lot has been written and said on the subject of suburbia. What a dehumanizing environment: fields of grain smothered under the sprawl of houses and pavement! With 30 to 40 percent of the land in most towns covered in asphalt instead of grass, we get heat islands that screw with our weather. We feel the emotional pull of these roads, too, pulling up stakes and moving our households (on average) once every five years. Whatever happened to stability? Worse still, we suffer through hourlong commutes to distant workplaces, and working outside the home is something both women and men are now expected to do. As a result, mothers increasingly leave their children in daycare, where they're tended in groups rather than one on one. Teenagers have it rough as well; they've outgrown daycare and left the joys of childhood behind, but society doesn't believe they're competent for any sort of real work. The purpose of high school, many argue, is not so much to educate teens as to keep them out of our hair during the all-important workday.
The result? Teens develop a separate culture all their own, with all the sexual politics and power plays of the adult world but little of its gravitas or restraint. And this behavior then carries through into adulthood; in a rising tide of pornography and TV-approved philandering, we've seen our divorce rate climb to 50 percent. Serial monogamy is the new normal; children are raised by a Gatling-gun lineup of rotating father figures in households of half-siblings. It's a kind of hell on Earth, and we have only ourselves to blame.
That's the party line, anyway, usually from both parties. But what if they were wrong? What if all this were somehow good for us? We'll come back to this point in a minute; meanwhile, let's talk about Africa. Bear with me.
The Bushmen had 'burbs, too
The Kalahari desert in southern Africa is home to groups of people called Bushmen, or more properly the Khoi San (or Khoisan), famous for their natural charisma and for their role in the 1980 Botswanan movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. These are those people with the funny clicking sounds in their language, and this is important, because those sounds appear to be of very ancient origin. For a variety of reasons, linguists believe these sounds used to exist in all languages but have gradually been lost as language has evolved over tens of thousands of years. The vast majority of modern languages have no trace of them. The implication? That the San family of languages is very old and closely related to Ursprach, the primal tongue of humanity (see "Speaking in Tongues, Baby!").
The genetics of the San people are also interesting. It's been known since 1987 that all human beings are descended from a single woman—called "mitochondrial Eve"—who lived about 150,000 years ago. Less well known is that fact that all non-African people are also descended from a single woman—called "Lara"—who lived more recently, around 60,000 years ago (see "Adam and Eve and Lara and Fox"). Y-chromosome evidence points to a similar story for human males. It seems that a single tribe of people migrated out of Africa and gave birth to every non-African society in the world today. And as it turns out, that tribe's closest living relatives are—you guessed it—the Khoi San people.
This may sound strange, because the San are an endangered population—only 100,000 people or so, living in marginal environments and now intermingled in towns and cities with the people of much larger tribes. How did they come to be so prolific? The answer is that there used to be a lot more of them. Turning here to history and archaeology, we find that until fairly recently the San people occupied nearly all of southern and eastern Africa, including (a) the region where modern humans originated, (b) the region where modern language probably started and (c) a lot of the most fertile territory on the continent. If there really was an ancestral Garden of Eden somewhere in northeastern Africa—and I think there probably was—the San people were surely the ones living there. Since that time, alas, they've been gradually crowded out by Bantu farmers—particularly in the last 2,000 years. For better or worse, the San were hunter-gatherers, and while that's a decent living, it requires vast amounts of land (depending on the environment, anywhere from 100 to 10,000 acres per person, versus 1 to 10 acres for subsistence farming). With agriculture on their side, the Bantu could outcompete the San by supporting a larger population in the same areas—a demographic advantage that remains with them even today. In the end, the San remained mainly in and around the Kalahari, a place so hot and dry that no one else cared to challenge them for it.
Still, they've been there for a long time—20,000 years at least, and possibly much longer—and until the modern disruptions of the mid-20th century, their environment was relatively stable, and their culture highly optimized within it. Technologically and socially, they probably hadn't changed much since the Upper Paleolithic Era, otherwise known as the Stone Age or the Ice Age, which ended around 10,000 years ago. Unfortunately, the past few decades have seen huge shifts in the natural, political and social environment of the Kalahari Desert and an almost total end to the San's hunter-gatherer ways. A tribe of San people called the !Kung were among the last to give up this lifestyle.
Wealth is relative
The point I'm staggering toward is unscientific but obviously true: Until about 1975, the !Kung were the honest-to-God children of Eden, as close to our global ancestors in appearance and language, culture and habit as anyone could ever hope to imagine. If you wanted to look 20 millennia backward in time, you didn't need to look any further than a !Kung village. Today they keep goats and gardens and even cattle, and work as laborers and servants for Bantu peoples in and around the desert. Fortunately, this shift has happened within living memory, and many !Kung still practice the old ways on extended primitive camping trips, so it's still possible to study and interview them, to learn more about how they lived.
And here's where we tie it back to my earlier point, because to a first approximation the !Kung lived in the suburbs, just like us.
