Biology Reference
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However, to maintain the ingrained taboo against incest, there had to be exchange of clan
members, either teenage boys or girls, with other clans. Once again, the tribe size that spoke
the same dialect, and hence the social universe was about 600 members. Beyond that, the tribe
became too large. It is of interest that modern humans can maintain a circle of contacts up to
about 600, ignoring the newer lack of reciprocity of TV, Facebook, Twitter and other modern
media.
In the Central Kalahari desert reserve created by the British in 1884 to protect the bushmen
and allow them to live in peace, the clans centered around water holes, pans, or wells in the
desert, never building permanent structures but moving somewhat according to the seasons.
Although created for the San Bushmen, the ruling Tswana tribe has tried to change that because
of new diamond mines in the Central Kalahari reserve requiring the scarce water resources.
Indeed, there have been court cases over the issue with the San Bushmen winning their rights to
water but despite that Para military police harass them and recently some were punished for
killing an eland in the territory including one of the hunters being buried alive.
Historically, men would go out hunting on average once every four days and only one in four
hunts was successful. The range of hunting was rarely beyond five to six miles; a range of
about an hour's walk. Sometimes longer walks would have to be undertaken to get, for
example, flint from a certain site for tools or to track an elephant that could travel large
distances when wounded. This six mile range was because of in case of injury, or killing a
large animal, and needing to return to home before nightfall, particularly because of predators.
Lions, leopards, and hyena will usually avoid humans during the day and will tolerate humans
close approach if not hunted, but much less so at night. A range beyond that was unsafe and
probably too tiring in the long term. Hence, it is of interest, even with modern transportation,
whether cars, trains, airplanes or boats, modern humans do not like to live further than an hour
from their modern hunting grounds, namely, for most, that is their place of work. Implicit in the
hunter-gatherer life style was the gathering of vegetable foods by women and cooperative
hunting for meat by men and bringing it back for sharing (see San Bushmen photos near the end
of the topic).
Because of the cooperative nature and egalitarian society, meat was brought back for the
rest of the clan, unless the killed animal was particularly large. Children and women were
called upon to transport the meat using containers, such as the heart pericardial sac or stomach.
Ostrich shells and hare bladders were used for carrying water. Later pottery was developed
for carrying water in addition to using animal products or melon gourds. This work was also
typically done by women and children. Transportation of toddlers thus required leather
satchels to carry children on their mother's backs. For hunter-gatherers the options for
transporting meat, nuts, or children were human carriers, sleds and toboggans, boats, rafts and
kayaks, and when dogs were domesticated some 32,000 years ago, dogs as carriers or draft
animals for sleds on the ice. Dogs helped with transport, hunting and as a reserve for food in
dire circumstances. Within this hunter-gatherer society we see the basic tenants of an economic
system of sharing, reciprocity, and transportation. This physiology of man, psychology, culture,
cooperative hunting process, and economic system, is what from a biological view separates
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