Wednesday, July 10, 2024

New Interview with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas: 1950s author of "The Harmless People" on San Bushmen

 23 minutes in: archaeological dig discovered 

"The San were Pre-Contact and they had been in there - well two ... archaeological work was done later. One encampment was found to have continuous occupation for 80,000 years and another 30,000 years without particular change in the material culture" 

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"The San were Pre-Contact and they had been in there - well two ... archaeological work was done later. One encampment was found to have continuous occupation for 80,000 years and another 30,000 years without particular change in the material culture....If you've been there for 80,000 years you've done the exploring....they knew every inch of those 120,00 square miles."
The people I lived with in what is now Namibia, in the 1950s, these were pre-contact people who lived a life on hunting and gathering. They are our ancestors and the way our ancestors lived for 100,000 years - without wrecking everything. That's... many many species lived with varying degrees of cooperation or not cooperation. But they all understood each other. The lions and the people had a truce. The lions didn't hurt the people. Because they both needed to drink... they had one source of water and they needed to drink from it...And that went on for 100,000 years... One encampment was dug up that had been constantly oocupied, continuously occupied for 85,000 years. Another one for 35,000 years.

The Neolithic was more recent than that and that short time - we've managed to... very soon most African animals will be extinct... you know that's happening all over the world...

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