The Old Way: A Story of the First People

This will be one of the most important books of the millennium. -Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig 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. In The Old Way, Marshall Thomas 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. A deeply felt, deeply observed masterpiece that transforms the way we look at our own world. -Sarah Blaffer Hardy.…