Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (46 page)

Children mostly stayed within the circle of the camp. The adults taught them about dangers, but, in reality, the risks of their life in the encampment were few. The adults kept a wary eye out for the children if they strayed out into the bush. On the whole, in their simple lives, there was little need for the adults to nag and scold the children. No worries about the children messing something up, being dirty, breaking valuable objects, or running into traffic. The general picture is of a carefree childhood with few responsibilities and the comfort of being surrounded by a benevolent community of relatives, leading to a well-adjusted existence.

When we look at both our ancient history and our understanding of genetic biology, we can identify some suggestive pointers for today. Ideally, it looks as though a woman should allow at least four years between births. She should allow breastfeeding/sucking for at least three years. She should provide plenty of intimate body contact and avoid giving the baby the impression that it is forgotten or abandoned; the child sleeps with her. The family would live in convenient daily contact with a large extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Grandmothers are on hand all the time and have a vital child-care role. The environment should allow an indulgent upbringing with little need for scolding.

These are apparently the desirable goals, but they are a long way from modern life. Perhaps only the first one—four-year birth spacing—would be simple to implement today. Nevertheless, once a mother understands these goals, she has a chance of steering her life in a helpful direction. She can avoid fighting harmful battles and focus on the necessary ones. Sibling rivalry is a genetically programmed feature of existence and parents have to battle it even-handedly as best they can. Parent-child conflict is normal in many areas: weaning is always a difficult time with tantrums and tears and the mother has to resist them in a sensible way. Weaning from the intimate body contact is also a difficult time: it is normal for the child to be depressed. Parents have to resist manipulation by the child’s psychological warfare.

MYTHS AND RITUALS

In every culture, people lead intense spiritual lives expressed through dance, song, stories, rituals, and deep emotional attachment to the land. All peoples find their identity in tribal stories and myths. The primitive bands had no writing, so they passed down their cultural heritage by intensely disciplined repetition. The older members, who had memorized the entire folklore, would train the younger members to be word-perfect. This was how tribes preserved, with remarkable accuracy, events and stories going back thousands of years. Storytelling was a favorite pastime around the campfire. The children would listen in rapt attention as the tales unfolded, laughing in glee at the antics of some ancient trickster or gasping in dread at some tragedy. This time together, sharing the communal folklore, is at once a powerful release and a strong force knitting the members of the band together.

Many males were killed in battle, so there were not so many living well into old age, but one would be designated as the headman. He was the successful survivor of many life-and-death battles, the high-status “alpha-male,” and he had many wives and children. The remaining elders were also venerated in some way, and they were the repository of know-how and tribal memory. Old men were indispensable sources of survival expertise and entertaining stories, the precious guardians of the tribal heritage. In contrast with today’s society, old people were not only useful, they fulfilled an essential role in the well-being of the band.

People cluster in little groups during the day, often talking as they make artifacts or perform other tasks. At night, families talk late by their fires or visit other family fires with their children. Frequently, the men and women form their own groups. The subjects of discussion are quite distinct. “The men’s imagination turns to hunting. They converse musingly, as though enjoying a sort of daydream together, about past hunts, telling over and over again where game was found and who killed it. They wonder where the game is at present, and say what fat bucks they hope to kill. They also plan their next hunts with practicality.”
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The women talk about who did or did not share food with them as well as their anxieties about not having food. They also complain about their arduous foraging day and the long trudge home. They talk at length about their lovers, husbands, sexual experiences, or the time they went into the bush to give birth. They would not dream of discussing such matters when a man is in earshot, because men had “their talk” and women had theirs.
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All primal peoples, whether we look at the San, Australian Aborigines, or Hadza, are deeply attached to their land and feel deeply connected to the nature that surrounds them. In tests made on people from all over the world, they consistently picked out a picture of blue sky, rolling parkland, and the occasional animal as being the most pleasing.
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Other studies show that American children are less likely to suffer distress if they live in natural surroundings of greenery rather than in concrete buildings and asphalt-lined parking lots.
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The closer we are to natural surroundings, the more comfortable we feel.

The San dance on many occasions. Both men and women dance, often all night long, working themselves up into a delirium. This kind of behavior is a human universal value and it does not require much imagination to see Western parallels with the atmosphere in nightclubs and discos. People everywhere like doing it and clearly there is some kind of healthy mental relief to be found from the experience. About once a week, the San adult males indulge in a sacred “fire dance” that goes on from dusk until dawn.
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All the members of the band are present and the women sit in a tight circle singing and clapping and helping to raise the state of dancing frenzy. The men dance in a circle around the women until they go into a trance-like state, where they have mystical, hallucinatory experiences. In this state, and foaming at the mouth, they literally play with fire, skipping through the embers or even scooping up them up. The men describe their experience as a process of death and rebirth. “You give up what you are, give up your identity, enter the unknown, willingly going into fundamental mysteries and so enter the state of transcendence.”
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The American professor of comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell, describes this as the classic tale of the hero’s journey into the unknown. The boy becomes a man and the man becomes a hero. After the dance, the Bushman is reborn as an ordinary, fully functioning man. These are deep themes, found all over the world and in all societies.

