The Old Way: A Story of the First People - Hardcover

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374225524 ISBN 13: 9780374225520

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

One of our most influential anthropologists reevaluates her long and illustrious career by returning to her roots—and the roots of life as we know it

When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas first arrived in Africa to live among the Kalahari San, or bushmen, it was 1950, she was nineteen years old, and these last surviving hunter-gatherers were living as humans had lived for 15,000 centuries. Thomas wound up writing about their world in a seminal work, The Harmless People (1959). It has never gone out of print.

Back then, this was uncharted territory and little was known about our human origins. Today, our beginnings are better understood. And after a lifetime of interest in the bushmen, Thomas has come to see that their lifestyle reveals great, hidden truths about human evolution.

As she displayed in her bestseller, The Hidden Life of Dogs, Thomas has a rare gift for giving voice to the voices we don’t usually listen to, and helps us see the path that we have taken in our human journey. In The Old Way, she shows how the skills and customs of the hunter-gatherer share much in common with the survival tactics of our animal predecessors. And since it is “knowledge, not objects, that endure” over time, Thomas vividly brings us to see how linked we are to our origins in the animal kingdom.

The Old Way is a rare and remarkable achievement, sure to stir up controversy, and worthy of celebration.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the author of seven books, nonfiction and fiction—among them The Hidden Life of Dogs, The Harmless People, and Reindeer Moon. She has written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, and lives in New Hampshire.

When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas first arrived in Africa to live among the Kalahari San, or bushmen, it was 1950, she was nineteen years old, and these last surviving hunter-gatherers were living as humans had lived for fifteen thousand centuries. Thomas wound up writing about their world in a seminal work, The Harmless People (1959), a book that is still in print.

 

The history of mankind that most of us know is only the tip of the iceberg, a brief stint compared to fifteen thousand centuries of life as roving clans that seldom settled down adapted every day to changes in environment and food supply, and lived for the most part like the animal ancestors from which they evolved. Those origins are not so easily abandoned, Thomas suggests, and our wired, documented, and market-driven society has plenty to learn from the Bushmen of the Kalahari about human evolution.

 

As she displayed in The Hidden Life of Dogs, Thomas helps us see the path that we have taken in our human journey. In The Old Way, she shows how the skills and customs of the hunter-gatherer share much in common with the survival tactics of our animal predecessors. And since it is "knowledge, not objects, that endure" over time, Thomas brings us to see how linked we are to our origins in the animal kingdom.

"Heartbreaking and gorgeously observed . . . The Old Way is not only a timely work, but also a timeless one—a last look back before we decide how to go forward."—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review

"Heartbreaking and gorgeously observed . . . The Old Way is not only a timely work, but also a timeless one—a last look back before we decide how to go forward."—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review

 

"It is fascinating to see how Thomas has honed her observational powers over the year . . . and how her notion of 'culture' has broadened."—Los Angeles Times

 

"With a perspective honed over the intervening 50-odd years . . . Thomas captures the fascinating customs of a people that had no future as a tribe."—The Daily News

 

"A fascinating and rewarding read . . . Marshall proves again and again the full humanity and astonishing sophistication of a people so 'primitive' that she offers them as a link to our earliest Paleolithic forebears, the first humans."—Chauncey Mabe, The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

"Part memoir, part anthropological study, part skewering of the forces of modernity that have destroyed a way of life that was not just ancient and extraordinary, but full of clues about how we came to be who we are today . . .Thomas has produced a magnificent elegy to a way of life that has only recently passed us by . . . Her book provides us with a cultural artifact of the rarest kind—a first-hand account of a way of life usually only guessed at by experts poring over bones and fossils in the dirt."—Austin Merrill, The News and Observer (Raleigh)

“Throughout the book Thomas evocatively imagines the ancient lives based on what she witnessed during the twilight of one of the last hunter-gatherer societies . . . The Old Way reveals how an indigenous people and an American family were able to transcend their tremendous cultural divide and find common ground.”—The Explores Journal

"In 1950, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' father, the retired president of Raytheon, together with his wife, a former English teacher, and their two teenage children went out to live among some of the last people in the world still living as nomadic hunter-gatherers. It would be a coming of age like no other, with stunning and unforeseen rewards for the field of Anthropology. Her mother, Lorne Marshall, would write The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, one of the great ethnographies of all time; her brother John made a series of films culminating (just before he died) in the epic Kalahari Family, chronicling the fate of the !Kung through early contacts and discovery of their remarkable way of life, to their tragic displacement from the lands that had sustained them for so many thousands of year. Elizabeth herself, an extraordinarily gifted writer went on to write a number of best-selling books. Now, half a century later, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas returns to those early experiences and re-examines what she learned from the people, places, animals and lifeways encountered in the Kalahari long ago. The result is a brilliantly conceived, wise and hauntingly vivid, portrait of the natural and social worlds inhabited by people living much as our earliest human ancestors must have. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ finest book to date, The Old Way, is a deeply felt, deeply observed masterpiece that transforms the way we look at our own world."—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection

 

"This is the owner's manual we need for humankind. The Old Way gives us critical insight into our past at a turning point in human history by one of the few people who has seen our kind living as we have lived for most of our species' existence. This will be one of the most important books of the millennium."—Sy Montgomery, author of The Snake Scientist and The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans

 

"A meticulous discussion of the names applied to the people [now called] 'Ju/wasi' . . This is Thomas at her best: respectful of scholarship, traditions and peoples . . . Essential."—Library Journal

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the author of seven books, nonfiction and fiction —among them The Hidden Life of Dogs, The Harmless People, and Reindeer Moon. She’s written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Atlantic, and lives in New Hampshire.

