The Peoples of the Forest
Paleolithic society must have been organized
very much as the pygmies are today. They are nomads or semi nomads. A tribe
numbers five hundred, one thousand, or two thousand people, sometimes more,
always living in groups of about thirty, on average (although it can vary
from ten to fifty, including the women and children), who hunt together.
Every so often the groups - or whole tribe - meet to celebrate great dances
and collective rites. Dancing and singing are the main social activities.
Because a pygmy house doesn't take long to build, frequently moving camp
and setting up a new one a few days's journey away is easy. The composition
of the village is fluid. The few component families are usually, but not
always, related on the male side. With every move, some go their own way
and others arrive, making each new settlement different from the one before.
Hunting territory is split among the groups and passed down from parents
to children. The right to hunt in a different area can be acquired through
marriage. About 30 to 40 percent of the pygmy diet is game of some sort,
usually antelope or gazelle. Monkey is considered a delicacy, particularly
our cousins the chimpanzee and gorilla, which inhabit the pygmy areas. The
men hunt, and the women gather the rest of the food (fruit and all sorts
of vegetables).
They go barefoot and, until a few years ago, were almost totally naked, their only attire being a loincloth, generally made from the bark of a tree. They do not weave and whenever possible they obtain cotton cloth or ragged shirts and trousers from local cultivators. When I began my research in the mid-1960s, they still made their loincloth out of bark that had been beaten to soften it. The pygmies in northeast Zaire sometimes decorate them with beautiful patterns; these may fetch hundreds and even thousands of dollars on European and American markets.
The pygmies are extraordinarily well adapted to the forest and are experts on every living thing. They use herbs and roots to make medicines generally unknown to Western doctors. They dip their arrowheads in a deadly poison, using extracts from three of four different plants, and have even developed the antidotes for these poisons. What they know most about, however, is ethologyanimal behaviorwhich is fundamental to a hunter. They are the only humans able to survive on their own in the forest. Years ago I saw a very good and scientifically accurate film in which a pygmy showed a child how chimpanzees catch insects by using a stick to open the tunnels in their nests in tree bark. The termites are disturbed by the unusual condition and swarm over the stick in wild agitation, upon which the chimpanzee quickly withdraws it and gleefully eats his meal. The discovery that chimpanzees manipulate instrumentsof which the stick used to catch termites is the most importantcaused a great stir some years ago. It was made independently by the British ethologist Jane Goodall, who after months of work was finally accepted by a group of chimpanzees and spent years studying their habits and customs. The pygmies knew all about the chimpanzees centuries ago, even if they prefer their termites cooked.