Rites of Passage

The need to turn boys into men is found in all societies. At some point, the boy, who has been attached to his mother, has to be removed from the world of women and incorporated into the world of men. It happens when the men believe that the boy has reached a suitable level of maturity (not necessarily puberty), probably around 10 to 12 years old. The process takes place over several months as the boy is instructed in behavior appropriate to the status of an adult male. It covers matters such as dress, speech, deportment, and morality.

Up to now, the hunt has been a mysterious activity of the mature, initiated males. They disappeared into the bush for hours or days on end and, on their return, related proud tales of valor, ingenuity, and derring-do. Often, they came back with the meat-prize, something which raised their status in the eyes of those who depended on them. It is a big moment in the life of a boy when he is allowed on his first hunt. This immediately separates him from his sisters and mother—this is something that the womenfolk will never experience.

In a similar way, many spiritual matters have been surrounded in mystery. “It is forbidden to talk of these things except by men who have been initiated in the mysteries of the dance,” reported a Bushman to Laurens van der Post.
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Now religious secrets are revealed. As part of this process, the initiate is required to commune for the first time with the “supernatural,” which he does in trances induced by frenzied dancing, fasting, or the use of mind-altering plants. Often, body parts are modified as part of the ritual: penises are circumcised, noses are pierced, teeth are filed, or faces are tattooed. Without them, the male is not a fully-fledged adult. Finally, the boy has to undergo an ordeal. The manner of the ordeal varies enormously from society to society, but they all have one thing in common: the boy has to show bravery worthy of a man. When he has finished, he knows in his soul that he is now a man.

In Western culture, there was, up until recent times, machinery that reflected similar processes, albeit in a much weaker form and with patchier coverage. Traditionally, these were provided by military academies, boarding schools, and various quasi-military cadet organizations. Civilian examples include the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts. They all had their rituals, traditions, and ordeals. Now, the Boy Scouts have had to eliminate rough, body-contact games and, after a Supreme Court ruling, military academies are obliged to admit women. In many areas, initiation ceremonies have been driven underground and often take dysfunctional forms. Thus, clandestine university fraternity “hazings” and military initiation ordeals occasionally give rise to scandal, accusations of bullying, and even death of the initiate.

In many ways, we have dismantled male initiation rituals. We are raising a population of boy-men, in touch with their feminine side but hesitant in their masculinity. It should not be surprising, then, if some young men prefer life in a street gang or criminal activity. There, they find the excitement, danger, challenges, and combat that their souls crave. Of course, many men are able to divert their primitive instincts into ones that are more socially acceptable. For example, low-status males might find an outlet in competitive sports by becoming a star player at basketball or football. Schools used to understand this very well and made sure that every boy developed himself in competitive games; this is not necessarily the case anymore. Other men find satisfaction in intellectual pursuits, such as a fulfilling career as a doctor, journalist, or architect; these are the lucky ones. Most men still end up as bank clerks, assembly-line workers, and shop assistants. Males experience a midlife crisis when it dawns on them that they will never make it to the top—their fate is to join the ranks of the also-rans.

In our Pleistocene past, men were daily presented with opportunities to be heroic. This heroism was driven by the rewards: the admiration of the womenfolk and the opportunity to win a new woman. It is a theme present throughout all folklore right up to the present day. Now, if a young man goes up to his sweetheart and says, “I want to prove myself to you, give me something dangerous to do,” she is most likely to say “Don’t be silly, you might get yourself killed.” Most men today will live their lives never having been heroic. It is remarkable how many men now in their eighties, having led uneventful adult careers, revert to reminiscences of their youthful exploits in boot camp. It was the episode that defined their identity, just like an initiation rite, which in a way it was.

Heroism, of course, is a high-risk activity and the hero could lose his life. How did our forebears cope with the early deaths of young men? Part of the answer lies in the initiation rite. At this time, the mother experiences the brutal wrenching of her child away from her—she loses her “little boy” to the world of men and feels a sense of loss and bereavement. Today, we fight death at every turn and refuse to “go gentle into that good night.”

LESSONS FOR TODAY

We have gradually built up a picture of what life must have been like for our Pleistocene forebears. The basic survival unit was the band of about 50 people, a grouping of people who were all related to each other by blood or marriage. They all socialized and supported each other and the children freely mingled among them.

Within this group, there were sub-groups, notably the family, consisting of mother and children plus father. A significant feature of the family grouping is that it is much more loosely knit than our so-called nuclear families of today. The ancient fundamental or nuclear family unit was the mother and child. This has been a special relationship down through the ages in all cultures. Fathers floated around in the inner circle, but were not part of the nucleus. It is to the chagrin of many husbands when they find that, as soon as a child is born, they are no longer the center of their wife’s attention, which is now focused on the baby.

As soon as the child was weaned from his mother’s back, he was brought up in large part by the grandmother and other relations. The father played only a small role. In her daily life, the mother had long conversations with other mothers while foraging and with all women when back at the camp. The father was chiefly solitary while on the hunt and indulged in “man-talk” with the other men back at the camp. The husband interacted with his wife for short periods of the day, mainly to discuss factual matters and arrange the food sharing, most of which had been contributed by her.

In other words, the women mostly found their companionship with other women. The men found their companionship in their solitary communion with nature on the hunt and with the other men back at the camp. Even so, we must visualize these separate gatherings going on within the close confines of the encampment. The groups were only a few feet apart and, even if they had separate conversations, they would feel close to one another. The children would wander freely from one to the other.