The World Until Yesterday

Attitudes towards danger

On one of my first trips to New Guinea, when I was still inexperienced and incautious, I spent a month with a group of New Guineans, studying birds on a forest-covered mountain. After a week camped at low elevation and inventorying birds there, I wanted to identify the bird species living at higher elevation, so we moved our gear a few thousand feet up the mountain. For the campsite at which we would be based for the next week, I selected a gorgeous location in tall forest. It was on a long ascending ridge at a point where the ridge flattened and became broader, offering lots of gentle terrain nearby in which I could comfortably walk around and watch birds. From a nearby stream, we could obtain water without having to go far. The campsite was at one side of the flat ridge crest, overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep valley over which I would be able to watch soaring hawks, swifts, and parrots. As the place to erect our tents, I chose the base of a glorious giant of a forest tree, with a thick straight trunk covered with moss. Delighted at the prospect of spending a week in such beautiful surroundings, I asked my New Guinea companions to build a platform for our tents.

To my astonishment, they became agitated and refused to sleep there. They explained that the tall tree was dead, so it might fall over on our camp and kill us. Yes, I did see that the tree was dead, but I was still surprised at their overreaction and objected, “It’s a huge tree. It looks still solid. It’s not rotten. No wind could blow it over, and there isn’t wind here anyway. It will be years before this tree falls over!” But my New Guinea friends remained frightened. Rather than sleep in the shelter of a tent under that tree, they declared that they would instead sleep exposed out in the open, far enough away that the tree wouldn’t hit and kill them if it fell.

I thought then that their fears were absurdly exaggerated and verged on paranoia. But as my months of camping in New Guinea forests went on, I noticed that, at least once on almost every day, I heard a tree falling somewhere in the forest. I listened to stories of New Guineans killed by tree-falls. I reflected that these New Guineans spent much of their lives camped in the forest—perhaps a hundred nights a year, or about 4,000 nights over their 40-year expected lifespan. I eventually carried out the math. If you do something that involves a very low probability of killing a person—say, just once in a thousand times that you do that something—but you do it a hundred times per year, then you are likely to die in about 10 years, instead of living out your expected lifespan of 40 years. That risk of falling trees doesn’t deter New Guineans from going into the forest. But they do reduce the risk by being careful not to sleep under dead trees. Their paranoia makes perfect sense. I now think of it as “constructive paranoia.”

My choice of this oxymoronic, seemingly unpleasant term for a quality that I admire is intentional. We normally use the word “paranoia” in a pejorative sense, to include greatly exaggerated and baseless fears. That’s how New Guineans’ reactions to camping under dead trees initially struck me, and it’s true that usually a particular dead tree wouldn’t fall on the particular night that a person chose to camp under it. But, in the long run, that seeming paranoia is constructive: it’s essential to surviving under traditional conditions.

Nothing else that I have learned from New Guineans has affected me as deeply as that attitude. It’s widespread in New Guinea, and reported in many other traditional societies around the world. If there is some act that carries a low risk each time, but if you’re going to do it frequently, you had better learn to be consistently careful if you don’t want to die or become crippled at a young age. That’s an attitude that I’ve learned to adopt towards the low-risk but frequent hazards of American life, such as driving my car, standing in the shower, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb, walking up and down stairs, and walking on slippery sidewalks. My cautious behavior drives crazy some of my American friends, who consider it ridiculous. The Westerners who most share my constructive paranoia are three friends whose lifestyle made them, too, alert to the cumulative hazard of repeated low-risk events: one friend who piloted small airplanes, another who was an unarmed policeman on the streets of London, and a third who floats rubber rafts down mountain streams as a fishing guide. All three learned from examples of less cautious friends who were eventually killed after years of that job or activity.

Of course, not just New Guinea life but also Western life has its dangers, even if one isn’t a pilot, bobby, or river guide. But there are differences between the perils of modern Western life and of traditional life. Obviously, the types of dangers are different: cars and terrorists and heart attacks for us, lions and enemies and falling trees for them. More significantly, the overall level of danger is much lower for us than for them: our average lifespan is double theirs, meaning that the average per-year risk that we face is only about half as great. The other significant difference is that the effects of many or most accidents that we Americans suffer can be repaired, whereas accidents in New Guinea are much more likely to prove crippling or fatal. On the sole occasion when I became incapacitated and unable to walk in the United States (from slipping on an icy Boston sidewalk and breaking my foot), I hobbled to a nearby pay phone to call my physician father, who picked me up and took me to a hospital. But when I injured my knee in the interior of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island and became unable to walk, I found myself stranded 20 miles inland from the coast, without any means to obtain outside help. New Guineans who break a bone can’t get it set by a surgeon and are likely to end up with an improperly set bone that leaves them permanently impaired.

In this chapter I shall describe three incidents that befell me in New Guinea, and that illustrate constructive paranoia or the lack of it. At the time of the first incident, I was too inexperienced even to recognize signs of mortal danger nearby: I was operating as a normal Westerner, but in a traditional world that required a different mind-set. In the next event, over a decade later—the one that finally taught me to embrace constructive paranoia—I was forced to acknowledge that I had made a mistake that nearly cost me my life, while another, more cautious man facing the same choice at the same time didn’t make my mistake and thus didn’t experience the trauma of coming close to death. In the remaining incident, yet another decade later, I was with a New Guinea friend who reacted with constructive paranoia to a seemingly inconsequential detail that I had overlooked. He and I were never able to decide whether the apparently innocent stick on the ground that my friend spotted really did mark the presence of hostile people (as my friend feared), but I was impressed by his cautious attention to minutiae. In the following chapter I’ll discuss the types of danger faced by traditional societies, and the ways in which people estimate, misestimate, and deal with danger.

A night visit

One morning, I set out from a large village with a group of 13 New Guinea Highlanders to reach an isolated small village several days’ walk away. The region was in the foothill altitudinal zone with New Guinea’s lowest population densities, below the elevation of the densely populated Highland valleys suitable for intensive cultivation of sweet potatoes and taro, above the lowland elevations where sago palms grow well and fresh-water fish are plentiful, and in the altitudinal range with the highest incidence of cerebral malaria. I was told before setting out that our journey would take about three days, and that we would be constantly in forests that were completely uninhabited. The whole region had a very sparse population and had come only a few years previously under government control. Warfare had been occurring until recently, and endocannibalism (eating of one’s dead relatives) was reported as still being practised. Some of my New Guinea companions were local, but most of them came from another district of the Highlands and knew nothing about this district.

The first day’s walk was not bad. Our route wound around the slopes of a mountain, gradually gained in elevation to cross a ridge, and then began to descend again along the course of the river. But the second day was one of the most grueling hikes of my career in New Guinea. It was already drizzling when we broke camp at 8:00 A.M. There was no trail: instead, we waded along a mountain torrent, climbing up and down over huge slippery boulders. Even for my New Guinea friends, accustomed to rugged Highland terrain, the route was a nightmare. By 4:00 P.M. we had descended over 2,000 vertical feet along the river and were exhausted. We pitched camp in the rain, erected our tents, cooked our rice and tinned fish for dinner, and went to sleep while the rain continued.

The details of the layout of our two tents are relevant for understanding what happened during that night. My New Guinea friends slept under a large tarpaulin stretched over a central raised horizontal ridge-pole, and pulled down taut to the ground along both sides parallel to the ridge-pole, like an inverted V in cross-section. The tarpaulin’s two ends were open; one could walk into or out of the tarpaulin at its front and back ends, and the ridge-pole was high enough that one could stand up under the tarpaulin’s center. My own tent was a bright green Eureka pup-tent stretched over a light metal frame, and with a large front door flap and a small rear window flap both of which I zipped closed. My tent’s front door faced one of the two open ends (the “front”) of the New Guineans’ large tarpaulin, and was just a few yards away from it. Anyone walking out of the front of their tarpaulin would come first to the closed front door of my tent, then walk along the side of my tent, and finally pass my tent’s rear with its closed window flap. But to someone unfamiliar with Eureka pup-tents, it would have been unclear whether the actual entrance after unzipping a flap was the closed front door or the rear with a closed window. I slept with my head towards the rear and my feet towards the front door, but I would have been invisible from the outside of my tent because its walls were not transparent. The New Guineans kept a fire going inside their tarpaulin for warmth.

All of us quickly fell asleep, worn out from the long grueling day. I have no idea how much later it was that I became awakened by a soft sound of footsteps and a sense of the ground shaking from someone walking nearby. The sound and motion stopped, evidently because the unknown person was standing near the rear of my tent, near my head. I assumed that one of my 13 companions had just come out of the large tarpaulin shelter to urinate. It did seem strange that he had not gone out of the rear of the tarpaulin away from my tent for privacy, but had instead turned towards my tent, walked along its length, and was now standing at my tent’s rear and near my head. But I was sleepy, attributed no significance to where he had chosen to urinate, and dozed off. Within a short time I was awakened again, this time by voices from the shelter of the New Guineans who were talking, and by bright light from their fire, which they had stirred up. That wasn’t unusual; New Guineans often do wake up periodically during the night and talk. I called out asking them to be more quiet, and I went back to sleep. And that was the entirety of the apparently meaningless incident at night, as I experienced it.

When I woke up the next morning, I opened the front door flap of my tent and greeted the New Guineans under their tarpaulin a few yards away, starting to cook breakfast. They told me that their voices and their stirring up the fire at night had been caused by several of them being awakened by the presence of a strange man standing at the open front of their tarpaulin. When the stranger realized that he was being watched, he made a gesture, visible in the firelight, of stretching out one arm horizontally and letting its hand droop downwards at the wrist. At that gesture, some of the New Guineans called out in fear (for reasons that I shall mention in a moment). Their calling out was what I had sleepily mistaken as the noise of their talking during the night. At the sound of their calling, others of the New Guineans awoke and sat up. The strange man then ran off into the rainy night. My New Guinea friends pointed out some barefoot footprints in the wet mud where the man had stood. But I don’t recall my friends saying anything that alarmed me.

It was indeed unexpected to me that anyone would come at night in the rain to our camp in the middle of an uninhabited stretch of forest. However, I had become accustomed to the fact that things unexpected to me did often happen in New Guinea, and I had never felt that I was in any personal danger from any New Guinean. After we finished breakfast and folded up our tents, we resumed our journey, now on its third day. Our route climbed out of the awful river bed and followed a broad clear path through beautiful tall forests along the river bank. I felt as if I were walking in awe inside a high Gothic cathedral. I strolled on alone ahead of my New Guinea friends, in order to identify birds that hadn’t already been disturbed by them, and to enjoy in solitude the magical cathedral-like forests. It was only when I finally reached a larger river below the village that was our final destination that I sat down to wait for my friends to catch up. It turned out that I had walked a long distance ahead of them.

Our 10-day stay at the isolated small village was so interesting in its own way that I forgot about the incident of the prowler at night. When it finally became time to return to the large village from which we had set out, the local men among my 13 New Guinea friends proposed that we return by a completely different route, which they said bypassed the awful wading in a river. That new route proved to be a good dry trail going through forests. It took us only two days to get back to the large village, instead of the agonizing three days of our march out. I still have no idea why our local guides had inflicted the route with the grueling wading of the stream on themselves, as well as on the rest of us.

Subsequently, I recounted our adventures to a missionary who had been living in the area for several years, and who had also visited the isolated small village. In the following years I came to know better two of the local men who had been our guides on that trek. From the accounts of the missionary and of the two New Guineans, I learned that the prowler at night was well known in that district—as a crazy, dangerous, powerful sorcerer. He once threatened to kill the missionary with his bow and arrow, and once actually tried to do so with a spear at the same isolated village that I had visited, laughing as he jabbed his spear in earnest. He was reported to have killed numerous local people, including two of his wives, and also his eight-year-old son just because the boy ate a banana without his father’s permission. He behaved like a true paranoid, unable to distinguish reality from his imagination. Sometimes he lived in a village with other people, but at other times he lived alone in the area of forest where we had camped on that night, and where he had killed women who made the mistake of going there.

Despite the man being so obviously crazy and dangerous, local people didn’t dare interfere with him, because they feared him as a great sorcerer. The gesture that he made at night when detected by my New Guinea friends—outstretched arm with drooping wrist—conventionally symbolizes to New Guineans in that area the cassowary, New Guinea’s largest bird, which is believed to be actually a powerful magician who can turn himself into a bird. The cassowary is flightless, a distant relative of ostriches and emus, weighs 50 to 100 pounds, and terrifies New Guineans because it has stout legs with razor-sharp claws that it uses to disembowel dogs or people when attacked. That extended-arm, drooping-wrist gesture made by the sorcerer at night is believed to work powerful magic, and it mimics the shape of the neck and head of the cassowary held in the position when the bird is about to attack.

What was that sorcerer intending to do when he came into our camp that night? While your guess is as good as mine, his aims were probably not friendly. He knew or could infer that the green pup-tent would have a European inside it. As for why he came to the back rather than to the front door of my tent, I guess that that was either because he wanted not to be detected by the New Guineans in their shelter facing my tent’s front door as he tried to get into my tent, or because he was confused by my tent’s structure and mistook the back (with its small window flap zipped closed) for the front with its large door. If I had had the experience of New Guinea then that I do now, I would have practised constructive paranoia and screamed to my nearby New Guinea friends as soon as I heard and felt footsteps near the rear of my tent. I certainly wouldn’t have walked alone, far ahead of my New Guinea friends, on the next day. In retrospect, my behavior was stupid and put me in danger. But I didn’t know enough then to read the warning signs and to exercise constructive paranoia.

A boat accident

In the second incident, my New Guinea friend Malik and I were on an island off Indonesian New Guinea and wanted to get ourselves and our gear to the New Guinea mainland, separated from the island by a strait a dozen miles wide. Around 4:00 P.M. on a clear afternoon, slightly more than two hours before sunset, we joined four other passengers in a wooden canoe about 30 feet long, driven by two outboard motors mounted on the stern and with a crew of three young men. The four other passengers were not New Guineans: instead, they were a Chinese fisherman working on the New Guinea mainland, plus three men from the Indonesian islands of Ambon, Ceram, and Java respectively. The canoe’s cargo and passenger space was covered by a plastic awning about four feet high, stretched over a framework, loosely attached to each side of the canoe, and extending from about 4 feet in front of the stern forward to 10 feet behind the canoe’s prow. The three crew sat in the stern at the motors, and Malik and I sat just in front of them, facing the rear. With the awning over us and at our sides, there was little outside that we could see. The four other passengers sat at our backs, towards the canoe’s prow.

The canoe set off, and the crew soon had the engines up to full speed, through waves several feet high. A little water splashed into the canoe under the awning, then a little more, and the other passengers began groaning good-naturedly. As some more large quantities of water splashed in, one of the crew began bailing water immediately in front of me out the loose sides of the awning. More large quantities of water came in, soaking the luggage stored towards the front of the canoe. I put my binoculars for protection inside the small yellow knapsack that I was holding in my lap, and that contained my passport, money, and all of my field notes wrapped inside a plastic bag. Over the roar of the engines and the crashing of the waves, Malik and the other passengers began to shout loudly, now no longer good-naturedly, at the driver, telling him to slow down or turn back. (This and all the rest of the conversations during this whole incident were in the Indonesian language, the official language and the lingua franca of Indonesian New Guinea.) But he didn’t slow down, and more water splashed in. The accumulated weight of water was now causing the canoe to ride so low that water began pouring in over the sides.

