts on the shores of a lake; the rich and predictable resources of the lake permitted a sedentary existence. Here people harvested wild cereals and made baskets from plant fibres. The semi-nomadic Gravettians of eastern and central Europe in the build-up to the last Ice Age around 30 thousand years ago had also found a predictable and abundant food in the form of migrating herds of reindeer; they too established villages, like Pavlov and Dolni Vestonice, and even went down the route of industrial production in the form of clay figurines. The difference between the Gravettians and the nomadic people of Puritjarra is that the former had a predictable and abundant resource while the latter did not. The Natufian people of the Middle East of around 13 thousand years ago were able to become sedentary because they lived in a place of great resource diversity, with seasonal concentrations of gazelles, cereals, and other foods. In this case diversity of resources made for a predictable environment. With the rising sea levels around 8 thousand years ago, people on the north-west Pacific coast of America settled and defended territories against neighbours. They lived in hierarchical societies with a division of labour among their people; the secret in this case was the massive and predictable seasonal arrival of salmon. So much fish was caught in a short time that techniques were developed to preserve and store the surplus. In coastal Peru, the inhabitants set up villages that exploited the abundance of fish along with resources inland and they moved their villages up and down the coast as they follo
wed the fish, in a fashion not dissimilar to the Gravettians.
These examples are all fairly recent in our story, after 30 thousand years ago. Can we find evidence of settlement that is earlier? I think that we can and I start with the Neanderthals in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar. The Neanderthals lived in a land that combined ecological diversity with periods of superabundance. The latter was provided by the sea in the form of migrations of tuna and the seasonal arrival of monk seals to breed.4 We have looked at a number of caves and rock shelters that were occupied by the Neanderthals in Gibraltar5 and we looked at their stone tools for evidence of mobility: where were the raw materials obtained, and were people staying in the caves for a while or just paying short visits? The answers suggested that the Neanderthals were probably behaving like the Gravettians or the Peruvian coastal people, albeit operating on a smaller spatial scale. The furthest raw materials came from a distance of 17 kilometres, not very far for a human to travel. The evidence from the caves along the 6-kilometre stretch of limestone cliffs of Gibraltar was that the Neanderthals were going into them occasionally and briefly but they were not living inside them—not for very long anyway. The difference was Gorham’s, which was like the mother cave. Here the Neanderthals lived in a more permanent and sustained manner, akin to a permanent campsite. So, where there was ecological diversity and abundance, the Neanderthals too opted for a sedentary existence. What we do not know is how territorial they were, but we can imagine that they must have been so.
The Improbable Primate Page 14