Reviews

Last year, while traveling through the Kalahari, I stopped for the night at a cluster of huts, encircled by cactus and low thorny scrub. The leader of the hamlet, a fine-boned San warrior, thanked me for making the journey to his world. He invited me inside, and we sat down in the darkness of his one-room home. When we were comfortable, I said it had long been my dream to see for myself the ancient ways of the San.

"You are too late," he replied. "Everything has changed."

"When did it change?"

The warrior pushed himself up on his stick and thought for a moment.

"A lifetime ago," he said.

The San people of the Kalahari, a vast desert region (120,000 square miles) in southwest Africa, have sometimes been ridiculed for their simplicity, their naiveté and their gentleness. (The tribe got the world's attention back in 1980 with the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy," in which an ordinary Coca-Cola bottle lands in one village, with catastrophic results.) . They possess a kind of refinement that is almost impossible to describe. Historically, their lives have never been cramped with consumer goods or supercharged by self-induced stress. Instead, they lived in a world that respected the elements above and the dry soil beneath. They walked lightly on the Earth .

Throughout the 20th century, the San were a beacon of light, shining back to an ancient time . . . that of our own ancestors. By learning about them, we were able to learn about ourselves. It sounds simple: You found a so-called primitive tribe, you studied it, and you concluded that what they are and what we were are the same. But it's not that simple at all. It takes an anthropologist blessed with extraordinary sensitivity and foresight to understand how the chain has worked. And it takes a greater one still to break it down into bite-sized chunks and feed it to laymen.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is one of the most important champions of the San "Bushmen." She has spent a lifetime gently alerting us to their cause -- and to the fact that we have not only polluted the planet but have wrecked the delicate balance of tribal Africa as well.

At the age of 19, Thomas traveled to Botswana with her parents and her brother and lived with the Ju/wasi tribe of Bushmen. Her father, Laurence, was a civil engineer, and her mother, Lorna, became a respected anthropologist, writing a seminal work on the !Kung San. Thomas turned her early feelings and experiences of the Kalahari into a book entitled The Harmless People (1959), a work that has not been out of print since.

Now, with a lifetime on which to reflect, she has published The Old Way, a work of impressive scholarship and, more important, a book that connects the dots linking us to the first stages of the human race. And how many dots there are! Thomas explains our human ancestry by citing the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's illustration: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. On and on goes your lineage, each of you holding the hand of your mother, until your line is three hundred miles long and goes back in time five million years, deep into the African rain forest, where the clasping hand is that of a chimpanzee."

Early in the book, Thomas reflects on how it felt to first stumble into the serene land of the Ju/wasi in the 1950s: "[It was] as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. I feel that I saw the Old Way, the way of life that shaped us, a way of life that now is gone." For her, the Ju/wasi reflected a time almost 150,000 years ago, when the "Old Rules" governed our species. We were a people in fear of lions, of sickness and of darkness, and we had yet to create the kind of agricultural, non-nomadic societies that frame our lives today.

The Old Way concludes with the disheartening truth that the Ju/wasi and other San groups now struggle to coexist in a world rocked and ravaged by homogeneous modernity -- a similar plight to Australian Aboriginal groups and other native peoples. Many San are living under a blanket of poverty, tormented by alcoholism and AIDS. They wear native clothing only when tourist cameras come out, and few can remember a relatively recent time when ostrich eggshells were used to carry water or when digging sticks were used to unearth prized tubers and roots.

The Kalahari desert continues to touch all who gaze upon it. But in a way, the land is not the same now that the fragile tapestry of humanity has been torn apart. When I finished reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's remarkable book, I found myself wishing I could step into the time machine as she did almost half a century ago and emerge into the real Kalahari, the world of our ancestors.

Reviewed by Tahir Shah
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In 1950, Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs), at 19, joined her civil engineer father, her ballerina mother (who would become a celebrated anthropologist) and her brother on a life-changing expedition into southwest Africa's Kalahari Desert to live among the Ju/wasi Bushmen. Less a rigorous anthropological study than a loving, nostalgic ode to a self-sustaining culture of hunter-gatherers, this book recounts their now extinct way of life. The Ju/wasi used ostrich eggs to hold more than a day's water supply to expand their foraging range, and burned dry grass to encourage the growth of green grass, thus attracting large antelopes and other prey. The Ju/wasi allowed polygamy and divorce, welcomed baby girls as much as baby boys and treated children with unfailing kindness, but practiced infanticide on children born to nursing mothers because, with their low-fat diet, they could produce enough milk for only one child. In recent decades, the Bushmen have been removed from their land and their way of life has been obliterated by modernity, racism, poverty, alcoholism and AIDS. Thomas offers readers a glimpse of how our prehistoric ancestors undoubtedly lived, worked, loved and played. Photos from the Marshall family album freeze the Ju/wasi in the happy 1950s. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0374225524
• ISBN 13: 9780374225520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368