The next few seconds, as the canoe settled lower into the ocean, were a blur that I can’t reconstruct in detail. I was now scared that I would be trapped under the canoe’s plastic awning as it sank. Somehow, I and everyone else managed to get out of the canoe into the ocean; I don’t know whether some of us towards the rear jumped out of the open rear space not covered by the awning, or whether we instead crawled out under the awning’s sides, and whether the passengers in front of us crawled out under the awning or scrambled to the open space in front or to the rear of the awning. Malik told me afterwards that the crew got out of the canoe first, then I got out, then Malik.

The next minute was even more of a panicked blur for me. I was wearing heavy hiking boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and shorts, and found myself in the water several yards from the canoe, which had capsized and was now bottom up. The weight of my hiking boots was dragging me underwater. My initial thought was a vivid, frightened “what is there that I can hold on to to keep myself afloat?” Near me, someone was clinging to a yellow life preserver, which I tried to grab in my panic, but the other person pushed me away. From my position now floating in the water, the waves seemed high. I had swallowed some water. While I can swim for short distances in a calm swimming pool, I wouldn’t have been able to swim or float for many minutes through waves. I felt overwhelmed by fear that there was nothing to keep me afloat: our luggage and the canoe’s gas tank floating nearby weren’t buoyant enough to support my weight, the inverted canoe hull was now low in the water, and I feared that even it would sink. The island from which we had set out appeared to be several miles distant, another island seemed equally distant, and no other boat was in sight.

Malik swam over to me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and pulled me back to the canoe. For the next half-hour he stood on the submerged upside-down engine and clung to the canoe’s stern, while I clung nearby to the rear of the canoe’s left side, with Malik keeping a grip on my neck. I stretched my arms out over the hull’s round smooth underside, merely to steady myself, because the hull offered nothing for my hands to grasp. Occasionally I reached out my right hand to grip a submerged part of the engine, but that kept my head low above the water, which splashed into my face. Instead, for most of the time, my only grip holding me to the canoe was with my feet, which were somehow inserted in or hooked onto the left side’s sunken gunwale. Now that the canoe was upside down and my feet were on the gunwale, the gunwale’s depth below the water was such that my head was not far above the surface of the water, and occasionally a wave washed over me. Some piece of wood or awning was loose on the gunwale and rubbed and hurt my knee with each wave. I asked Malik to hold me while I untied my boot laces with one hand and then took off and threw away the heavy boots that were dragging me down.

From time to time I turned around to look at the waves coming towards me, and to brace myself for especially big waves. Often, one of my legs lost its grip on the gunwale, leaving me to rotate helplessly on the other leg that was still on the gunwale. Several times I lost my grip with both legs, was swept loose, paddled back or was pulled back by Malik, and in panic tried to regain my leg grip on the gunwales. During the entire time since the capsizing, the struggle to survive from one wave to the next had been all-consuming. I had the sense that there was no pause in the struggle. Each wave threatened to shake me loose. Each time that I did get shaken loose, there was a panicked struggle to get back to the canoe and to get a grip again. I was often gasping from water in my face.

Because Malik’s stance on the engine seemed more secure than my foot grip on the gunwales, I eventually moved from the canoe’s side to its stern and stood with one leg on the submerged engine next to Malik, leaning forward and resting my arms on the round hull. Then I found and grabbed with my right hand some wooden bars attached to the hull, probably a partially broken piece of gunwale. This was the first good handhold that I had had since the canoe capsized. Standing on the engine and leaning forwards over the hull had the advantage that it kept my head higher above the waves than when I had been standing on the more deeply submerged gunwale, but it had the disadvantage that it placed more strain on my leg and was more tiring.

We didn’t seem to be drifting any closer to the two islands visible in the distance. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay afloat for more than a minute if the canoe, already floating low in the water, sank. I asked Malik if the canoe was just being held up by trapped air under the hull and was at risk of sinking if that air somehow came out, but he answered that the canoe timbers themselves would float. There was nothing that I could do except to hold on, react to each wave, wait (for what?), and watch. I kept asking Malik whether he was OK—probably just to assure myself that I was OK.

Luggage floated out from underneath the canoe. Some of it had been lashed to the canoe and stayed floating near the prow, including my own three suitcases. But other luggage was loose and drifted away, including my red rucksack, my green duffel bags, and Malik’s luggage. It flashed through my mind that the most important thing was to save my life, and that what happened to my luggage was trivial by comparison. I nevertheless found myself slipping into my usual what-if mode of mulling over how I would deal with problems that arise in the course of travel. If I lost my passport, I thought, I could always get another one, though it would be a big mess to have to go to the nearest American embassy in Indonesia’s capital 1,600 miles away. If I lost all my money and traveler’s checks, I wasn’t sure if I had a separate record of my traveler’s check numbers, and that record would be in my drifting or floating luggage anyway. If we did get rescued, I would have to borrow a lot of money in order to fly to Indonesia’s capital and get a new passport: how and from whom could I borrow money? My most important possessions—that passport, money, and traveler’s checks, plus my bird notes from the whole trip—were in my yellow knapsack, which I had been holding in my lap in the canoe and didn’t see now. If I didn’t succeed in retrieving my knapsack, perhaps I could at least reconstruct from memory the bird lists for the main sites that I had visited. Then I realized that it was absurd to be thinking about my passport, money, and bird lists, when I didn’t know if I was going be alive an hour from now anyway.

The scene of our struggles was paradoxically beautiful. There was a cloudless blue sky overhead, lovely tropical islands were visible from afar, and birds were flying. Even with the distraction of my struggle for survival, I continued to identify the birds: there were Lesser Crested Terns (or were they Greater Crested?), possibly a smaller species of tern, and one Striated Heron. But, for the first time in my life, I was in a situation where I didn’t know if I would live. I couldn’t acknowledge my own feelings about the prospect of death. Instead, I reflected on how upset my mother and my fiancée would be if I died. I recited to myself the telegram that I imagined my mother receiving: “We are sorry to have to tell you that your son Jared drowned in the Pacific Ocean yesterday.”

At some point I told myself that, if I did survive, I should stop obsessing about things in life less important than survival. What would I do differently with the rest of my life if I did survive this accident? One thought was to devote myself to having children, about which I had been uncertain. (Afterwards, I did decide to have children.) Would I ever return to New Guinea if I survived? The risks of New Guinea—risks associated with boats like this, with crashes of the small planes on which I depended for travel, and with injuries or illnesses that could leave me physically incapacitated in a remote mountain range—all those risks weren’t worth just obtaining a list of birds for yet another previously unexplored mountain. Perhaps this would be the end of my New Guinea career, even if I did survive.

But I then reminded myself that I had more immediate problems than to figure out what I would do if I survived. I recalled that one of my locked suitcases floating lashed to the canoe’s prow contained two folded-up air mattresses and two air pillows, which would be excellent life preservers if inflated. I asked Malik to ask one of the men perched on the canoe’s prow to open the suitcase and extract the mattresses and pillows. I dug the suitcase key out of my pocket and passed it to Malik, to pass on to one of the men on the prow. But no one did open my suitcase, for reasons that I never learned.

The canoe’s other seven people besides Malik and me—the other four passengers and three crew—were now all sitting on or clinging to the front of the canoe’s upside-down hull. The Ceram passenger made several dives under the canoe to look for anything useful, and he succeeded in pulling out the canoe’s three life preservers, which he gave to the seven people at the front. No one did anything to help Malik and me. The Ambon passenger was weeping and repeating, “I can’t swim, we are going to die!” The Javan passenger was reciting prayers. The Chinese fisherman said that he was afraid of rain and big waves if we were still afloat and alive after sunset; “God help us then!” he added. Malik said that, if we were not rescued within the hour or so remaining before sunset, there would be no hope for us, because the direction of the ocean currents was carrying us out to sea away from land, and we would not survive the night. I didn’t think seriously of what would happen to us if we were not rescued before sunset, except to reflect how hard it had already been to be wet, shivering, and clinging to the rolling hull for an hour in daylight, and how much harder it would be to continue to do so for 12 hours at night in the dark. But the three crew and the Ceram man seemed secure and relaxed. One of them was singing, one or two of them occasionally swam near the hull, and the Ceram man sat on the hull eating a big fruit called a durian, of which passengers had brought several and which were now floating loose.

We kept looking around us for other boats. None were visible, except for some sails far off towards the New Guinea mainland. After around 5:30 P.M., an hour before sunset, we saw three small sails of sailing canoes coming from the mainland on a course that would carry them past us but in the distance. One of my fellow passengers took a stick, mounted a shirt on it, stood up on the canoe’s hull, and waved the stick and shirt to catch the attention of whoever was in the sailing canoes. The Ceram man asked me to take off my blue shirt, which Malik then mounted on another stick and waved while he too stood up. All of us kept shouting “Tolong!” (Indonesian for “help”), but we were far out of hearing range of the sailing canoes in the distance.

I was still standing on the upside-down engine underwater at the stern. It at least offered a secure platform for my feet, whereas the other seven people sitting or standing on the smooth round hull in front of me, and now joined by Malik as well, had nothing to grip. But I knew that I was not going to be able to stand uncomfortably on the engine all night, because my leg was already starting to cramp. I shouted out to Malik to ask him whether he thought that I would be more secure sitting forward on the hull with him and the other passengers than standing on the engine, and he answered, “Yes.” For me to get from the stern to the front of the boat meant traversing an area of hull much more insecure than either the stern or the front: it required walking along the round hull of the pitching canoe. I climbed from the engine onto the hull, stood up, and tried walking forwards. I quickly fell off into the sea, scrambled back onto the hull, eventually reached a position just behind the Chinese fisherman, and sat astride the hull immediately behind him. This had some disadvantages: there was nothing for either my hands or my feet to grip, I had to shift my body as the hull rolled, a few times I fell off into the sea and had to scramble back on, and I began to shiver because my body was now completely in the air rather than partly in the warm sea. It was ironical to be at risk of hypothermia in the tropical lowlands: while I would have felt hot if I had been dry, being instead constantly splashed and wet and wind-exposed left me chilled. But my head was now high above the waves, I was not standing on the engine and developing leg cramps, and I thought that I could maintain my new position for longer than the position in which I had been standing at the stern.

As the sun dropped lower towards the horizon, two of the three crew took two of the three life preservers and swam off towards the island, miles in the distance, from which we had set out, saying that they were going to fetch help. It still wasn’t clear whether the three sailing canoes in the distance were on a path that would pass far ahead of us, where they couldn’t see or hear us, or whether any of them was getting closer. The remaining men on our hull pointed to the sun, concerned with how many minutes remained before sunset, and with whether we would be visible into the sun or back-lit by the sun from the sailing canoes. Besides the sailing canoes, we saw a motor launch and possibly one other boat, but they were very far away.

Now, the sail of the nearest sailing canoe seemed to be getting bigger. Enough of the canoe was now visible to make it likely that the canoe must also have seen us and was actually getting closer. When it was about 100 yards away from us, the canoe stopped and dropped its sail. In the canoe there was just one man, who paddled towards us. We could now see that the canoe was a small one, only about 10 feet long, riding very low in the sea, with perhaps only six inches of freeboard. As the little canoe came alongside us, without discussion the two men on our capsized hull nearest the canoe, the Ambon man who couldn’t swim and the Javanese, jumped into it. The little canoe couldn’t safely hold anyone else, and its boatman paddled off. As it did so, it became clear that the second of the three canoes was approaching, and it too dropped sail at a distance of 100 yards. It was larger than the first canoe, and in it were two men, who paddled towards us. When it came close, this time there was discussion between those two men and our group, and among the people in our group, as to how many people the sailing canoe could hold, and who they would be. At first, the two men in the sailing canoe proposed to take only two or three of us, because they were concerned about their own canoe’s low freeboard and risk of being swamped, but they finally agreed to take four of the five of us left on our hull. We agreed among ourselves that the person to remain on our hull would be the third crew member, who retained our remaining life preserver.

As I stepped into the sailing canoe, Malik asked me where my passport was. I replied that it was in my yellow knapsack, possibly still in the airspace under our hull. The Ceram man who had already dived repeatedly under the hull to retrieve the life preservers now dived again, came out with my yellow knapsack, and passed it to me. The sailing canoe then pushed off from our capsized hull, with six people in it: one of its two crew members in front and the other in back, and behind the front crewman the Chinese fisherman, me, Malik, and the Ceram man in that sequence. I had periodically looked at my wristwatch, which to my surprise was still working despite its immersion in seawater. The time was 6:15 P.M., 15 minutes before sunset. We had been in the water or on our capsized canoe for two hours.

It soon grew dark. Our two rescuers paddled towards the nearest land in the distance, which happened to be the island from which we had set out that afternoon. The sailing canoe rode very low in the water, with just a few inches of freeboard, and one of the men sitting behind me bailed constantly. I reflected that this little, heavily loaded canoe could also tip over, but that we probably were safe now. I didn’t feel any relief or strong feelings; this was all just happening to me, as if I were an emotionless observer.

As our canoe paddled on, we heard voices in the water to our left. I guessed that it might be the voices of our motor canoe’s two crew members who had swum off with life preservers. However, one of my companions could understand better than could I what the voices were shouting in Indonesian. It turned out that the shouts were from the three people in the first rescue canoe (its pilot, and our Ambon and Javan passengers), which was sinking, having taken on too much water from being overloaded. The freeboard of our own rescue canoe was too low for us to pick up another person. Someone in our canoe shouted something back to the three men in the water, and our rescuers paddled on, leaving them to their fates.

I don’t know how long it took us to return to the island: perhaps an hour. As we approached it, we saw big waves breaking and a fire on the beach, and we wondered what the fire meant. In front of me I heard a conversation in Indonesian between the Chinese fisherman and the canoe paddler in the prow, including repeatedly the Indonesian words empat pulu ribu (meaning “40,000”). The Chinese fisherman, who had retrieved a small bag of his from our overturned canoe, opened his bag, took out money, and gave it to the paddler. I assumed at the time that the paddler was tired and wanted to land us at that nearby beach with the fire, and that the fisherman was offering him 40,000 Indonesian rupiah as an inducement to take us further to the island’s main dock. But Malik told me later that what the paddler actually said was this: “If you don’t give me 10,000 rupiah [about $5] for each of the four of you now, I will take you back to your capsized canoe and leave you there.”

Our rescue canoe rounded a point of the island and came into a sheltered bay where campfires were burning on the beach. Behind us in the dark, we heard a motor and saw a motorboat with a bright light come up slowly behind us. Our little canoe stopped in shallow water, and Malik, the Chinese fisherman, the Ceram man, and I stepped out and waded to and climbed into the motorboat, which by coincidence turned out to be a fishing boat belonging to the family of the Chinese fisherman. It had been out fishing, happened to see our two crewmen who had swum off with the two life preservers, picked them up, searched for and found our capsized canoe, and picked up the floating luggage still attached to the canoe (including my suitcases but none of Malik’s luggage). We stayed in the motorboat as it slowly headed towards the New Guinea mainland. We told the motorboat drivers about the three men from the first capsized rescue canoe whom we had heard shouting in the water. However, when we reached the approximate location where we had heard them, the motorboat went straight on and did not circle or shout. Malik told me later that the drivers explained that the three men from the capsized rescue canoe had probably somehow reached shore.

