Hadzat – Nykyajan metsästäjä-keräilijät
They grow no food, raise no livestock, and live without rules or calendars. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. What do they know that we’ve forgotten?
Photograph by Martin Schoeller
National Geographicin sivuilta löytyy mielenkiintoinen kuvaus vielä nykyaikanakin “metsästäjä-keräilijä” -elämäntapaa noudattavasta tansanialaisesta Hadza -heimosta. Alla muutamia poimintoja Hadza -heimon parissa muutaman viikon elelleen Michael Finkelin tekstistä. Koko tarinan voit lukea täältä.
Mitä sellaista hadzat yhä osaavat, jonka me olemme jo unohtaneet?
Years aren’t the only unit of time the Hadza do not keep close track of—they also ignore hours and days and weeks and months. The Hadza language doesn’t have words for numbers past three or four.
Onwas was interested in a picture of my cat. “How does it taste?” he asked.
He could not name the leader of his own country.
But approximately one-quarter of all Hadza, including those in Onwas’s camp, remain true hunter-gatherers. They have no crops, no livestock, no permanent shelters.
What the Hadza appear to offer—and why they are of great interest to anthropologists—is a glimpse of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than “the worst mistake in human history”—a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.
Photo Martin Schoeller
Hadza women gather berries and baobab fruit and dig edible tubers. Men collect honey and hunt. Nighttime baboon stalking is a group affair, conducted only a handful of times each year; typically, hunting is a solo pursuit. They will eat almost anything they can kill, from birds to wildebeest to zebras to buffalo. They dine on warthog and bush pig and hyrax. They love baboon.
People sleep whenever they want. Some stay up much of the night and doze during the heat of the day. Dawn and dusk are the prime hunting times.
Onwas, as he repeatedly told me, doesn’t worry about the future. He doesn’t worry about anything. No Hadza I met, in fact, seemed prone to worry. It was a mind-set that astounded me, for the Hadza, to my way of thinking, have very legitimate worries. Will I eat tomorrow? Will something eat me tomorrow? Yet they live a remarkably present-tense existence.
This may be one reason farming has never appealed to the Hadza—growing crops requires planning; seeds are sown now for plants that won’t be edible for months. Domestic animals must be fed and protected long before they’re ready to butcher. To a Hadza, this makes no sense. Why grow food or rear animals when it’s being done for you, naturally, in the bush? When they want berries, they walk to a berry shrub. When they desire baobab fruit, they visit a baobab tree. Honey waits for them in wild hives. And they keep their meat in the biggest storehouse in the world—their land. All that’s required is a bit of stalking and a well-shot arrow.
The school-age kids I spoke with in Onwas’s group all said they had no interest in sitting in a classroom. If they went to school, many told me, they’d never master the skills needed for survival.
Photo Martin Schoeller
The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan.
Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave…
There are no televisions or board games or books in Onwas’s camp. But there is entertainment. The women sing songs. And the men tell campfire stories…
Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down.
While Hadza have a word for body odor, the men tell me that they prefer their women not to bathe—the longer they go between baths, they say, the more attractive they are.
Their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed camping trip. It’s incredibly risky. Medical help is far away. One bad fall from a tree, one bite from a black mamba snake, one lunge from a lion, and you’re dead. Women give birth in the bush, squatting.
Lisää Martin Schoellerin ottamia kuvia heimosta National Geographicin Tha Hadza -kuvagalleriassa.
