The Last Survivors
About five thousand human populations remain on the earth, judging from the number of languages in existence; this is an imperfect but useful measure, if only because the languages are the sole aspect of culture studied systematically enough. Very few hunter-gatherer societies are left about thirty until some years ago, now even fewer. Today the only numerically important groups (with more than one hundred thousand members) are the central African pygmies, the Khoisan of southern Africa, and the Australian Aborigines; only the pygmies, and not all of them, live predominantly by hunting and gathering. Other smaller groups exist, scattered about. Of these we know, if not the lifestyle they once pursued, at least what remains of it after being disturbed by us.
There are two populations in South Africa generally known as the Bushmen and Hottentots. Anthropologists have coined the name "Khoisan," joining Khoi-khoi (the Hottentots) to San (the Bushmen). Today they inhabit very arid areas, but previously they lived in the more pleasant savanna, from where they have been driven. Apart from differences of environment and ecology, the Khoisan live, or lived, in a way fairly similar to the pygmies. Few are hunter- gatherers today. Many are farm laborers; others are soldiers or somehow live in the city.
They have preserved their language, which is undoubtedly extremely old and very unusual: it contains unique clicking sounds, which are highly varied and difficult to repeat. Various South African tribes, such as the Xhosa, have mixed a lot with the Khoisan, a fact proved by the appearance of three new clicks in their language and of Khoisan genes in their DNA. The Khoisan also have characteristic, almost oriental, features. Nelson Mandela, Africa's most charismatic politician, is of Xhosa origin, and his face shows clear signs of Khoisan influence. The word Xhosa really should be written !Xhosa, the exclamation mark indicating a special click in phonetic conventions.
The Australian Aborigines are dispersed or live together in reserves, where they have a more sedentary life than before, except for a group in the north. To these, the government has assigned a territory in which they can continue to live as in the past. There are about 170,000 Aborigines, of whom 47,000 still preserve some knowledge of their original language. Only relatively few live in ways similar to the traditional ones. In the past, they lived in groups of twenty-five to thirty people, and the tribes, when they existed (the majority have been destroyed, broken up, amalgamated, or put into reserves), numbered four hundred to five hundred people on average. Each surviving Australian tribe has a different, ancient language (not borrowed from neighbors, as is common with pygmies). When James Cook arrived at the end of the eighteenth century, agriculture was still unknown.
These average dimensions for groups of hunter-gatherers are the same as those found on archaeological sites that precede the discovery of agriculture: the settlements and campfires along with the amount of animal bones found indicate numbers equivalent to the groups of pygmy hunters and Australian Aborigines. Naturally, the hunting band, the approximate equivalent in size to a modern pygmy and ancient settlement, varies in number because it is dynamic and mobile; it may tighten to form smaller nuclei or widen to a larger group according to the demands of hunting and survival. The tribe is a social unit superior to the band. It is more stable and tends to be endogamous, meaning that most marriages (80 to 90 percent) are contracted within it. It has also been found that five hundred is the minimum threshold for easily avoiding excessive intermarriage, with its damaging effects on offspring.
The pygmies say it is best to "marry afar," because the man acquires hunting rights in his wife's territories. This way he broadens his hunting ground and prospects for survival. This is a highly valid economic motive, but the custom is positive for an additional extremely important, if unconscious, reason: it reduces the chances of marriage between close blood relations and enriches the local genetic pool. Primitive peoples living in small groups run serious risks of inbreeding, leading to lower vitality and infertility in the children. Custom almost always finds a way of avoiding this danger, however. A long-term genealogy has been reconstructed for the Thule Eskimos, a tiny, rather isolated group inhabiting the far northern coast of western Greenland. An extraordinary series of genealogical acrobatics has ensured that although marriage inevitably takes place between relations, they are always distant ones.