The motorboat ride to the mainland took about an hour and a half. I was shirtless and shivering. We landed around 10:00 P.M., to find a crowd awaiting us at the mainland dock, the news of our accident having somehow preceded us. Among that crowd, my attention was instantly drawn to a small elderly woman, possibly a Javan from her appearance. In my life I have never seen such an expression of extreme emotion on the face of anyone, except for actors in movies. She seemed to be overwhelmed by a mixture of grief, horror, and disbelief at something awful that had happened, and by utter exhaustion. The woman came out of the crowd and began questioning us. It turned out that she was the mother of the Javan man who had been in the first sailing canoe that had capsized.

I spent the following day at a small guesthouse, rinsing saltwater out of my suitcases and their contents. While my equipment—my binoculars, tape recorders, altimeters, books, and sleeping bag—was ruined and unsalvageable, I was able to rescue my clothes. Malik lost everything that he had brought with him. Under local conditions, we had no recourse against the canoe crew whose negligent motor operation had caused the accident.

On the following evening I climbed onto the roof of a nearby building around 6:00 P.M. in order to re-experience how rapidly the daylight had faded at sunset. Near the equator, daylight fades much more rapidly than in the temperate zones, because the sun sets vertically rather than at an angle sloping to the horizon. At 6:15 P.M., the time when we had been rescued on the previous day, the sun was just above the horizon, and its light was growing dimmer. Sunset came at 6:30 P.M., and by 6:40 P.M. it was much too dark for someone in another boat to have distinguished us and our capsized canoe even at a distance of only a few hundred yards. We had had a close escape and been rescued just in time.

As I came down from the roof in the dark, I was feeling helpless and still unable to grasp what those reckless crewmen had done to me. I had lost valuable equipment, and I had almost lost my life. My fiancée, my parents, my sister, and my friends had almost lost me. My knees were raw and scarred from being rubbed with each wave against the gunwale as I gripped it. All of that because of the recklessness of three young men who should have known better, drove too fast in high waves, ignored all the water splashing into the canoe, refused to slow down or stop when repeatedly asked to do so, swam off with two of the three life preservers, never apologized, and never showed the slightest regret for the anguish and loss that they had actually inflicted on us, and for how close they had come to killing us. Those bastards!

While wallowing in these thoughts, I came across a man on the ground level of the building onto whose roof I had climbed to view the sunset. I fell into conversation with him and told him why I had gone up onto the roof and what had happened to us on the previous day. He answered that, coincidentally, he had also been on the same island the previous day, and had also wanted to go to the mainland. He had looked at the canoe that we hired, with its big engines, seen the young crewmen and their cocky and laughing behavior, and watched how they gunned the engines and handled the canoe coming in to shore to await passengers. He had had much experience of boats. He had decided that he didn’t want to risk his life with that crew and boat, and had waited for a larger and slower boat to go to the mainland.

That reaction of his jolted me. So, I hadn’t been helpless after all! The cocky crew weren’t the only people who had come close to throwing away my life. I was the one who had stepped into their canoe; no one had forced me to do it. The accident had ultimately been my responsibility. It had been completely within my power to prevent it from happening to me. Instead of asking why the crew had been so stupid, I should have been asking myself why I had been so stupid. The man who had chosen to wait for a larger boat had exercised New Guinea–style constructive paranoia, and he had thereby escaped being traumatized and nearly killed. I should have exercised constructive paranoia myself, and I would now do so for the rest of my life.

Just a stick in the ground

The most recent of the three episodes related in this chapter unfolded many years after my canoe accident had convinced me of the virtues of constructive paranoia. Out of New Guinea’s lowlands rise many separate isolated mountain ranges, which are interesting to biologists because they resemble “islands” of montane habitats surrounded by a “sea” of lowlands, as far as the distributions of species confined to montane habitats are concerned. The higher elevations of most of the isolated mountain ranges are uninhabited by people. There are two possible means to reach those high elevations in order to survey their birds and other animals and plants. One is to be flown directly by helicopter to high elevations, but it is difficult to obtain a helicopter for charter in New Guinea, and even harder to locate a clear area for landing a helicopter on a forest-covered New Guinea mountain. The other method is to find a village close enough to the mountain that one can bring one’s gear to the village by plane, helicopter, or boat, and then walk from the village to climb the mountain. The difficulties of New Guinea terrain are such that it is impractical to carry one’s gear to a mountain camp more distant than about five miles from a village. A further practical problem is that, for many of the isolated peaks, available maps don’t show the location and elevation of the highest peak or the nearest village; one instead has to obtain that geographic information by a survey flight.

One particular mountain range interested me because, although it was reported to be not especially high, it was isolated. Hence at the end of one of my trips to New Guinea, while I was starting to plan the next year’s trip, I chartered a small plane to fly a survey along the entire length of that mountain range, and I identified its highest peak. There was no village within at least 25 miles of the peak in any direction, and no garden clearing or any other signs of human presence nearby. That ruled out reaching the peak from the village and required instead a helicopter-based operation, which in turn required finding a natural clearing at which to land a helicopter. (Some helicopters can hover over the forest canopy while passengers and cargo are being lowered by winch through the canopy to the ground, but that requires special helicopters and training.) While one’s first impression of New Guinea forests is of an unbroken expanse of green trees, one does encounter occasional natural clearings at landslides where an earthquake has shaken down a patch of forest, or at a marsh, a dried-up pond, the bank of a river or pond, or a dry mud volcano. On this survey flight I was delighted to spot a huge landslide clearing, about two and a half miles from the peak and several thousand feet lower in elevation. By New Guinea standards, that’s much too far to establish a camp at the landslide and to be able to walk daily to the peak to observe birds. Instead, it would be necessary to fly our gear by helicopter into a first camp at the landslide, then to clear a trail and carry the gear ourselves to a second campsite in forest close to the peak: hard work, but nevertheless feasible.

With that problem of finding a helicopter landing site potentially solved, the other problem involved obtaining permission and help from local New Guinean land-owners. But how was I to do that, when there were no signs of humans anywhere near the peak? Whom should I contact? I knew from personal experience that there were nomads moving around at low elevation in the eastern part of the range. There were reports, but there was no definite information, that related nomads might range further west near the peak, but I hadn’t spotted any signs of their presence from the plane. I also knew from experience that nomads living in isolated mountain ranges remain mostly or entirely at low elevation, where their staple food of sago palm grows. At high elevation there isn’t enough food to support a resident human population. At most, nomads might make occasional hunting trips to higher elevations above the altitudinal ceiling for sago palms, but I had been in several mountain ranges where the nomads don’t even do that, and where animals living at high elevation are tame because they have never seen humans and never been hunted.

My failure to locate any signs of nomads near my intended peak had two consequences. First, it meant that I hadn’t found any New Guineans who would claim to own the mountain, and from whom to ask permission. Second, in my New Guinea fieldwork I need local people to make and run a camp, clear trails, and help me find and identify birds, but here there were no local people available. That second problem was one that I could solve just by bringing New Guineans whom I already knew from another part of New Guinea. The potential huge problem was the first one of permission.

In New Guinea, every bit of land is claimed by some group, even if they never visit the land. An absolute no-no in New Guinea is to trespass on someone’s land without permission. The consequences of being caught trespassing include being robbed, murdered, and/or raped. I have been in several unpleasant situations when I did ask permission from the most nearby people, who did claim to own the area that I wanted to visit and who gave me their permission, only for me to find on going there that some other group claimed to own the area and was outraged to find me there without their permission. Compounding the danger was that, in this case, I would not just be coming myself, but would also be bringing several New Guineans from another part of New Guinea. That would be considered even more infuriating to local land-owners: New Guineans, unlike me, might be there to steal women and pigs and to settle land.

What would I do if, after I was dropped by helicopter at this landslide, and after the helicopter flew off and left me for three weeks, I did encounter nomads? My helicopter would have to make several shuttle flights to bring my supplies and my co-workers to the landslide, thereby advertising my presence. If there were any nomads at all within miles, they would hear and see the helicopter, figure out that it was landing there, and come track us down. Making things even worse in this situation: the nomads in this area, if there were any, might be “uncontacted,” i.e., might never have seen a white man or missionary or government official. First contact with previously uncontacted tribal peoples is terrifying. Neither side knows what the other side wants or will do. It is difficult or impossible to communicate peaceful intent by sign language to previously uncontacted people whose language one does not know, even if they wait long enough to let you try to communicate. The risk is that they won’t wait; they may be terrified or furious, panic, and immediately start shooting with bows and arrows. What would I do if I were found by nomads?

After that survey flight, I went back to the U.S. to plan a helicopter-based expedition to that landslide and that summit the following year. Practically every night of that intervening year, while drifting off to sleep, I ran through my head scenarios imagining what I might do if I did encounter nomads there in the forest. In one scenario, I would sit down and hold out my hands to show that I had no weapon and was non-threatening, force a smile, reach into my knapsack to pull out a chocolate bar and eat a piece myself to show that it was non-poisonous and edible, and offer them the rest of the bar. But—they might get angry immediately, or they might panic when they saw me fumbling in my knapsack, as if to take out a gun. Or, in another scenario, I would start imitating calls of local New Guinea birds, to show that I was there just to study birds. That’s often a good ice-breaker with New Guineans. But they might just think that I was crazy, or trying to work bird-related sorcery on them. Or, if I was with the New Guineans whom I had flown in, and together we encountered a single nomad, perhaps we could somehow induce him to stay at our camp, we’d make friends with him, I’d start to learn his language, and we’d induce him not to go off and bring back some of his fellow nomads before we got picked up and left in our helicopter several weeks later. But—how would we induce one terrified nomad to stay in our camp for several weeks, with these other New Guinean trespassers?

I had to recognize that none of these happy-ending scenarios that I imagined was even remotely plausible. That realization didn’t make me abandon the whole project. It still seemed most likely that we simply wouldn’t encounter any nomads, because we hadn’t seen any signs of any huts from the air, and because my previous experience was that lowland nomads usually don’t visit summits of mountains. But when I finally did go back to New Guinea a year later to carry out the planned exploration of the summit, I still didn’t have a plan that I was convinced would work if we did encounter nomads.

Finally came the day, a year later, when the project was ready to begin. I assembled four New Guinea friends from mountains several hundred miles away, and half a ton of supplies, to fly in a chartered small airplane to the closest available airstrip, a small dirt strip at a village 37 miles south of the peak that was our target. As we flew along the foothills of the mountain range, we spotted eight huts scattered along rivers at the base of the hills in the eastern part of the range, but the last hut was still 23 miles east of our peak. On the following day our chartered small helicopter arrived at the airstrip to shuttle us in four runs into the big landslide clearing that we had seen on our previous trip. The first flight took two of the New Guineans, plus a tent and axes and some food to sustain them in case of an accident such that the helicopter could not return for a while. After just an hour, the helicopter came back to our airstrip with a note from them reporting exciting news. In flying around the peak, they had discovered a campsite location much better than the big landslide: a little landslide only two-thirds of a mile from the peak, and at higher elevations than the bigger landslide. That meant that we would be able to travel back and forth between our camp and the peak within a few hours, without any need to carry our gear from the big landslide and establish a closer camp. Two more helicopter flights brought the other two New Guineans and more supplies from the airstrip to the selected campsite.

The last helicopter flight carried me and the rest of our supplies to the campsite. During the flight I looked down carefully from the helicopter for any signs of people. About 10 miles north of the airstrip and still 27 miles south of the peak was another village on a small river. Soon after that village, I spotted two isolated huts, presumably belonging to nomads, still lying in the flat lowlands before we reached the first of a series of ridges leading up to the mountain range. Once we reached the ridges, there were no further signs of humans whatsoever: no huts, no gardens, no anything else. In New Guinea a distance of 27 miles from our campsite over rough terrain might as well be on the other side of the ocean, as far as our risks of unwanted visitors were concerned. Perhaps we were in luck, and perhaps these mountains really were uninhabited and unvisited!

The helicopter circled our planned campsite, where I could see the four New Guineans waving below. The clearing proved to be a small steep-sided gully whose slopes had apparently collapsed in a landslide (probably triggered by one of the frequent earthquakes in that region), such that the floor of the gully was dirt bare of vegetation, perfect for landing a helicopter. Apart from that small landslide and the big distant landslide that had been our original target, everything else within sight was covered by forests. The pilot and I landed and unloaded our last cargo, then I went up in the helicopter again and asked the pilot to head for the nearby peak so that we could plan where to make a trail. From the head of our gully, we could see a ridge leading straight to the peak, but not so steeply as to present problems. The peak itself was very steep for its top 200 vertical feet and might be a difficult scramble to climb. But there were still absolutely no signs of people or huts or gardens. The helicopter then dropped me at our campsite and flew off, agreeing to pick us up again 19 days later.

That was an act of faith on our part: from what we saw of the terrain, it would have been utterly impossible to walk back to the airstrip 37 miles distant. While I had brought along a small radio, in that hilly terrain my radio could not receive or transmit messages from or to the helicopter base 150 miles away. Instead, as a precaution in case of an accident or illness requiring an emergency evacuation, I arranged for a small airplane whose scheduled flight path took it not too far from our campsite to deviate from its path and circle our camp every five days. We could try to talk with the pilot by radio to confirm that we were OK, and we agreed that we would place a bright red air mattress on the landslide if we did have an emergency.

We spent all of the second day constructing our camp. Our happiest discovery was that there were still no signs of people: if nomads had been alerted by our helicopter to try to track us down, it wasn’t happening yet. Large birds were flying in and out of the gully, undisturbed by our presence a few dozen yards away. That suggested that the birds were unafraid of people, and provided further evidence that nomads didn’t visit this area.

On the third day I was at last ready to climb to the peak, following my New Guinea friends Gumini and Paia, who were cutting trail. Initially, we climbed 500 feet up out of our landslide gully onto the ridge, which bore a small patch of grass and shrubs with low trees, I assumed because of an older landslide that was now becoming overgrown. Climbing along the ridge, we soon entered closed forest and worked our way upwards in an easy climb. Bird-watching was now exciting, as I began to see and hear montane species, including a couple of uncommon and little-known ones such as the Perplexing Scrub-Wren and the Obscure Honeyeater. When we finally reached the summit pyramid, it was indeed very steep, as it had appeared from the air. But we were able to pull ourselves up it by holding on to tree roots. On its top I spotted a White-breasted Fruit-Dove and a Hooded Pitohui, two montane species that were absent below. Apparently this peak was just high enough to support a few individuals of each species. But I hadn’t met some other montane species that are common and noisy at this elevation elsewhere in New Guinea: perhaps they really were absent because the area of this mountain was too small to support a viable population of them. I sent Paia back to camp, while Gumini and I walked slowly down our trail, birding as we went.

So far, I was delighted and relieved. Everything was going well. The problems that I had feared hadn’t materialized. We had succeeded in finding a landing place for our helicopter in the forest, made a comfortable camp, and cleared an easy short trail to the summit. Best of all, we had found no signs of visits by nomads. The 17 days remaining to us would be ample time to establish which montane bird species were present and which weren’t. Gumini and I descended our new trail in good spirits and emerged from the forest into the small open patch that I had taken to be an old landslide clearing on the ridge above our camp.

