Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River by Robert Twigger Read Free Book Online Page A

rudimentary art among Neanderthals. But only Homo sapiens sapiens is buried with trade goods from far away, way outside his own living area. Burials in the Pyrenees turn up with obsidian carvings from central Europe. Northern Europeans have Mediterranean beads. These are the descendants of the first Homo sapiens who swarmed up the Nile and out of Africa, swapping their goods as they went.
    We assume they were trading, but looking at the nearest living equivalent that is still around today – hunter-gatherer groups – it is much more probable that they simply gave these things away. The !Kung tribesmen, a remote group of the so-called San Bushmen of the Kalahari, are gift givers not traders. They also have no leaders. As one put it, ‘We have headmen, every man is a headman over himself!’ This was said as a joke to anthropologist Richard Lee as he studied their highly efficient way of life.
    Trade is so central to our own ideas of what is essentially human that we may assume gift giving as an aberrant or naive proto-behaviour. Yet hunter-gatherers – such as the !Kung – as well as those early Homo sapiens had no need of trade nor any incentive to practise it, living as they did in groups of around thirty members, which is the ideal size for a hunting unit. Though the so-called Dunbar number is often repeated as marking the ideal size of a human community (150 members), this is a theoretical construct derived from extrapolations from primate studies. The lower figure of thirty better reflects the requirements of feeding a group who have no recourse to farming. Early hunter-gatherer man carried only twenty-five pounds of worldly goods when he moved, which he did periodically to find new game. We can assume that a great river, replete with game living off its bounty, would have worked as a natural magnet, pulling these hunter-gatherers ever further north. They had no need to trade – their twenty-five-pound bundle contained all they needed – but they would certainly have given goods away as gifts. When you are on the move you want as light a bundle as possible; there is no benefit in excess baggage.
    !Kung women give birth roughly every four years. They suckle their young for that long, which acts as a natural prophylactic, a necessary one since it is hard to move and carry two infants at a time. But it is also an ecological solution. Only with the coming of agriculture can man turn his womenfolk into the breeding machine that for so long was seen as the natural state. Hunter-gatherer women, as opposed tothe women of pastoral nomads and nomadic agriculturists, have a great deal of equality with men. This is not mere romance – it stems from the importance of their role in both gathering food and shouldering the burden of moving around.
    The !Kung do not trade because all they carry are a few tools and perhaps a musical instrument. The necessity of movement means they cannot develop the greed that is an everyday part of the settler’s life. Is it possible, then, that in that first breakout from Eden early man really did fall from grace? The !Kung settle their differences through talk, not through war – just as the Penan hunter-gatherers of Borneo are reported to do, as do the other endangered and scattered survivors of Homo sapiens who stuck to the original plan and weren’t tempted by the lure of grain and grazing animals. It seems to me that to have no leaders is better expressed as having no followers. It is the followers who cause all the problems, and early man had solved this before he took that river out of Eden.
    The details are also correct. The Nile now splits into two main branches in the Egyptian delta. A thousand years ago there were three branches. In prehistory there were four, just as it states in Genesis.
    It is tempting to want to turn the clock back. But the whole gist of the story of the Fall, the first Nile story if you like, is about the impossibility of doing just that. Adam and Eve are kicked