Word: bushmen
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This elysian community actually exists. Its habitat is Africa's Kalahari Desert, a region so harsh and inhospitable that Western man would be hard put to eke out a living. But in that unforgiving neighborhood, the Bushmen, a golden-skinned, short-statured and cheerful people, have been living contentedly for thousands of years as hunter-gatherers subsisting on what nature provides without resort to agriculture. In Man the Hunter (Aldine Publishing Co., $6.95), a recent symposium of studies on primitive societies, Harvard Anthropologists Irven DeVore and Richard B. Lee note that "cultural Man has been on earth for some...
From Tierra del Fuego to Hudson Bay, if the world's 3,000,000 surviving hunter-gatherers provide any clue, man's distant past probably was more placid and, in some ways, more rewarding than his present. In their hostile environment, the Kalahari Bushmen find enough to eat with less effort than most civilized peoples. Anthropologist Lee estimates that the Bushman's daily diet averages 2,140 calories and 93.1 grams (3.26 oz.) of protein-well in excess of the estimated daily allowance for people of their vigor and size (1,975 calories, 60 grams of protein...
...Innocence. Happy, gentle and accepting, the hunter-gatherer asks of life only what it provides, and his manner of existence suggests that for uncounted thousands of years life provided more than enough. Unfortunately, the hunter-gatherer is doomed. Of the 45,000 Bushmen in the Kalahari, only 5,000 or so follow the ancient ways; and the number dwindles each year. Like many Eskimos, Australian aborigines and other surviving hunter-gatherers, the rest have attached themselves to the new ways of civilization...
Among Africa's first known tribal groups were the artistically talented Bushmen, who scratched out their lively rock drawings of hunters and wild animals in the Stone Age. Some 7,000 years ago, the Hamites came across the Suez, bringing a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, and soon they intermarried with Bushmen and early Negroes to produce new races. Over the continent's vast distance, these groups scattered into the polyglot tribes that fractionalize Africa today. Each went its own way. Some tribes raised empires based on hereditary rulers. In other tribal cultures, outstanding men or women and sometimes even children...
Such problems soon vanish in the joy of difficult labor going well. On weekends, when the work gang is roistering in the city, Morrison prowls beyond the gorge and encounters the Lani, a tribe of bushmen. Among these simple, amoral savages, he rediscovers the unsophisticated pleasures, the quick and easy friendships of a time when "all tastes were like summer and youth, before alcohol and tobacco and sour love...