Suddenly, Gumini stopped, bent over, and stared closely at something on the ground. When I asked what he found so interesting, he just said, “Look,” and he pointed. What he was pointing to was nothing more than a small stalk or tree seedling a couple of feet high, with a few leaves on it. I told him, “That’s just a very young tree. See, there are lots of other young trees growing up here in this clearing. What’s so special about this one?”

Gumini answered, “No, it’s not a young tree. It’s a stick stuck in the ground.” I disagreed: “What makes you think so? It’s just a seedling growing up out of the ground.” In reply, Gumini grasped it and pulled. It lifted out easily, without the need for any effort to break or pull out roots. When he had lifted it out, we saw that there were no roots at the base of the stick, which was broken off cleanly. I thought that perhaps Gumini’s pulling had snapped its roots, but he dug down around the hole left by the stick and showed me that there weren’t any broken-off roots. It must instead be a broken-off small stick inserted into the ground, as he had insisted. How had it gotten there and become inserted?

We both looked overhead at the small trees 15 feet tall above us. I suggested, “A branch must have broken off that tree overhead, and fallen down and gotten stuck in the ground.” But Gumini objected, “If that branch broke and fell, it’s not likely to have landed with the broken-off end pointing exactly down and the leaves pointing up. And it’s a light branch, not heavy enough to drive itself several inches into the ground. It looks to me like some person broke it off and inserted it with the sharp broken end into the ground and the leaves upwards, as a sign.”

I felt a shiver and my skin flushing on the back of my neck, as I thought of Robinson Crusoe cast ashore on his supposedly uninhabited island, suddenly coming across a human footprint. Gumini and I sat down, picked up and held the stick, and looked around us. For an hour we sat there, talking to each other about the possibilities. If a person really did this, why isn’t there any other sign of human activity, just this broken stick? If a person did plant it, how recently was he here to do it? It wasn’t today, because the leaves are already slightly wilted. But it wasn’t a long time ago either, because the leaves are still green, not shriveled and dry. Is this open area really an overgrown landslide clearing as I had assumed? Maybe, instead, it’s an old garden that has become overgrown. I kept coming back to my belief that a nomad would not have walked in there a few days ago from a hut 27 miles away, broken and planted a stick, and walked off without leaving any other signs. Gumini kept insisting that a broken stick wasn’t likely to insert itself into the ground, so as to mimic what a person does.

We walked back the short distance into camp, where the other New Guineans were, and told them what we had found. Nobody else had seen any hint of human presence. Now that I had gotten into this paradise about which I had been dreaming for a year, I wasn’t going to put out the red mattress as an emergency sign for evacuation on the first overflight three days later, just because there was one unexplained stick in the ground. That would be carrying constructive paranoia too far. There was probably some natural explanation for that stick, I told myself. Maybe it really had happened to fall vertically with enough force to insert itself, or maybe we had overlooked its roots broken off when we pulled it out. But Gumini was an experienced woodsman, one of the very best whom I had met in New Guinea, and he wasn’t likely to misread signs.

All that we could do was to be very careful, remain alert for other signs of people, and not do anything else to give away our presence to any nomads who might be lurking nearby. Our four noisy helicopter flights to establish our camp could be expected to have tipped off any nomad within dozens of miles. We would probably soon know if there were any. As precautions, we didn’t yell to each other from a distance. I made a point of being especially quiet when I went below camp to bird-watch at low elevation where any nomads were most likely to be. So that our campfire smoke wouldn’t give away our presence from afar, we reserved making a big fire for our main cooking until after dark. Eventually, after we found some large monitor lizards prowling around our camp, I asked my New Guinea friends to make bows and arrows for defense. They complied, but only half-heartedly—perhaps because freshly cut green wood wouldn’t make a good bow and arrow, or because four green bows and arrows in the hands of just my four New Guineans wouldn’t be of much use if there really were a band of angry nomads around.

As the days went on, no more mysterious broken sticks turned up, and there were no suspicious signs of humans. Instead, we saw tree kangaroos during the day, unafraid and not running away at the sight of us. Tree kangaroos are New Guinea’s largest native mammals and the first target of native hunters, so in inhabited areas they quickly become shot out. Surviving individuals learn to be active only at night and are very shy and flee if seen. We also encountered unafraid cassowaries, New Guinea’s biggest flightless bird, which is also a prime target of hunters and also rare and very shy in areas with people. The big pigeons and parrots in the area were also unafraid. Everything pointed to this being a location whose animals had never experienced human hunters or visitors.

When our helicopter came back and evacuated us on schedule 19 days after we had arrived, the mystery of the broken stick was still unresolved. We had seen no other possible signs of humans than that one stick. In retrospect, I think it’s unlikely that nomads from the lowlands many miles away climbed up thousands of feet, made a garden, came back a year or two later, planted one stick by coincidence a couple of days before our arrival so that the leaves were still green, and left no other trace of themselves. While I can’t explain how that stick got there, my guess is that Gumini’s constructive paranoia was in this case unjustified.

But I can certainly understand how Gumini acquired his attitude. His area had come under government control recently. Until then, traditional fighting had been going on. Paia, 10 years older than Gumini, had grown up making stone tools. In Gumini’s and Paia’s society, people who weren’t super-attentive to signs of strangers in the forest didn’t live long. It does no harm to be suspicious of sticks not readily explained naturally, to spend an hour examining and discussing each one, and then to remain alert for other sticks. Before my canoe accident, I would have dismissed Gumini’s reaction as exaggerated, just as I had dismissed as exaggerated the reactions of New Guineans to the dead tree under which I had camped earlier in my New Guinea career. But I had now spent enough time in New Guinea to understand Gumini’s reaction. It’s better to pay attention 1,000 times to sticks that turn out to have fallen naturally into an unnatural-looking position, than to make the fatal mistake of ignoring one stick that really did get placed by strange humans. Gumini’s constructive paranoia was an appropriate reaction of an experienced, cautious New Guinean.

Taking risks

While the underlying caution that I term constructive paranoia has struck me frequently among New Guineans, I don’t want to leave the misimpression that they are thereby paralyzed and hesitant to act. To begin with, there are cautious and incautious New Guineans, just as there are cautious and incautious Americans. Then, too, the cautious ones are perfectly able to weigh risks and to act. They do some things that they know are risky, but that they nevertheless choose to do repeatedly and with appropriate care. That’s because doing those things is essential for their obtaining food and succeeding in life, or because they place value on doing them. I’m reminded of a line attributed to the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky, about the risks of attempting difficult hockey shots that might miss the net: “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in!”

My New Guinea friends would understand Gretzky’s quip, and would add two footnotes to it. First, a closer analogy with traditional life would be if you were actually penalized for missing a shot—but you would still take shots, albeit more cautiously. Second, a hockey player can’t wait forever for the perfect opportunity to take a shot, because a hockey game has a time limit of one hour. Similarly, traditional lives include time limits: you’ll die of thirst within a few days if you don’t take risks in finding water, you’ll starve within a few weeks if you don’t take risks in obtaining food, and you’ll die within less than a century no matter what you do. In fact, traditional lifespans are on the average considerably shorter than those of modern First World people, because of uncontrollable factors such as diseases, droughts, and enemy attacks. No matter how cautious a person in a traditional society is, he or she is likely to die before age 55 anyway, and that may mean having to tolerate higher risk levels than in First World societies with an average lifespan of 80—just as Wayne Gretzky would have to take more shots if a hockey game lasted only 30 minutes instead of one hour. Here are three examples of calculated risks that traditional people accept but that horrify us:

!Kung hunters, armed with nothing more than small bows and poisoned arrows, wave sticks and shout to drive groups of lions or hyenas off of animal carcasses. When a hunter succeeds in wounding an antelope, the small arrow does not kill by impact: instead, the prey runs off, the hunters track it, and by the time that the prey has collapsed from the slow-acting poison’s effect many hours or a day later, lions or hyenas are likely to have found the carcass first. Hunters who are not prepared to drive those predators off carcasses are guaranteed to starve. Few things impress me as more suicidal than the thought of walking up to a group of feasting lions while shaking a stick to intimidate them. Nevertheless, !Kung hunters do it dozens of times a year, for decades. They attempt to minimize their risks by challenging sated lions with visibly bulging bellies and likely to be ready to retreat, and by not challenging hungry or emaciated lions that evidently just discovered the carcass and are likely to stand their ground.

Women in the Fore area of New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands move from their natal village to their husband’s village at the time of marriage. When married women later go back to their natal village to visit their parents and other blood relatives, they may travel either with their husbands or else alone. In traditional times of chronic warfare, a woman’s traveling alone involved the risk of her being raped or killed while traversing enemy territory. Women attempted to minimize those risks by seeking protection from other relatives living in the territory traversed. However, the dangers and the protection were both difficult to predict. A woman might be attacked in revenge for a killing carried out a generation ago; or her protectors might be outnumbered by those seeking revenge, or might acknowledge justice in the demand for revenge.

For instance, the anthropologist Ronald Berndt related the story of a young woman named Jumu, from Ofafina village, who went to marry a man at Jasuvi. For Jumu later to return with her child to visit her parents and brothers at Ofafina required traversing the Ora district, where a woman named Inusa had recently been killed by Ofafina men. Hence Jumu’s Jasuvi in-laws advised her to seek protection from an Ora male relative named Asiwa, who also happened to be a brother’s son of the dead Inusa. Unfortunately, after finding Asiwa in his garden, Jumu was detected by some Ora men, who tricked and pressured Asiwa into allowing one of them to rape Jumu in Asiwa’s presence, and then killed Jumu and her child. Asiwa was apparently only half-hearted in his efforts to protect Jumu, because he felt that the killing of Jumu and her child constituted legitimate revenge for Inusa’s killing. As for why Jumu made what proved to be the fatal mistake of entrusting herself to Asiwa’s protection, Berndt commented, “Fighting, revenge, and counter-revenge are so commonplace that people become accustomed to this state of affairs.” That is, Jumu was unwilling to abandon forever the hope of seeing her parents again, and she accepted and tried to minimize the risks involved.

My remaining example of the delicate balance between constructive paranoia and knowingly accepting risks involves Inuit hunters. An important Inuit method of hunting seals in the winter involves standing, sometimes for hours, over one of the seal’s breathing holes in a shelf of sea ice, in the hopes that a seal will surface at that hole for a quick breath and can then be harpooned. This technique poses the risk that the ice shelf may break off and drift out to sea, leaving the hunter stranded on the ice and facing likely death from ice break-up and drowning, exposure, or starvation. It would be much safer for hunters to remain on land and not place themselves at that risk. But that in turn would make death from starvation probable, because land hunting offers no rewards to match killing seals at breathing holes. While Inuit hunters attempt to select ice shelves unlikely to break off, even the most careful hunter cannot predict shelf break-off with certainty, and other hazards of Arctic life result in a short average lifespan for traditional Inuit hunters. That is, if a hockey game lasted only 20 minutes, one would have to risk taking shots even if missed shots were penalized.

Risks and talkativeness

Finally, I would like to speculate about a possible connection between two features of traditional life: its risks, and what I have experienced as the talkativeness of traditional peoples. Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking. That makes it difficult for a Westerner like me, accustomed to nights spent in uninterrupted sleep and not punctuated with conversations, to get a good night’s rest in a hut shared with many New Guineans. Other Westerners have similarly commented on the talkativeness of the !Kung, of African Pygmies, and of many other traditional peoples.

Out of innumerable examples, here is one that stuck in my mind. One morning during my second trip to New Guinea, I was in a camp tent with two New Guinea Highland men, while other men from the camp were out in the forest. The two men belonged to the Fore tribe and were talking to each other in the Fore language. I had been enjoying learning the Fore language, and the men’s conversation was sufficiently repetitive and about a subject for which I had already acquired vocabulary that I was able to follow much of what they were saying. They were talking about the Highland staple food of sweet potato, for which the Fore word is isa-awe. One of the men looked at the large pile of sweet potatoes in the corner of the tent, assumed an unhappy expression, and said to the other man, “Isa-awe kampai.” (“There aren’t any sweet potatoes.”) They then counted how many isa-awe the pile actually contained, using the Fore counting system that mapped objects against the 10 fingers of the two hands, then against the 10 toes, and finally against a series of points along the arms. Each man related to the other how many isa-awe he himself had eaten that morning. Then they compared notes on how many isa-awe the “red man” had eaten that morning (i.e., me: the Fore referred to Europeans as tetekine, literally “red man,” rather than as “white man”). The man who had spoken first now said that he was hungry for isa-awe, although he had eaten breakfast only an hour ago. The conversation went on to estimate how much longer that pile of isa-awe would last, and when the red man (me again) would buy some more isa-awe. There was nothing unusual about that conversation: it stands out in my mind only because it indelibly reinforced my memory of the Fore word isa-awe, and because I was struck at the time by how long the men were able to continue a conversation consisting of variants just on the single theme of isa-awe.

We may feel inclined to dismiss such talking as “mere gossip.” But gossip fulfills functions for us, and for New Guineans as well. One function in New Guinea is that traditional people have none of the means of passive entertainment to which we devote inordinate time, such as television, radio, movies, books, video games, and the Internet. Instead, talking is the main form of entertainment in New Guinea. Another function of New Guinea talking is to maintain and develop social relationships, which are at least as important to New Guineans as they are to Westerners.

In addition, I think that their constant stream of conversation helps New Guineans to cope with life in the dangerous world around them. Everything gets discussed: minute details of events, what has changed since yesterday, what might happen next, who did what, and why they did it. We get most of our information about the world around us from the media; traditional New Guineans get all their information from their own observations and from each other. Life is more dangerous for them than it is for us. By talking constantly and acquiring as much information as possible, New Guineans try to make sense of their world, and to prepare themselves better to master life’s dangers.

Of course, conversation serves that same function of risk avoidance for us as well. We, too, talk, but we have less need of talk, because we face fewer dangers and have more sources of information. I’m reminded of an American friend whom I’ll call Sara, and whom I admired for her own efforts to cope with a dangerous world around her. Sara was a single mother, working full-time, living on a modest salary, and struggling to pay for her young son’s needs and her own needs. As a smart and sociable person, she was interested in meeting the right man to become a partner for her, a father for her son, a protector, and an economic contributor.

For a single mother, the world of American men is full of dangers that are difficult to assess accurately. Sara had encountered her share of men who proved to be dishonest or violent. That didn’t discourage her from continuing to date. However, like !Kung hunters who don’t give up when they find lions on a carcass, but who use all their experience to assess quickly the dangers posed by those particular lions, Sara had learned to size up men quickly and to be alert for small signs of danger. She regularly spent much time talking with women friends in similar situations, in order to share experiences of men and other opportunities and risks of life, and so they could help each other make sense of their observations.

Wayne Gretzky would understand why Sara kept exploring men, despite many missed shots. (I’m pleased to be able to report that Sara finally did make a happy second marriage, with a good man who was a single father when she met him.) And my New Guinea friends would understand Sara’s constructive paranoia, and all the time that she devoted to rehearsing with her friends the details of her daily life.

