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Lars with Thirty Three inch Steelhead
Now I'm enthusiastic again. There is probably an element of the randomness of rewards that
drives us. Thus, there seems to be an innate desire to beat the odds and keep on trying to
master the randomness of life's situations and get the reward. Thus, experiments in pigeons
showed many years ago that intermittently randomly giving pigeons a seed would drive them to
peck until their beaks bled. A game programmer for Electronic Arts (EA) once told me that
kids and teenager games are designed to give a reward every 7 seconds. Indeed, the Hadze
hunter gatherers are notorious gamblers, using their iron arrowheads as chips, to the point of
gambling away their ability to hunt, not unlike addicted modern gamblers. Similarly, my
brother or I may drive up to ten hours a day looking for interesting animals and events in
Kruger Park and not see anything of note. Sometimes it's a good day, others it's not. The
gatherers of the equation (ladies of the house) will also often forfeit the early morning
“hunting” drive and I may set out alone. On the last trip I set out on an early 150 km drive and
saw over some 30 lions in total, a lion kill, 21 sable, buffalo, and leopard (my favorite
carnivore) and the light was perfect for photography. The chances are random, and that must
play into our hunting psyche of pursuing an objective. It can even become an addiction,
however, if the success entirely disappears, then the interest is lost. Many of the remaining
pockets of some 70,000 San Bushmen, no longer hunt and gatherer either because the animals
have disappeared or they have lost the skill. One of the largest communities is indeed a tent
city at Schmidt's Drift in South Africa near the former Kalahari Gemsbok Game Reserve and
greater Transfrontier Park. These are two tribes that used to fight for the South African
Defense Force in Namibia, including some I suspect from my old battalion. They now have
food kitchens that feed them and they live off military pensions with many disease, hygiene,
and social problems, including fighting between the two tribes, one that is of more mixed
Nguni race. Medical researchers are watching with interest what happens to cardiovascular
disease in the community now that they have switched to a more Western Diet, particularly
since San Bushmen have some genetic markers found in Caucasians to be associated with an
increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Anthropology topics tend to discuss changes in society as if a society makes a group
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