Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Webley or a Taurus .357 revolver because they wanted night protection against lions. They
never saw or heard of an AD (accidental discharge) or injury because the San kept the
revolvers for defense at contact range. As a result there was a steady trickle of lions and
leopards with bullet holes in the skin. After getting to know bushmen that came to work for him
as trackers with their families, Don found they would sometimes produce well cared for and
oiled Webley revolver earned from working for his great grandfather (Mk I or V with rampant
elephants on the grips), or grandfather (Mk VI, plain grips), or father (lion grips). The early
rangers in the Kruger Park noted that within two generations of stopping hunting and shooting
in the mid-1920s the lions had lost their fear of humans and started prowling or attacking them
even during the day.
This relationship of tolerance was taken one step further to a level of symbiosis by the
amaTonga/Shangaan in the area just north and east of where we were traveling. They would
drive lions off a kill and take some slices of meat from the carcass, and then let the lions return
to eat. In a story related by Bulpin, he told of Barnard watching an elderly couple who would
go out and drive their local lion off his kill and collect meat from the carcass. One day the old
man went into a deep donga (an area of erosion from water that has cut back into an area of a
plain with steep sides) to the kill and found the lion was not there. His elderly spouse
followed along expecting the lion had been driven off the kill in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately she did the opposite and flushed the lion towards her husband. This created a
standoff with the lion and man cramped up against the walls of the donga. Fortunately she
realized her mistake from his calling out and backed off allowing the lion to retreat back out
the opening of the donga. After collecting some meat, they left the lion to feed. For his labor,
only some meat for them was taken and in return they protected him from other marauding
potential male lion competitors by driving off other male lions. W.C. Baldwin, in his topic
about hunting in Southern Africa during the mid and late 1800s, described finding the
amaTonga living in a wretched state in the shadows of Kamhlabane because of their
scavenging practices. This was probably because they could not compete with the Zulu and
Swazi pastoralist who had their cattle for protein, were militarily superior, and had largely
killed off many of the animals in this particular area. They also could not keep cattle because
of potential cattle raiding and Nagana (cattle sleeping sickness carried by tsetse flies). Thus,
scavenging came to a dead end as a survival option although it was likely part of the long
successful reign of H. Ergaster.
The San Bushmen of Southern Africa, the Mbuti pygmy tribes of the rain forest, or the Hadze
and Wata (great elephant hunters) of East Africa, lived or continue to live well, with more free
time and less worry than probably any other society. Nor did they, as we modern human have
to, worry about retirement plans once a long career of hard work was over. Indeed, for first
world countries, it looks like people will have to work even longer careers due to lack of
retirement funds in job markets that require increasingly longer hours of work.
What then was the downside of this tribal existence and why did people domesticate
animals as pastoralists and become food farmers? There are no clear answers. Many theories
exist. Disease was clearly one of the reasons, but this is unlikely for the San Bushmen since
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