Dangers of traditional life

The anthropologist Melvin Konner spent two years living with !Kung hunter-gatherers in a remote area of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert, far from any roads or towns. The nearest town was a small one with few motor vehicles, such that a car appeared along the road through town on the average only every minute or so. Yet when Konner brought a !Kung friend named !Khoma to the town, the man was terrified at the prospect of having to cross the road, even when no car was visible in either direction. This was a man whose lifestyle in the Kalahari involved driving lions and hyenas off the carcasses of game animals.

Sabine Kuegler, the German missionary couple’s daughter who grew up with her parents among the Fayu tribe in Indonesian New Guinea’s swamp forests, where there are also no roads or motor vehicles or towns, related a similar reaction. At the age of 17 she finally left New Guinea to attend boarding school in Switzerland. “There were unbelievably many cars here, and they roared along so unbelievably fast!… Every time that we had to cross the street without a traffic light, I began to sweat. I couldn’t estimate the cars’ speed, and I was panicked that I would be run over…. Cars raced by from both directions, and when there was a small gap in the traffic, my friends ran across the street. But I stayed there, as if turned to stone…. For five minutes I kept standing at the same place. My fear was just too great. I walked a huge detour until I finally found a street-crossing with a traffic light. From then on, all my friends knew that they had to plan crossing the street with me far in advance. To this day, I’m still afraid of rushing traffic in cities.” Yet Sabine Kuegler had become accustomed to watching out for wild pigs and crocodiles in New Guinea swamp forests.

These two similar stories illustrate several points. People in every society face dangers, but the particular dangers differ among societies. Our perceptions of both unfamiliar risks and familiar ones are often unrealistic. Konner’s !Kung friend and Sabine Kuegler were both correct, in that cars actually are the number-one danger in Western life. But American college students and women voters, asked to rank life’s dangers, both rated nuclear power as more dangerous than cars, despite nuclear power (even including the death tolls from the two atomic bombs dropped at the end of World War II) having actually killed only a tiny fraction of the number of people that cars have killed. American college students also rate pesticides as extremely risky (close behind guns and smoking, in their opinion), and surgery as relatively safe, whereas in reality surgery is more dangerous than pesticides.

One could add that traditional lifestyles are overall more dangerous than the Western lifestyle, as expressed in a much shorter lifespan. That difference, though, is mostly recent. Before effective state government began around 400 years ago to reduce the impact of famines, and especially before public health measures and then antibiotics largely overcame infectious diseases less than 200 years ago, lifespans in European and American state societies were no higher than in traditional societies.

What, really, are the main dangers in traditional life? We shall see that lions and crocodiles are only part of the answer. As for reactions to dangers, we modern people sometimes respond rationally by adopting measures effective at minimizing the dangers, but in other cases we respond “irrationally” and ineffectively, e.g. by denial, or else by prayer and other religious practices. How do traditional peoples respond to dangers? I shall discuss what seem to me to be the four main groups of dangers faced by traditional peoples: environmental hazards, human violence, infectious and parasitic diseases, and starvation. The first two of those groups are still major problems in modern Western societies, the third and especially the fourth less so (although they are still important in other parts of the modern world). Then I’ll briefly mention ways in which our assessments of risks are distorted, such that we overreact to pesticides and underreact to surgery.

Accidents

When we imagine the dangers facing traditional societies, our first association is likely to be with lions and other environmental hazards. In reality, for most traditional societies environmental dangers rank only third as a cause of death, behind disease and human violence. But environmental dangers exert a bigger effect on people’s behavior than do diseases, because for environmental dangers the relation between cause and effect is much quicker and more easily perceived and understood.

Table 8.1 lists the main reported causes of accidental death or injury for seven traditional peoples for whom summaries are available. All seven live in or near the tropics and practise at least some hunting and gathering, but two (New Guinea Highlanders and the Kaulong) obtain most of their calories by farming. Obviously, different traditional peoples must face different dangers related to their different environments. For instance, drowning and being carried out to sea on an ice floe are risks for the Inuit of the Arctic coast but not for the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, while being struck by a toppling tree and being bitten by a poisonous snake are risks for Aka Pygmies and the Ache but not for the Inuit. Falling into a collapsing underground cavern is a risk for the Kaulong but for none other of the seven tabulated groups, because only the Kaulong live in an environment with many thinly roofed sinkholes. Obviously too, Table 8.1 lumps together the differences between sexes and age classes within a society: accidents kill more men than women among the Ache, the !Kung, and many other peoples, not only because hunting animals by men poses more dangers than does plant gathering by women, but also because men tend to be more risk-seeking than are women. But Table 8.1 still suffices to suggest some conclusions.

Table 8.1. Causes of accidental death and injury

We note first that Table 8.1 makes no mention of the main causes of accidental death in modern Westernized societies: in descending sequence of death toll, we are killed by cars (Plate 44), alcohol, guns, surgery, and motorcycles, of which none except occasionally alcohol is a hazard for traditional peoples. One might wonder whether we have merely traded our old hazards of lions and tree-falls for our new hazards of cars and alcohol. But there are two other big differences between environmental hazards in modern societies and in traditional societies besides the particular hazards involved. One difference is that the cumulative risk of accidental death is probably lower for modern societies, because we exert far more control over our environment even though it does contain new hazards of our own manufacture such as cars. The other difference is that, thanks to modern medicine, the damage caused by our accidents is much more often repaired before it kills us or inflicts life-long incapacity. When I broke a tendon in my hand, a surgeon splinted my hand, which healed and regained full function within six months, but some New Guinea friends who experienced tendon and bone breaks ended up with no or improper healing and were crippled for life.

Those two differences are part of the reason why traditional people so willingly abandon their jungle lifestyle, admired in the abstract by Westerners, who don’t have to live that lifestyle themselves. For instance, those differences help explain why so many Ache Indians give up the freedom of their lives as forest hunters and settle on reservations, degrading as that may seem to outsiders. Similarly, an American friend of mine traveled halfway around the world to meet a recently discovered band of New Guinea forest hunter-gatherers, only to discover that half of them had already chosen to move to an Indonesian village and put on T-shirts, because life there was safer and more comfortable. “Rice to eat, and no more mosquitoes!” was their short explanation.

As you read through the seven sets of entries of Table 8.1, you’ll see some common themes of dangers that are serious for many or most traditional peoples, but that are rare or surprising for us moderns. Wild animals are indeed a major threat for traditional peoples (Plate 43). For example, jaguars cause 8% of deaths of adult Ache men. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, buffalo, and crocodiles do kill Africans, but the animal that kills more Africans than any other is the hippopotamus. !Kung and African Pygmies are killed, bitten, scratched, and gored not just by big carnivores but also by antelope and other injured prey that they hunt. While we are horrified at the idea of !Kung hunters driving prides of lions from carcasses, the !Kung recognize that the most dangerous lion is in fact a lone beast too old, sick, or wounded to catch swift prey and reduced to attacking humans.

Poisonous snakes also rank high as a hazard for the tropical peoples of Table 8.1. They cause 14% of deaths of adult Ache men (i.e., more than jaguars), and even more loss of limbs. Almost every adult Yanomamo and Ache man has been bitten at least once. Ranked even more often as dangerous are trees, as a result both of trees or branches falling on people in the forest (remember my own experience that I described at the start of Chapter 7), and of people climbing a tree to hunt or to gather fruit or honey and falling out of the tree (Plate 42). Domestic fires for warmth are a bigger risk than bush fires, such that most New Guinea Highlanders and !Kung acquire burn scars from sleeping next to a fire as an adult or playing next to it as a baby.

Death from exposure to cold and/or wet weather is a danger outside the tropics, and at high altitudes in New Guinea and elsewhere in the tropics. Even for the Ache living in Paraguay near the Tropic of Capricorn, winter temperatures can drop below freezing, and an Ache caught out in the forest at night without a fire is at risk of dying. On one of New Guinea’s highest mountains, while I was hiking well prepared and warmly dressed in freezing rain and gale-force winds at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I met a group of seven New Guinea schoolchildren who had foolishly set out that morning in clear weather, wearing shorts and T-shirts, to cross the mountain. By the time that I encountered them several hours later, they were shivering uncontrollably, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Local men with me, who shepherded them to a shelter, pointed out to me a nearby rock pile behind which a group of 23 men had sought shelter in bad weather in a previous year and had ended up dying there of exposure. Drowning and being struck by lightning are other environmental hazards for traditional as well as modern peoples.

The !Kung, New Guineans, Ache, and many other foraging peoples are legendary for their ability to follow tracks, read clues in the environment, and detect a barely indicated trail. Nevertheless, even they, and especially their children, occasionally make mistakes, get lost, and may be unable to find their way back to camp before nightfall, with fatal consequences. Friends of mine were involved in two such tragedies in New Guinea, one in which a boy walking with a group of adults wandered off and was never found despite exhaustive searches that same day and on the following days, the other in which an experienced strong man became lost on a mountain in the late afternoon, could not reach his village, and died of exposure in the forest at night.

Still other causes of accidents are our own weapons and tools. The arrows used by !Kung hunters are smeared with a potent poison, with the result that an accidental scratch by an arrow is the most serious cause of hunting accidents for the !Kung. Traditional people around the world accidentally cut themselves with their own knives and axes, as do modern cooks and woodsmen.

Less heroic and much commoner than lions or lightning as causes of accidental death or injury are humble insect bites and thorn scratches. In the humid tropics any bite or scratch—even one from a mere gnat, leech, louse, mosquito, or tick—is likely to become infected, and to develop if untreated into an incapacitating abscess. For example, once when I revisited a New Guinea friend named Delba with whom I had spent several weeks hiking through the forest two years previously, I was shocked to find him house-bound and unable to walk at all, as the result of a simple scratch that had become infected, and that then responded quickly to antibiotics that I carried but that New Guinea villagers don’t have. Ants, bees, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps not only bite or scratch but also inject poisons that are sometimes fatal. Along with falling trees, stinging wasps and biting ants are the dangers that my New Guinea friends fear most in the forest. Some insects lay an egg under one’s skin, from which hatches a larva that produces a huge and permanently disfiguring abscess.

While these causes of accidents in traditional societies are varied, they yield some generalizations. Serious consequences of accidents include not just death itself but also, even if one survives, the possibility of temporarily or permanently decreased physical effectiveness, resulting in impaired capacity to provide for one’s children and other relatives, decreased resistance to diseases, crippling, and limb amputation. It’s these “minor” consequences, not the risk of death, that make my New Guinea friends and me so afraid of ants, wasps, and infected thorn scratches. A poisonous snake bite that the victim survives may still cause gangrene and leave the victim paralyzed, maimed, or having lost the bitten arm or leg.

Just like the omnipresent risk of starvation to be discussed later in this chapter, environmental hazards influence people’s behavior far more than one might guess from the number of deaths or injuries caused. In fact, the number of deaths may be low precisely because so much behavior is invested in combating the hazards. For instance, lions and other big carnivores account for only 5 out of 1,000 !Kung deaths, and this might mislead one to the erroneous conclusion that lions are not a big factor in !Kung life. In reality, that low death toll reflects the profound influence of lions on !Kung life. New Guineans, living in an environment without dangerous carnivores, hunt at night; the !Kung don’t, both because it then becomes difficult to detect dangerous animals and their tracks, and because dangerous carnivores themselves are more active at night. !Kung women always go foraging in groups, constantly make noise and talk loudly to ensure that animals do not encounter them by surprise, look for tracks, and avoid running (because it incites a predator to attack). If a predator is seen in the vicinity, the !Kung may restrict their travel out of camp for a day or two.

Most accidents—those caused by animals, snakes, falling trees, falling out of a tree, bush fires, exposure, getting lost, drowning, insect bites, and thorn scratches—are associated with going out to forage for or to produce food. Most accidents could thus be avoided by staying home or in camp, but then one would acquire no food. Hence environmental dangers illustrate the modified Wayne Gretzky principle: If one takes no shots, then one will miss no shots but one is also guaranteed to score no goals. Traditional foragers and farmers, even more than Wayne Gretzky, must balance hazards against the overriding need for a steady stream of scores. Similarly, we modern city-dwellers could avoid the major hazard of urban life, car accidents, by staying home and not exposing ourselves to thousands of other drivers roaring unpredictably at 60 to 100 miles per hour along the freeways. But the jobs and shopping of most of us depend on driving. Wayne Gretzky would say: If no drives, then no pay check and no food.

Vigilance

How do traditional peoples respond to their reality of living lives always at danger from environmental hazards? Their responses include the constructive paranoia that I explained in Chapter 7, religious responses that I’ll discuss in Chapter 9, and several other practices and attitudes.

The !Kung are constantly vigilant. While out foraging or walking through the bush, they watch and listen for animals and people, and they examine tracks in the sand to deduce what animal or person made the tracks, in which direction it was traveling, at what speed, how long ago, and whether or how they should modify their plans as a result. Even while in camp they must remain vigilant, despite the deterrence value of people and noise and fires, because animals sometimes enter camps, especially snakes. If the large poisonous snake known as the black mamba is seen in a camp, the !Kung are likely to abandon the camp rather than try to kill the snake. That might seem to us an overreaction, but the black mamba is one of Africa’s most dangerous snakes because of its large size (up to eight feet), quick movements, long fangs, and potent neurotoxic venom; most bites are fatal.

In any dangerous environment, accumulated experience teaches rules of behavior to minimize the risks, rules worth following even if an outsider considers it overreacting. What Jane Goodale wrote about the outlook of the Kaulong people in the rainforests of New Britain could apply equally well to traditional peoples elsewhere, with just substitutions of the specific examples: “Prevention of accidents is important, and the knowledge of how, when, and under what circumstances any particular endeavor should or should not be undertaken is necessary to personal success and survival. Significantly, innovation in any technique or in behavior relating to the natural environment is considered to be extremely dangerous. There is a rather narrow range of correct behavior, beyond which there is the distinct and oft-stated danger of the sudden opening of the ground under one’s feet, the falling of a tree as one walks underneath, or the sudden rise of flood waters while one is attempting to cross over the other bank. For example, I was told to stop skipping stones on the surface of our river (‘a flood will come up’); not to play with fire (‘the ground will open up,’ or ‘the fire will burn you, and not cook your food’); not to call the name of cave bats while hunting them (‘the cave will collapse’); and many other ‘don’ts’ with similar sanctions carried out by the natural environment.” The same attitude underlies the philosophy of life that a New Guinea friend summed up for me: “Everything happens for a reason, so one must be cautious.”

A common Western reaction to danger that I have never, ever, encountered among experienced New Guineans is to be macho, to seek or enjoy dangerous situations, or to pretend to be unafraid and try to hide one’s own fear. Marjorie Shostak noted the lack of those same Western macho attitudes among the !Kung: “Hunts are often dangerous. The !Kung face danger courageously, but they do not seek it out or take risks for the sake of proving their courage. Actively avoiding hazardous situations is considered prudent, not cowardly or unmasculine. Young boys, moreover, are not expected to conquer their fear and act like grown men. To unnecessary risks, the !Kung say, ‘But a person could die!’”

