The Old Way: A Story of the First People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Among the self-flattering notions held by the civilized world is the one that labels traditional hunter-gatherer societies as “primitive,” their members ignorant of any understanding of the natural world other than the magical. Thunder is the rumbling of the sky god’s stomach; an eclipse is a lion covering the moon with its paw to give himself darkness for better hunting. That sort of thing.

In The Old Way, a reminiscence of life among the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the 1950s, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas demonstrates the imbecility of such a misconception. On the contrary, the Ju/wasi, as they call themselves, not only possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of their environment, but also made a subtle distinction between myth and reality beyond what many “civilized” people seem able to grasp.

During a lunar eclipse, Marshall recounts, she happened to be with her family at a Ju/wasi camp where the people paid almost no attention to the disappearance of the moon. “In fiction, they would have fallen to their knees in terror, beseeching the white people to save them.”

Pressed for an explanation of the celestial event, one man finally offered the lion’s paw theory, which had, at least, some basis in the observable hunting practice of lions, who prefer to hunt in darkness.

“Still,” Marshall writes, “the story was not meant to be taken as fact in the way that, say, the Book of Genesis is sometimes taken. It was a story, and it showed, among other things, the profound awareness that the people had of lions.” Indeed, the Ju/wasi reassured their white visitors: “`Don’t worry,’ they said, scarcely bothering to look up at the spectacle. `The moon will be right back.'”

Thus, and in many similar anecdotes and observations, 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.

Today, Thomas is best known for the surprise best-sellers, The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993) and The Tribe of the Tiger (1994), in which she brings her skills as a writer and anthropologist to bear on what are essentially hobby projects, not rigorous scientific inquiries.

For all of the genuine pleasures these two books provide their readers, they constitute by far the least interesting aspects of Marshall’s remarkable life and output. For one thing, she is the author of two novels about prehistoric human life, Reindeer Moon (1987) and The Animal Wife (1990), which are far superior to the romantic adventure novels of Jean Clan of the Cave Bear Auel.

Even more significant is her first book, The Harmless People (1959), an anthropological examination of the Ju/wasi, also known as the San people of Southern Africa. A groundbreaking work, it has never been out of print.

Marshall’s first book arose from the time she spent in Africa with her family.

Her father, Laurence, a co-founder of Raytheon, took early retirement after World War II to spend more time with his family and decided to do it in Africa, where they eventually sought out the remote Bushmen, who had not previously been studied. Elizabeth Marshall, then 19, became a scientist and writer; her brother, John, a year younger, became a documentary filmmaker and activist on behalf of the Ju/wasi.

Now Marshall returns to the Ju/wasi in The Old Way: A Story of the First People, an engrossing if odd narrative that combines elements of the memoir with those of the popular science book and random bits of anthropological study. In this way it bears unhappy similarities to the dog and cat books, sharing some of their weaknesses. Certainly, it contains far less science than what is promised by its stated thesis: Hunter-gatherer societies such as that of the Bushmen provide an unexpected window into the way our most distant ancestors must have lived.

“To me,” she writes in the first chapter, “the experience of visiting this place and these people was profoundly important, 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 is now gone. I also feel that I saw the most successful culture that our kind has ever known, if a lifestyle can be called a culture and if stability and longevity are measures, a culture governed by sun and rain, heat and cold, wind and wildfires, plant and animal populations.”

As with the dog and cat books, The Old Way is, at times, a fascinating and rewarding read. Yet it would have been a better book had Marshall chosen a genre – memoir, science book, anthropological study – and stuck with it. There is, especially, simply not enough science in it to make up for the slack parts, nor yet enough chronological or dramatic shaping to the memoir bits. Readers might wish she had taken her observations of the Ju/wasi way of life and compared them with what archeologists are digging up about the way our Paleolithic forebears lived.

When, in the last three chapters, Marshall examines the rapid loss of the Ju/wasi traditional way of life and their resultant social problems, the narrative regains its taut focus.

Now reduced to poverty, exploitive farm or factory work, the dole, or prostitution, none of the Ju/wasi live as they did when the Marshalls first met them more than 50 years ago. Drunkenness is a particular scourge to a people who had no tradition of making alcohol.

In part, Marshall reports, the Ju/wasi’s dire circumstances today stem from the idea held by distant African officials that they are incapable of learning to farm.

The dominance of modern technological life, it seems, is driving more than animal species to extinction. And imbecilic notions of superiority are not restricted to western nations.