You think I'm kidding? A !Kung village was a sprawling mess of identical houses (well, grass huts), with packed dirt lots and trails taking the place of pavement. Longer trails linked the villages together, the people were highly mobile and typically moved several times over the course of a lifetime. Their hunting/gathering work was different from the sort of planning/serving/organizing/building/selling we do today, and they did their commuting on foot, but to reach the ample food supplies out in the bush they typically had to travel for 30 to 60 minutes. (Any less and they'd quickly deplete the supply in a too-small range. Any more and they'd simply move to someplace more productive.)
What's more, San women enjoyed almost total equality with the men. And why not? Their work was just as difficult and just as important, and their workday just as long (about 8 hours). It takes a man to build houses and put meat on the table, yes, but it takes a woman to crack nuts and dig up roots, to make clothing and gather firewood. And this equality has one inevitable consequence: working women simply can't afford to spend too many of their days taking care of children. Indeed, the !Kung women took close care of their children only until the age of 5 or so, at which point the kiddoes were typically handed off to grandmothers or rotated through group care by other women in the village.
This state of benign neglect only grew as the children got older, until finally, as teenagers, they were basically left on their own in a state of permanent summer vacation. They had some basic chores to do, and they could hunt and forage a little, close to home, but they weren't trusted with the adult responsibility of poisoned arrows, or with the dangers and hardships of real wilderness. Economically speaking, there was no real need for them to work anyway, until they reached the age of 16. In this sense the San were a wealthy people, with (arguably) less hardship in their lives than the farmers next door, and a heck of a lot less than the city drudges and child laborers of the industrial world. With all the walking and with a diet closely matching the nutritionist's "food pyramid," they were also surprisingly healthy.
Yesterday wasn't so bad
But idle hands will find their own sort of work; !Kung teenagers spent their days in elaborate role-playing games, in small houses and even entire mini-villages of their own. Think of them as Paleolithic drive-in movie theaters. Here they rehearsed the rhythms of family life, and yes, discreetly explored their sexuality. Like us, the San elders disapproved of their children behaving this way, but like our own teenagers, !Kung kids had torrid, volatile love affairs that eventually gave way to trial marriages—living together with a sexual partner without actually tying the knot. When a woman felt ready—often sometime in her early-to-mid 20s, she would settle down for her first real marriage.
But the volatility continued. The !Kung were a bawdy and passionate people, fond of dirty jokes and brief flares of temper. They—how can I put this? They loved to cheat on each other, and fight about it, and make up, and cheat again until enough emotional damage had piled up that they finally preferred a divorce. Then they'd meet new partners, marry again, and start the cycle anew until, with luck, a truly stable couple came together and real happiness blossomed. Overall, their divorce rate was the same as ours: around 50 percent.
Sound familiar? It should. However fashionable it may be to bash the 'burbs, they really do seem to mirror the world our ancestors enjoyed, back in the pre-agrarian Dreamtime. Maybe, with high technology on our side and 10 millennia of civilized experience, we're finally wealthy enough to live the way we were meant to.
Of course, our modern world has some important differences. We live longer (almost twice as long as the !Kung), but because we don't get as much fresh air and exercise, our rates of clinical depression are higher. Because we commute in cars rather than on foot, we face the stress of traffic jams and the occasional outbreak of road rage. Because we watch TV instead of telling stories and singing songs, we don't nurture our individual creative talents as much as we probably should. There are other short-circuits as well; the modern practice of shopping seems to conflate several different behaviors, to not entirely good effect. San women had only as many clothes and adornments as they could personally make, while spending their days gathering food and fuel. In the modern world, women actually gather clothes and can fill any number of closets and jewelry boxes without ever feeling that they have enough. By San standards, our world is a little bit crazy.
But who's to say it can't get better? Who's to say it isn't getting a little bit better every single day? Why, in the end, should the Utopias of tomorrow find us in glittering antiseptic towers, when down the dusty trail there's a grass hut waiting, back home in the suburbs of Eden?
Sources:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Heat Island Group:
www.epa.gov/heatisland/resources/pdf/post_reflectance/reflectance_chap1&2.pdf
Why Do Americans Move So Often?
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0108/05/sun.10.html
The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com (The Gods Must Be Crazy)
The Encyclopedia Britannica, 2004 Edition: ("Khoisan," "Kalahari")
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org ("mitochondrial eve," "subsistence farming," "Kalahari desert")
Lorne A. Sully, and Mark D. Emmons, Urban Reserves: The City of Saskatoon's Parternship with First Nations
City Planning Branch, City of Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Ngai Tahu Land Report, Waitangi Tribunal 1992 New Zealand
http://wai8155s1.verdi.2day.com/reports/sichat/wai027/chapt16.pdf
Olson, Steve: Mapping Human History, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002
Sykes, Bryan: The Seven Daughters of Eve, W.W. Norton and Company, 2001
Wells, Spencer: The Journey of Man, Random House, 2002
Shostak, Marjorie: Nisa, The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Vintage Books, 1982
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, To Crush the Moon. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available as a free download.