Shostak went on to describe how a 12-year-old !Kung boy named Kashe and his cousin and his father recounted a successful hunt in which the father had speared a large gemsbok, an antelope that defended itself with long razor-sharp horns. When Shostak asked Kashe whether he was helping his father with the kill, Kashe laughed and proudly answered, “No, I was up in a tree!” “His smile became an easy laugh. Puzzled, I asked again, and he repeated that he and his cousin had climbed a tree as soon as the animal had stopped running and had stood its ground. I teased him, saying everyone would have gone hungry if the animal had been left to him and his cousin. He laughed again and said, ‘Yes, but we were so scared!’ There was no hint of embarrassment or of a need to explain what might have been seen, in our culture, as behavior lacking in courage…. There would be plenty of time for him to learn to face dangerous animals and to kill them, and there was no doubt in his mind (or his father’s, to judge from the expression on his face), that he would, one day. When I questioned the father, he beamed, ‘Up in the tree? Of course. They’re only children. They could have gotten hurt.’”

New Guineans, !Kung, and other traditional peoples relate to each other long stories of dangers encountered, not only for entertainment in the absence of television and books, but also for their educational value. Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado give some examples from Ache campfire conversations: “Stories of accidental death are sometimes told in the evening when band members relate the day’s events to things that happened in the past. Children are fascinated by these stories and probably learn invaluable lessons about the dangers of the forest, which aid in their own survival. One boy died when he forgot to pinch the head of a palm larva before swallowing it. The jaws of the larva clamped onto his throat and he choked to death. Several times an adolescent boy strayed too far from the adult men while hunting and was either never seen again or found dead several days later. One hunter who was digging an armadillo burrow fell into the hole head first and suffocated. Another fell out of a tree almost 40 m [meters] to his death while he was trying to recover an arrow that he had shot at a monkey. One small girl fell into a hole left by a bottle tree that had rotted away and broke her neck. Several men were attacked by jaguars. Some of their remains were found and others simply vanished. A boy was bitten on the head by a poisonous snake in the camp at night while he slept. He died the next day. One old woman was killed by a falling tree chopped by an adolescent girl for firewood. Henceforth the girl became known as ‘Falling Firewood,’ a nickname that reminded her daily of her misdeed. One man was bitten by a coati and later died of the wound. In a similar incident a hunter was bitten on the wrist in 1985. His main arteries and veins were punctured and he certainly would have died if he had not received modern medical attention. A small girl fell in a river while crossing on a log bridge and was swept away…. Finally, in an event that seems a stroke of truly random bad luck, six people in one band were killed when a lightning bolt struck the camp during a storm.”

Human violence

Traditional societies exhibit much variation in their frequency and forms of death by human violence, which usually ranks as either the leading or (after illness) the second-leading cause of death. A significant factor underlying this variation is the degree of state or outside interference in suppressing or discouraging violence. Types of violence can be somewhat arbitrarily dichotomized into either war (discussed in Chapters 3 and 4) or homicide, where war in its clearest form is defined as collective fighting between different groups, while homicide is defined as killings of individuals within a group. However, this dichotomy becomes blurred when one has to decide whether killings between neighboring groups usually on friendly terms should be counted as in-group homicide or out-group war. Further ambiguities involve which types of killings to count: for instance, published tabulations of Ache violence include infanticide and senilicide, but published !Kung tabulations don’t, and different authors hold different opinions about the frequency of infanticide among the !Kung. The choice of victims, and the relation between the victim and the killer, also vary greatly among societies. For example, Ache victims of violence were mainly infants and children, while !Kung victims were mainly adult men.

!Kung studies of violence are instructive for several reasons. Initial accounts of the !Kung by anthropologists described them as peaceful and non-violent, so much so that a popular book published in 1959, early in the history of modern !Kung studies, was entitled The Harmless People. During three years of residence among the !Kung in the 1960s, Richard Lee observed 34 fights leading to blows but no killings, and informants told him that there actually were no killings during those years. Only after Lee had been in the area for 14 months and come to know his informants better were they willing to talk to him about past killings. When they did start talking, by cross-checking accounts of different informants Lee was able to assemble a reliable list of names and sex and age of killers and victims, the relation between killer and victim, and the circumstances, motive, season, time of day, and weapons used for 22 killings between 1920 and 1969. That list did not count cases of infanticide and senilicide, which Lee believed to be rare, but Nancy Howell’s interviews of !Kung women suggest that infanticide did occur. Lee concluded that those 22 cases represented the total number of deaths by violence in his study area between 1920 and 1969.

All 22 of those !Kung killings should surely be considered homicides rather than wars. In some cases the victim and the killer were within the same camp, while in other cases they were in different camps, but no killing involved a group of people from one camp seeking to kill a group of people from another camp (i.e., “war”). In fact, there was no reported event at all suggestive of a war among the !Kung in Lee’s area during the period 1920–1969. But the !Kung did say that they used to have raiding expeditions, apparently similar to the witnessed “wars” of other traditional peoples, during the generation of the grandparents of the oldest living !Kung—i.e., before Tswana herders began making annual visits to the !Kung and trading with them in the 19th century. We saw in Chapter 4 that visits of traders to the Inuit also had the effect of suppressing Inuit war, even though neither the traders with the Inuit nor those with the !Kung purposely suppressed war. Instead, the Inuit themselves abandoned war in their own self-interest in order to have more opportunities to profit from trade, and the !Kung may have done the same.

As for the rate of !Kung homicide, 22 killings over the course of 49 years works out to less than 1 homicide every 2 years. That sounds utterly trivial to readers of urban American newspapers, who can open the newspaper on any randomly chosen day and read about all the murders committed in their city within the last 24 hours. The main explanation for this difference is of course that the base population within which murders can occur is millions of people for an American city, but only about 1,500 people for the !Kung population surveyed by Lee. Referred to that base population, the homicide rate for the !Kung works out to 29 homicides per 100,000 person-years, which is triple the homicide rate for the United States and 10 to 30 times the rates for Canada, Britain, France, and Germany. One might object that the United States calculation excludes violent deaths in war, which would yield a higher rate for the United States. However, the !Kung rate also doesn’t include deaths in !Kung “wars” (i.e., their raiding expeditions that ended over a century ago), whose number is completely unknown for the !Kung but is known to be high for many other traditional peoples.

The figure of 22 !Kung homicides in 49 years is instructive for another reason as well. One homicide every 27 months means that, for an anthropologist carrying out a field study of a people lasting one year, the odds are against any homicide occurring during that period, and the anthropologist would consider the people as peaceful. Even if the anthropologist were resident there for five years, a period long enough for a killing to be likely to occur given !Kung homicide rates, the killing would be very unlikely to take place under the eyes of the anthropologist, whose assessment of the frequency of violence would depend on whether his informants chose to tell him about it. Similarly, although the United States ranks as the most homicidal society in the First World, I have never personally witnessed a homicide, and I have heard only a few first-hand accounts of homicides within my circle of acquaintances. Nancy Howell’s calculations suggest that violence was the second-leading cause of !Kung death, behind infectious and parasitic diseases, but ahead of degenerative diseases and accidents.

It is also instructive to consider why violent deaths ended recently among the !Kung. The last homicide reported to Lee occurred in the spring of 1955, when two !Kung men killed a third !Kung man. The two killers were arrested by the police, put on trial, and jailed, and did not return to their home area. This event occurred only three years after the first instance in which the police intervened to jail a !Kung killer. From 1955 until Lee published his analysis in 1979, there was no further homicide in his study area. This course of events illustrates the role of control by a strong state government in reducing violence. That same role also becomes obvious from central facts of the colonial and post-colonial history of New Guinea in the last 50 years: namely, the steep decrease in violence following establishment of Australian and Indonesian control of remote areas of eastern and western New Guinea respectively, previously without state government; the continued low level of violence in Indonesian New Guinea under maintained rigorous government control there; and the eventual resurgence of violence in Papua New Guinea after Australian colonial government gradually yielded to less rigorous independent government. That tendency for violence to decrease under state government control does not deny the fact that traditional societies have non-violent means of resolving most of their disputes successfully before the disputes become violent (Chapter 2).

Details of the 22 !Kung homicides were as follows. All of the killers, and 19 of the 22 victims, were adult men aged 20 to 55; only 3 of the victims were women. In all cases the !Kung killer knew the victim, who was a distant relative; the !Kung lacked completely the killings of strangers common in the United States in the course of robberies or road rage. All killings took place publicly in camps, in the presence of other people. Only 5 of the 22 !Kung killings were premeditated. For example, in one dramatic case around 1948, a notorious and possibly psychotic killer named /Twi, who had already killed two men, was ambushed and shot with a poisoned arrow by a man named /Xashe. The wounded /Twi still managed to stab a woman named //Kushe in the mouth with a spear and shot //Kushe’s husband N!eishi in the back with a poisoned arrow, before many gathered people shot poisoned arrows at /Twi until he looked like a porcupine, then stabbed his dead body with spears. The other 17 !Kung killings, however, unfolded during spontaneous fights. For instance, a fight broke out at N≠wama when one man refused to let another man marry the younger sister of the first man’s wife. In the resulting big argument that exploded, the husband shot an arrow at his sister-in-law; the sister-in-law’s suitor and his father and brother, and the husband and his allies, shot arrows and spears at each other; and, amidst several parallel fights, the suitor’s father was mortally wounded by a poisoned arrow in the thigh plus a spear in the ribs.

Most of the !Kung killings (15 out of 22) were parts of feuds in which one killing led to another and then to yet another over the course of up to 24 years; such cycles of retaliatory killings also characterize traditional war (Chapters 3 and 4). Among motives for !Kung killings other than that one of revenge for a previous killing, adultery is the one most often mentioned. For example, a husband whose wife had slept with another man attacked and wounded the adulterer, who then managed to kill the husband. Another cuckolded husband stabbed and killed his wife with a poisoned arrow, then fled the area and never returned.

As for other small-scale societies, some are less violent than the !Kung (e.g., Aka Pygmies, the Siriono), while others are or were more violent (e.g., the Ache, Yanomamo, Greenland and Iceland Norse). During the time that the Ache were still living in the forest as hunter-gatherers before 1971, violence was the commonest cause of death, exceeding even diseases. More than half of Ache violent deaths were at the hands of non-Ache Paraguayans, but killings of Ache by other Ache still accounted for 22% of Ache deaths. In marked contrast to the pattern of !Kung violence directed exclusively against adult !Kung, most (81%) of Ache homicide victims were children or infants—e.g., children (predominantly girls) killed to accompany a dead adult into the grave, children who were killed or who died of neglect after the death or desertion of their father, or infants killed because they were born separated by only a short birth interval from their next older sibling. Also in contrast to the !Kung, the commonest form of in-group killings of adult Ache was not a spontaneous fight with whatever weapons happened to be at hand, but instead a ritualized and pre-planned fight with clubs specially made for the occasion. As is true for the !Kung, state intervention has greatly decreased levels of violence among the Ache: since they began increasingly living on reservations after 1977 and came under the direct or indirect influence of the Paraguayan state, killings of adult Ache by other Ache have ceased, and Ache killings of their children and infants have decreased.

How do people in traditional societies without state government and police protect themselves against the constant danger of violence? A large part of the answer is that they adopt many forms of constructive paranoia. One widespread rule is to beware of strangers: routinely to attempt to kill or drive off a stranger detected on your territory, because the stranger may have come to scout out your territory or to kill a member of your tribe. Another rule is to beware of the possibility of treachery by supposed allies, or (conversely) to practise pre-emptive treachery against potentially fickle allies. For instance, a tactic of Yanomamo warfare is to invite people of a neighboring village to come to a feast at one’s own village, and then to kill them when they have set down their weapons and are eating. Don Richardson reports that the Sawi people of southwestern New Guinea honor treachery as an ideal: better than killing an enemy outright is to convince an enemy of your friendship, to invite the enemy many times over the course of months to visit you and partake of your food, and then to watch his terror when you declare, just before killing him, “Tuwi asonai makaerin!” (We have been fattening you with friendship for the slaughter!)

Still another tactic to reduce the risk of attack is that the locations of villages are commonly chosen for the purpose of defense or maintaining a good view over the surroundings. For instance, New Guinea mountain villages are typically located on hilltops, and many late-phase Anasazi settlements in the southwestern United States were in sites accessible only by a ladder that could be pulled up to cut off the entrance. While these locations oblige the inhabitants to carry water for long distances uphill from the river in the valley bottom below, that effort is considered preferable to the risk of being surprised by an attack at a riverside valley location. As population density or as fighting increases, people tend to shift from living in dispersed unprotected huts to aggregating for defense in large palisaded villages.

Groups protect themselves by building a network of alliances with other groups, and individuals ally themselves with other individuals. A function of the constant talking that has struck me in New Guinea, and that has struck other visitors to other traditional societies, is to learn as much as possible about each individual in one’s universe of contact, and to monitor people’s activities constantly. Especially good sources of information are women who were born into one’s own group, and who were then sent in marriage to another group, in the common traditional living pattern termed patrilocal residence (i.e., brides moving to join their husband’s group, rather than new husbands moving to join their wife’s group). Such married women often warn their blood relatives in their natal society that their husbands and other relatives by marriage are planning an attack. Finally, just as endless evening campfire conversations about accidents serve not just to entertain but also to educate children (and everyone else) about environmental risks, endless conversations about raids and people alert listeners to dangers arising from people, as well as providing gripping entertainment.

Diseases

Depending on the particular traditional society, diseases collectively rank as either the leading danger to human life (e.g., among the Agta and !Kung, where they accounted respectively for an estimated 50%–86% and 70%–80% of all deaths) or as the second most important danger after violence (e.g., among the Ache, among whom “only” one-quarter of deaths under conditions of forest life were due to illness). It must be added, though, that malnourished people become more susceptible to infection, and that food shortage is thus a contributing factor to many deaths whose cause is recorded as infectious disease.

Among diseases, the relative importance of different categories of disease for traditional peoples varies greatly with lifestyle, geographic location, and age. In general, infectious diseases are most important among infants and young children and remain important at all ages. Parasitic diseases join infectious diseases in importance in childhood. Diseases associated with worm parasites (such as hookworm and tapeworm) and insect-born protozoan parasites (such as malaria and the agent causing sleeping sickness) are more of a problem for peoples of warm tropical climates than for peoples of the Arctic, deserts, and cold mountaintops, where the worms themselves and the protozoa’s insect vectors have difficulty surviving in the environment. Later in life, degenerative diseases of bones, joints, and soft tissue—such as arthritis, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, bone fractures, and tooth wear—rise in importance. The much more physically demanding lifestyle of traditional peoples than of modern couch potatoes makes the former more susceptible than the latter to such degenerative diseases at a given age. Conspicuously rare or absent among traditional peoples are all of the diseases responsible for most deaths in the First World today: coronary artery disease and other forms of atherosclerosis, stroke and other consequences of hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, and most cancers. I shall discuss the reasons for this striking difference between First World and traditional health patterns in Chapter 11.

Only within the last two centuries have infectious diseases receded in importance in the First World as causes of human death. The reasons for those recent changes include appreciation of the importance of sanitation; the installation of clean water supplies by state governments, the introduction of vaccination, and other public health measures; the growth of scientific knowledge of microbes as the agents of infectious disease, permitting rational design of effective counter-measures; and the discovery and design of antibiotics. Poor hygiene permitted (and still permits today) the transmission of infectious and parasitic diseases among traditional peoples, who often use the same water supply for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing, defecate nearby, and do not understand the value of washing one’s hands before handling food.

