ref: Before Farming 2007/2 article 7

Of yodelling, caterpillars, a linguistic treasury -
and the Neanderthal menu

We all like a good meal, a chat and perhaps a sing song with friends. These pleasurable activities form a central part of the matrix of behaviours which we use to create and maintain close social bonds, as well as learn from each other. Hunter-gatherers are no different, as this set of papers demonstrates.

Megan Biesele’s longstanding study of the oral traditions of the Ju/’hoansi, in particular their folktales, is well known to anthropologists and archaeologists alike. In this issue, she provides an extended report on an ambitious project underway in the Kalahari to translate and transcribe texts collected over three decades into a permanent digital archive. This database has obvious value for researchers, but the project is about much more than providing fodder for academic rumination. The Ju/’hoan people themselves are directly involved in the process as contributors, recorders and beneficiaries of the data. The resulting archives are already being put to use by various local communities for their own educational, political and economic ends. Future generations will have much to be grateful for as their language and heritage is being secured.

Digital technology is also coming to the aid of the Baka of Cameroon, as reported by Jerome Lewis who is part of an initiative encouraging the sustainable development of forest resources (see News). Logging, legal and otherwise, poses a direct threat to the livelihood of the Baka as they derive from the forest essential foods (and trade goods) such as caterpillars and honey as well as medicines. The forest is also their sacred landscape, with burial grounds at risk from road clearance and the impact of heavy machinery. The Baka are now being trained to use hand-held GPS units to record the location of their resources and places of cultural importance so that maps can be made, sensitive areas avoided and illegal logging monitored by the authorities. This is a promising initiative that should in theory benefit all involved by ensuring the sustainable management of resources and the availability of the wood to the growing international market for ethically sourced timber. We’ll ask Jerome to report on the progress of this project in future issues, and I note with more than passing interest the archaeological potential of these maps for analysing prehistoric site distributions.

The underlying similarity in musical styles between hunter-gatherers of the forests of central and west Africa to those of the Kalahari has long been noted, but in a provocative intervention into the long-running Kalahari revisionist debate, Victor Grauer, brings some statistical rigour to this observation in the form of cantometrics. The intricate interlocking of voices – almost madrigal like – and yodelling characterise the songs of these two geographically and culturally separate regions. Grauer argues that this fundamental similarity in musical styles reflects a distant shared ancestry rather than independent innovation. That ancestry finds support in recent genetic data indicating a point of coalescence of African hunter-gatherer DNA (mtDNA and non-recombining Y-DNA) sometime before 60,000 years ago. For Grauer this deep seated biological and cultural ancestry rings the death knell for the revisionist argument. Bringing music into this debate is certainly novel, though I’m sure many will balk at the suggestion of such long-lived cultural conservatism in what seems, superficially at least, to be a fluid realm of behaviour. But perhaps such a view reflects our own openness and ease of access to the diversity of world music. I look forward to comments on this paper.

Last year we celebrated the sesquicentennial of the discovery of the first Neanderthal remains with a set of papers in Before Farming, and in this issue we return to the central issue of diet. Stable isotope based evidence (carbon and nitrogen) has transformed our understanding of the cognitive capacity of this species by providing evidence to counter the once prevalent image of Neanderthals as marginal scavengers. We now know that they consistently chose the super-size option when it came to meat-eating. Jessica Pearson provides a clear summary of the methodology of isotope based dietary reconstruction with directions for future research signposted, but she also draws attention to the potential health risks of the meaty Neander-thal diet. Without sufficient access to fatty animals and vegetables, they risked malnutrition, in particular lack of vitamin C, hitting what is called the protein ceiling. Given that Neanderthals survived as a species fornearly 300,000 years, they clearly found cultural and physiological responses to the basic challenge of feeding themselves and their offspring.

Perhaps when engaged in song Neanderthals celebrated the healthful properties of the humble tuber (apologies to Steven Mithen).

The Editor
Liverpool, November 2007

© Western Academic & Specialist Press Ltd 2007