Just to mention an example of hygiene and disease that impressed me personally, on a trip to Indonesia during which I spent most of each day bird-watching alone on forest trails radiating from a campsite shared with Indonesian colleagues, I was disconcerted to discover that I was experiencing sudden attacks of diarrhea at an hour varying unpredictably from day to day. I racked my brain to figure out what I was doing wrong, and what could account for the variation of the attacks’ timing. Finally, I made the connection. Each day, a wonderfully kind Indonesian colleague, who felt responsible for my well-being, came out from camp and followed my trail of that day until he encountered me, to make sure that I hadn’t had an accident or gotten lost. He handed me some biscuits that he had thoughtfully brought from camp as a snack, chatted with me for a few minutes to satisfy himself that all was well with me, and returned to camp. One evening, I suddenly realized that my diarrhea attack each day began about half an hour after my kind friend had met me and I had eaten his biscuits on that day: if he met me at 10:00 A.M., my attack came at 10:30, and if he met me at 2:30 P.M., it came at 3:00 P.M. From the next day onwards, I thanked him for his biscuits, disposed of them inconspicuously after he had turned back, and never had any more attacks. The problem had originated with my friend’s handling of the biscuits rather than with the biscuits themselves, of which we kept a supply in their original cellophane packets at our camp, and which never made me ill when I opened the packet myself. Instead, the cause of the attacks must have been intestinal pathogens transmitted from my friend’s fingers to the biscuits.

The prevalent types of infectious diseases differ strikingly between small populations of nomadic hunter-gatherers and family-level farming societies on the one hand, and large populations of modern and recently Westernized societies plus traditional densely populated Old World farming societies on the other hand. Characteristic diseases of hunter-gatherers are malaria and other arthropod-transmitted fevers, dysentery and other gastrointestinal diseases, respiratory diseases, and skin infections. Lacking among hunter-gatherers, unless they have been recently infected by Western visitors, are the feared infectious diseases of settled populations: diphtheria, flu, measles, mumps, pertussis, rubella, smallpox, and typhoid. Unlike the infectious diseases of hunter-gatherers, which are present chronically or else flare up and down, those diseases of dense populations run in acute epidemics: many people in an area become sick within a short time and quickly either recover or die, then the disease vanishes locally for a year or more.

The reasons why those epidemic diseases could arise and maintain themselves only in large human populations have emerged from epidemiological and microbiological studies of recent decades. Those reasons are that the diseases are efficiently transmitted, have an acute course, confer lifetime immunity on victims who survive, and are confined to the human species. The diseases become transmitted efficiently from a sick person to nearby healthy people by microbes that a patient excretes onto his skin from oozing pustules, that a patient ejects into the air by coughing and sneezing, or that enter nearby water bodies when a patient defecates. Healthy people become infected by touching a patient or an object handled by the patient, breathing in the patient’s exhaled breath, or drinking contaminated water. The disease’s acute course means that, within a few weeks of infection, a patient either dies or recovers. The combination of efficient transmission and acute course means that, within a short time, everybody in a local population has become exposed to the disease and is now either dead or recovered. The lifetime immunity acquired by survivors means that there is no one else alive in the population who could contract the disease until some future year, when a new crop of unexposed babies has been born. Confinement of the disease to humans means that there is no animal or soil reservoir in which the disease could maintain itself: it dies out locally and cannot come back until an infection spreads again from a distant source. All of those features in combination mean that these infectious diseases are restricted to large human populations, sufficiently numerous that the disease can sustain itself within the population by moving constantly from one area to another, locally dying out but still surviving in a more distant part of the population. For measles the minimum necessary population size is known to be a few hundred thousand people. Hence the diseases can be summarized as “acute immunizing crowd epidemic infectious diseases of humans”—or, for short, crowd diseases.

The crowd diseases could not have existed before the origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago. Only with the explosive population growth made possible by agriculture did human populations reach the high numbers required to sustain our crowd diseases. The adoption of agriculture enabled formerly nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle down in crowded and unsanitary permanent villages, connected by trade with other villages, and providing ideal conditions for the rapid transmission of microbes. Recent studies by molecular biologists have demonstrated that the microbes responsible for many and probably most of the crowd diseases now confined to humans arose from crowd diseases of our domestic animals such as pigs and cattle, with which we came into regular close contact ideal for animal-to-human microbe transfer only upon the beginnings of animal domestication around 11,000 years ago.

Of course, the absence of crowd diseases from small populations of hunter-gatherers does not mean that hunter-gatherers are free from infectious diseases. They do have infectious diseases, but their diseases are different from the crowd diseases in four respects. First, the microbes causing their diseases are not confined to the human species but are shared with animals (such as the agent of yellow fever, shared with monkeys) or else capable of surviving in soil (such as the agents causing botulism and tetanus). Second, many of the diseases are not acute but chronic, such as leprosy and yaws. Third, some of the diseases are transmitted inefficiently between people, leprosy and yaws again being examples. Finally, most of the diseases do not confer permanent immunity: a person who has recovered from one bout of a disease can contract the same disease again. These four facts mean that these diseases can maintain themselves in small human populations, infecting and re-infecting victims from animal and soil reservoirs and from chronically sick people.

Hunter-gatherers and small farming populations are not immune to crowd diseases; they are merely unable to maintain crowd diseases by themselves. In fact, small populations are, tragically, especially susceptible to crowd diseases when they become infected by a visitor from the outside world. Their enhanced susceptibility is due to the fact that at least some of the crowd diseases tend to have higher fatality rates in adults than in children. In dense urban First World populations everyone (until recently) became exposed to measles as a child, but in a small isolated population of hunter-gatherers the adults have not been exposed to measles and are likely to die of it if it arrives. There are many horror stories of Inuit, Native American, and Aboriginal Australian populations being virtually wiped out by epidemic diseases introduced through European contact.

Responses to diseases

For traditional societies, diseases differ from the other three major types of dangers as regards people’s understanding of the underlying mechanisms, and hence of effective cures or preventive measures. When someone is injured or dies from an accident, violence, or hunger, the cause and underlying process are clear: the victim was hit by a falling tree, struck by an enemy’s arrow, or starved by insufficient food. The appropriate cure or preventive measure is equally clear: don’t sleep under dead trees, watch out for enemies or kill them first, and ensure a reliable food supply. However, in the case of diseases, sound empirical understanding of causes, and science-based preventive measures and cures, achieved notable success only within the last two centuries. Until then, state societies as well as traditional small-scale societies suffered heavy tolls from disease.

This is not to say that traditional peoples have been completely helpless at preventing or curing diseases. The Siriono evidently understand that there is a connection between human feces and diseases such as dysentery and hookworm. A Siriono mother promptly cleans up her infant’s feces when it defecates, stores the feces in a basket, and eventually dumps the basket’s contents far away in the forest. But even the Siriono are not rigorous in their hygiene. Anthropologist Allan Holmberg relates watching a Siriono infant unobserved by his mother defecate, lie in his feces, smear them over himself, and put them into his mouth. When his mother finally noticed what was going on, she put her finger into the baby’s mouth, removed the feces, wiped but didn’t bathe the filthy baby, and resumed eating herself without washing her hands. Piraha Indians let their dogs eat off the plates from which they themselves are simultaneously eating: that’s a good way to acquire canine germs and parasites.

By trial and error, many traditional peoples identify local plants which they believe help cure particular ailments. My New Guinea friends frequently point out to me certain plants which they say that they use to treat malaria, other fevers, or dysentery or to induce miscarriage. Western ethnobotanists have studied this traditional pharmacological knowledge, and Western pharmaceutical companies have extracted drugs from these plants. Nevertheless, the overall effectiveness of traditional medical knowledge, interesting as it is, tends to be limited. Malaria is still one of the commonest causes of illness and death in New Guinea’s lowlands and hills. It was only when scientists established that malaria is caused by a protozoan of genus Plasmodium transmitted by mosquitoes of genus Anopheles, and that it can be cured by various drugs, that the percentage of New Guinea lowlanders suffering malaria attacks could be reduced from around 50% to below 1%.

Views of disease causes, and resulting attempted preventive measures and cures, differ among traditional peoples. Some but not all peoples have specialized healers, termed “shamans” by Westerners, and given specific epithets by the people involved. The !Kung and the Ache often view illness fatalistically, as something that is due to chance and can’t be helped. In other cases the Ache offer biological explanations: e.g., that fatal intestinal illnesses of children are due to weaning and eating solid food, and that fevers are caused by eating bad meat, too much honey, honey unmixed with water, too many insect larvae, or other dangerous foods, or by exposure to human blood. Each of these explanations may sometimes be correct, but they don’t serve to protect the Ache from a high death rate from disease. The Daribi, Fayu, Kaulong, Yanomamo, and many other peoples blame some illnesses on a curse, magic, or a sorcerer, to be countered by raiding, killing, or paying the responsible sorcerer. The Dani, Daribi, and !Kung attribute other illnesses to ghosts or spirits, with whom !Kung healers attempt to mediate by going into a trance. The Kaulong, Siriono, and many other peoples seek moral and religious explanations for illnesses: i.e., the victim brought the illness on himself by an oversight, committing an offense against nature, or violating a taboo. For instance, the Kaulong attribute respiratory illnesses of men to pollution by women, when a man has made the dangerous mistake of coming into contact with an object polluted by a woman menstruating or giving birth, or when a man has walked under any fallen tree or bridge or has drunk from a river (because a woman might have walked on the tree, over the bridge, or through the river). Before we Westerners look down on those Kaulong theories of male respiratory disease, we should reflect on the frequency with which our own cancer victims seek to identify their moral responsibility or the cause for their cancer, whose specific cause is as obscure to us as is the cause of male respiratory illness to the Kaulong.

Starvation

In February 1913, as the British explorer A. F. R. Wollaston was descending in good spirits through New Guinea montane forests after having succeeded in reaching the snow line on New Guinea’s highest mountain, he was horrified to find two recently dead bodies in his path. Over the next two days, which he described as among the most awful of his life, he encountered over 30 more bodies of New Guinea mountain people, mostly women and children, singly or in groups of up to five, lying in rough shelters along the track. One group consisting of a dead woman and two dead children included a still-living small girl about three years old, whom he carried to his camp and fed with milk but who died within a few hours. Into camp came another group of a man, a woman, and two children, of whom all except one of the children expired. The whole group, already chronically malnourished, had exhausted their supplies of sweet potatoes and pigs and found no wild food to eat in the forest except the hearts of some palm trees, and the weaker ones apparently died of starvation.

Compared to accidents, violence, and disease, which are frequently recognized and mentioned as causes of death in traditional societies, death due to starvation as witnessed by Wollaston receives much less mention. When it does occur, it is likely to involve mass deaths, because people in small-scale societies share food, so that either no one starves or else many people do simultaneously. But starvation is greatly underappreciated as a contributing cause of death. Under most circumstances, when people become seriously malnourished, something else occurs to kill them before they die purely of starvation and nothing else. Their body resistance fails, they become susceptible to illness, and they are recorded as dying of a disease from which a healthy person would have recovered. As they become physically weak, they become more prone to accidents such as falling from a tree or drowning, or to being killed by healthy enemies. The pre-occupation of small-scale societies with food, and the diverse and elaborate measures to which they resort to ensure their food supply and which I shall explain in the following pages, testify to their omnipresent concern with starvation as a major risk of traditional life.

Furthermore, food shortage takes the form not only of starvation in the sense of insufficient calories, but also shortages of specific vitamins (causing diseases such as beriberi, pellagra, pernicious anemia, rickets, and scurvy), specific minerals (causing endemic goiter and iron-deficiency anemia), and protein (causing kwashiorkor). Those specific deficiency diseases are more frequent among farmers than among hunter-gatherers, whose diets tend to be more varied than those of farmers. Like calorie starvation, specific deficiency diseases are likely to contribute to someone being recorded as dying of an accident, violence, or infectious disease before the person dies of the deficiency disease alone.

Starvation is a risk that affluent First World citizens don’t even think about, because our access to food remains the same, day after day, from season to season, and year after year. Of course, we have some particular foods that are seasonal and available for just a few weeks a year, such as freshly harvested local cherries, but the total available amount of food is essentially constant. For small-scale societies, however, there are unpredictably good or bad days, some season each year when food is predictably short and to which people look forward with foreboding, and unpredictably good or bad years. As a result, food is a major and almost constant subject of conversation. I was initially surprised that my Fore friends spent so much time talking about sweet potatoes, even after they had just eaten to satiation. For the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, the overwhelming preoccupation is with food, such that two of the commonest Siriono expressions are “My stomach is empty” and “Give me some food.” The significance of sex and food is reversed between the Siriono and us Westerners: the Sirionos’ strongest anxieties are about food, they have sex virtually whenever they want, and sex compensates for food hunger, while our strongest anxieties are about sex, we have food virtually whenever we want, and eating compensates for sexual frustration.

Unlike us, many traditional societies, especially ones in arid or Arctic environments, face frequent predictable and unpredictable food shortages, and their risk of famine is far higher than ours. The reasons for this difference are clear. Many traditional societies have few or no stored food surpluses on which to fall back, either because they can’t produce surpluses to store, or because a hot wet climate would cause food to spoil quickly, or because their lifestyle is nomadic. Those groups that actually could store surplus food risk losing it to raiders. Traditional societies are threatened by local food failures because they can integrate food resources only over a small area, whereas we First World citizens ship food over our whole country and import it from the most distant countries. Without our motorized vehicles, roads, railroads, and ships, traditional societies can’t transport food long distances and can acquire it only from near neighbors. Traditional societies lack our state governments that organize food storage, transport, and exchange over large areas. Nevertheless, we shall see that traditional societies have many other ways of coping with the risk of famine.

Unpredictable food shortages

The shortest time scale and smallest spatial scale of variation in tribal food supply involve day-to-day variation in individual hunting success. Plants don’t move around and can be gathered more or less predictably from one day to the next, but animals do move, so that any individual hunter risks bagging no animal on any given day. The solution to that uncertainty adopted almost universally by hunter-gatherers is to live in bands including several hunters who pool their catch to average out the large day-to-day fluctuations in catch for each individual hunter. Richard Lee described that solution from his own experience with the !Kung of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, but he was also generalizing for hunter-gatherers of all continents and all environments when he wrote: “Food is never consumed alone by a family; it is always (actually or potentially) shared out with members of a living group or band of up to 30 (or more) members. Even though only a fraction of the able-bodied foragers go out each day, the day’s returns of meat and gathered foods are divided in such a way that every member of the camp receives an equitable share. The hunting band or camp is a unit of sharing.” His principle of pooling and averaging among hunter-gatherers also applies to many small-scale herding and farming societies, such as the Sudan’s Nuer people studied by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who share meat, milk, fish, grain, and beer: “Although a household owns its own food, does its own cooking, and provides independently for the needs of its members, men, and much less, women and children, eat in one another’s homes to such an extent that, looked at from outside, the whole community is seen to be partaking of a joint supply. Rules of hospitality and conventions about the division of meat and fish lead to a far wider sharing of food than a bare statement of the principles of ownership would suggest.”

The next longer and larger scale of variation in food supply involves unpredictable variation in food availability affecting a whole local group. A spell of cold wet weather lasting a few days makes it unrewarding and dangerous for Ache Indians to go out hunting, and leaves them not only hungry but also at risk of cold exposure and respiratory infections. Ripening of the local crop of plantains and peach palm fruits, which are staple plant foods for Yanomamo Indians, occurs unpredictably: there is either none to eat, or else a local superabundance. The millet crop of the Nuer may be ruined by drought, elephants, heavy rain, locusts, or weaverbirds. Severe droughts that cause famine afflict !Kung hunter-gatherers unpredictably in about one out of four years, and are uncommon but feared among Trobriand Island farmers. Frosts kill the staple sweet potato crop in about 1 out of 10 years among New Guinea Highland farmers at high elevation. Destructive cyclones strike the Solomon Islands at irregular intervals of one to several decades.

Small-scale societies attempt to cope with these unpredictable local food failures in several ways that include shifting camp, storing food in their own bodies, agreements between different local groups, and scattering land for food production. The simplest solution for nomadic hunter-gatherers not tied to fixed gardens, and faced with local food scarcity, is to move to another location where food availability is at the moment higher. As for fattening up whenever possible, if problems of food rotting or of enemy raiders prevent you from storing food in a larder or container, you can at least store it as your own body fat, which won’t rot and can’t be stolen. In Chapter 11 I’ll give examples of small-scale societies that gorge, when food is abundant, to a degree unbelievable to Westerners, except for those few of us who have competed in hot-dog-eating contests. People thereby fatten themselves and become better able to survive subsequent times of food scarcity.

While gorging may help you carry yourself through a few weeks of food scarcity, it won’t protect you against a year of starvation. One long-term solution is to make reciprocal agreements with neighboring groups about sharing food when one group’s area has enough food and another group’s area is suffering from a food shortage. Local food availability fluctuates with time in any area. But two areas located a sufficient distance apart are likely to have fluctuations in food availability that are out of phase. That opens the door for your group to reach a mutually advantageous agreement with another group, such that they allow you onto their land or send you food when they have enough food but you don’t, and your group returns the favor when it’s the other group that’s short of food.

For example, in the area of the Kalahari Desert occupied by the !Kung San, rainfall in a given month varies by up to a factor of 10 between different sites. The result, in Richard Lee’s words, is that “the desert may be blooming in one area and a few hours’ walk away, the land may still be parched.” As one example, Lee compared monthly rainfall at five sites in the Ghanzi district for 12 months from July 1966 to June 1967. The total rainfall for the year varied by less than a factor of 2 between sites, but rainfall in a given month varied among sites from no rainfall at all to 10 inches. The site of Cume had the highest annual rainfall but was nevertheless the driest of the five sites in May 1967 and the second driest in November 1966 and February 1967. Conversely, Kalkfontein had the lowest annual rainfall, but it was the second-wettest site in March 1967 and again in May 1967. Hence for any site, a group confined to that site would be certain to experience droughts and food shortages at certain times, but could usually find some other group whose site was wet and flourishing—provided that the two groups had agreed to help each other in times of need. In fact, such generalized reciprocity is essential to the !Kung’s ability to survive in their locally unpredictable desert environment.

Reciprocity (punctuated occasionally by hostility) is widespread among traditional societies. Trobriand Island villages distribute food between villages to even out local food shortages. Among the Iñupiat of northern Alaska, individual families in times of local famine moved to live with relatives or partners in another district. The most important fruits consumed by South America’s Yanomamo Indians come from groves of peach palm trees and plantain trees, both of which (especially the former) produce harvests more abundant than a local group can consume by itself. The fruits spoil after ripening and cannot be stored, so they have to be eaten while ripe. When a local group finds itself with a surplus, it invites neighbors to come for a feast, in the expectation that those neighbors will reciprocate when they in turn produce a food surplus.

Scatter your land

The other common long-term solution to the unpredictable risk of a local food shortage is to scatter your land-holdings. I encountered this phenomenon in New Guinea when, while out bird-watching one day, I stumbled across a New Guinea friend’s garden clearing in the middle of forest a mile northeast of his village, and several miles from his other gardens scattered to the south and west of his village. What on earth did he have in mind, I asked myself, when he chose that isolated location for his new garden? It seemed so inefficient to commit himself to a waste of travel time, and the garden’s remoteness made it hard to protect from marauding pigs and thieves. But New Guineans are smart and experienced gardeners. If you see them doing something that you initially don’t understand, there usually turns out to be a reason. What was his motive?

Other Western scholars and development experts have been equally puzzled by other cases of field scattering elsewhere in the world. The example most often discussed involves medieval English peasants, who tilled dozens of tiny scattered plots. To modern economic historians, that was “obviously” a bad idea because of the resulting wasted travel and transport time and inevitable unplowed strips between plots. A similar modern case of field scattering by Andean peasant farmers near Lake Titicaca, studied by Carol Goland, provoked development experts to write in exasperation, “The peasants’ cumulative agricultural efficiency is so appalling…that our amazement is how these people even survive at all…. Because inheritance and marriage traditions continually fragment and scatter a peasant’s fields over numerous villages, the average peasant spends three-quarters of his day walking between fields that sometimes measure less than a few square feet.” The experts proposed land-swapping among farmers in order to consolidate their holdings.

But Goland’s quantitative study in the Peruvian Andes showed that there really is method to such apparent madness. In the Cuyo Cuyo district, the peasant farmers whom Goland studied grow potatoes and other crops in scattered fields: on the average 17 fields, up to a maximum of 26 fields, per farmer, each field with an average size of only 50 by 50 feet. Because the farmers occasionally rent or buy fields, it would be perfectly possible for them in that way to consolidate their holdings, but they don’t. Why not?

A clue noticed by Goland was the variation in crop yield from field to field, and from year to year. Only a small part of that variation is predictable from the environmental factors of field elevation, slope, and exposure, and from work-related factors under the peasants’ control (such as their effort in fertilizing and weeding the field, seed density, and planting date). Most of that variation is instead unpredictable, uncontrollable, and somehow related to the local amount and timing of rain for that year, frosts, crop diseases, pests, and theft by people. In any given year there are big differences between yields of different fields, but a peasant can’t predict which particular field is going to produce well in any particular year.

What a Cuyo Cuyo peasant family has to do at all costs is to avoid ending up at the end of any year with a low harvest that would leave the family starving. In the Cuyo Cuyo area, farmers can’t produce enough storable food surpluses in a good year to carry them through a subsequent bad year. Hence it is not the peasant’s goal to produce the highest possible time-averaged crop yield, averaged over many years. If your time-averaged yield is marvelously high as a result of the combination of nine great years and one year of crop failure, you will still starve to death in that one year of crop failure before you can look back to congratulate yourself on your great time-averaged yield. Instead, the peasant’s aim is to make sure to produce a yield above the starvation level in every single year, even though the time-averaged yield may not be highest. That’s why field scattering may make sense. If you have just one big field, no matter how good it is on the average, you will starve when the inevitable occasional year arrives in which your one field has a low yield. But if you have many different fields, varying independently of each other, then in any given year some of your fields will produce well even when your other fields are producing poorly.

To test this hypothesis, Goland measured the yields of all the fields of 20 families—488 individual fields in all—in each of two successive years. She then calculated what each family’s total crop yield, pooled over all their fields, would have been if, while still cultivating the same total field area, they had concentrated all their fields at one of their actual locations, or if instead they had scattered their fields at 2, 3, 4, etc. up to 14 different ones of the actual locations. It turned out that, the more numerous were the scattered locations, the lower was the calculated time-averaged yield, but also the lower was the risk of ever dropping below the starvation yield level. For instance, a family that Goland labeled family Q, which consisted of a middle-aged husband and wife and a 15-year-old daughter, was estimated to need 1.35 tons of potatoes per acre of land per year in order to avoid starvation. For that family, planting at just a single location would have meant a high risk (37%!) of starving in any given year. It would have been no consolation to family Q, as they sat starving to death in a bad year such as arrives about once in every three years, to reflect that that choice of a single location gave them the highest time-averaged yield of 3.4 tons per acre, more than double the starvation level. Combinations of up to six locations also exposed them to the risk of occasional starvation. Only if they planted seven or more locations did their risk of starvation drop to zero. Granted, their average yield for seven or more locations had dropped to 1.9 tons per acre, but it never dropped below 1.5 tons per acre, so they never starved.

On the average, Goland’s 20 families actually planted two or three more fields than the number of fields that she calculated that they had to plant in order to avoid starvation. Of course, that field scattering did force them to burn more calories while walking and transporting things between their scattered fields. However, Goland calculated that the extra calories thereby burned up were only 7% of their crop calorie yields, an acceptable price to pay for avoiding starvation.

In brief, through long experience, and without using statistics or mathematical analyses, Goland’s Andean peasants had figured out how to scatter their land just enough to buffer them against the risk of starvation from unpredictable local variation in food yields. The peasants’ strategy fits the precept “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Similar considerations probably also explain field scattering by medieval English peasants. The same considerations may explain why the Lake Titicaca peasants so harshly criticized by exasperated agricultural development researchers for appalling inefficiency were actually smart, and why it was actually the researchers’ land-swapping advice that was appalling. As for my New Guinea friend whose isolated garden several miles from his other gardens initially puzzled me, his people mentioned five reasons for scattering their gardens: to reduce the risks of all their gardens simultaneously being devastated by a wind-storm, crop disease, pigs, or rats, and to obtain a wider variety of crops by planting at three different elevations in different climatic zones. Those New Guinea farmers are similar to Goland’s Andean farmers, except for planting fewer but larger gardens (on the average, 7 gardens with a range from 5 to 11 for the New Guineans, instead of 17 fields with a range from 9 to 26 for the Andean farmers).

Far too many American investors forget the difference, recognized by peasant farmers around the world, between maximizing time-averaged yields and making sure that yields never drop below some critical level. If you are investing money that you are sure you won’t need soon, just to spend in the distant future or for luxuries, it’s appropriate to aim to maximize your time-averaged yield, regardless of whether yields become zero or negative in occasional bad years. But if you depend on your investment earnings to pay current expenses, your strategy should be that of the peasants: make sure that your annual earnings always remain above the level necessary for your maintenance, even if that means having to settle for a lower time-averaged yield. As I write these lines, some of the smartest investors in the United States are suffering the consequences of ignoring that difference. Harvard University has the largest endowment, and has had the highest time-averaged endowment earnings rate, of any American university. Its endowment managers became legendary for their skill, success, and willingness to explore profitable types of investments previously shunned by conservative university investment managers. The salary of a Harvard manager was linked to the long-term average growth rate of the portion of Harvard’s portfolio for which that manager was responsible. Unfortunately, Harvard’s investment income is not reserved for luxuries or a rainy day but contributes about half of the operating budget of Harvard College. During the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008–2009, Harvard’s endowment principal and income crashed, as did so many other investments aimed at maximizing long-term yields, so Harvard was forced to impose a hiring freeze and to postpone indefinitely its billion-dollar plan for a new science campus. In retrospect, Harvard’s managers should have followed the strategy practised by so many peasant farmers (Plate 45).

Seasonality and food shortage

We have been discussing how traditional peoples cope with the danger of starvation arising from unpredictable fluctuations in food supply. Of course, there are also predictable seasonal fluctuations. Inhabitants of the temperate zones are familiar with the differences between spring, summer, fall, and winter. Even today, when food storage and long-distance food transport have evened out most seasonal variation in food availability in supermarkets, local fresh fruits and vegetables still become available on a predictable schedule. For example, near my home in Los Angeles is a farmers’ market that stocks only locally grown seasonal produce, such as asparagus in April and May, cherries and strawberries in May and June, peaches and apricots in June and July, squashes from July through January, and persimmons from October through January. In the temperate zones of North America and Eurasia, availabilities of other foods besides fresh fruits and vegetables also used to fluctuate seasonally, until modern storage and transport eliminated the fluctuations. There was an abundance of meat in the fall, when farm animals were culled and slaughtered; of milk in the spring and summer, when cows and sheep gave birth; of fish such as salmon and herring, which have predictable times of fish runs up rivers and along the coast; and of hunted migratory wild animals such as reindeer and bison at certain seasons.

As a result, some months of the temperate-zone year were times of plenty, and other months were predictable lean times when people knew that stored food might run out and that they would at least have to tighten their belts and at worst risk starvation. For the Greenland Norse, that lean season came each year at the end of winter, when they were close to eating up the cheese, butter, and dried meat stored from the previous year, but when their cows and sheep and goats had not yet given birth and so were not yet producing milk, the herds of migratory harp seals had not yet arrived along the coast, and the resident common seals had not yet landed on beaches to give birth. It appears that the inhabitants of one of Norse Greenland’s two settlements all starved to death at the end of such a winter around 1360.

Americans, Europeans, and other residents of the temperate zones tend to assume that tropical regions, especially near the equator, lack seasonality. While temperature is of course much less variable from month to month in the tropics than in the temperate zones, most tropical areas do have marked wet seasons and dry seasons. For instance, the town of Pomio in Papua New Guinea lies only a few hundred miles south of the equator, is very wet (260 inches of rain a year), and receives 6 inches of rain even in the driest month. However, the wettest months at Pomio (July and August) are 7 times wetter than the driest months (February and March), and that has big consequences for food availability and living conditions at Pomio. Hence people resident at low latitudes or even on the equator face predictable lean seasons, just as do traditional temperate-zone peoples. In many cases that lean season falls during the local dry season, which variously comes during the months of September and October for the !Kung of the Kalahari and for the Daribi people in the hills of Papua New Guinea, December to February for Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo’s Ituri Forest, and January for the Kaulong people of New Britain. But some other low-latitude peoples experience instead a lean season during their wettest months, which are December to March for the Ngarinyin Aborigines of Northwest Australia, and June to August for the Nuer of the Sudan.

Table 8.2. Traditional food storage around the world

Traditional peoples dealt with predictable seasonal food shortages in three main ways: storing food, broadening their diet, and dispersing and aggregating. The first of these methods is routine in modern society: we store food in refrigerators, deep freezers, cans, bottles, and dried packages. Many traditional societies as well set aside food surpluses accumulated during a season of food abundance (such as fall harvest time in the temperate zones), and consumed that food during a season of food scarcity (such as temperate-zone winters). Food storage was practised by sedentary societies living in markedly seasonal environments with alternating seasons of food abundance and food deficits. It was uncommon among nomadic hunter-gatherers with frequent changes of camp, because they couldn’t carry much food with them (unless they had boats or dog-drawn sleds), and the risk of pilferage by animals or other humans made it unsafe for them to leave food unguarded at one camp and to plan to return later. (However, some hunter-gatherers, such as Japan’s Ainu, Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, the Great Basin Shoshone, and some Arctic peoples, were sedentary or seasonally sedentary and stored large quantities of food.) Even among sedentary peoples, some living in small family groups stored little food because they were too few to defend a larder against raiders. Food storage was more widespread in cold temperate regions than in the hot wet tropics, where food spoils quickly. Table 8.2 gives examples.

The main practical problem to be overcome in storing food is to prevent the food from rotting through decomposition by microorganisms. Because microbes, like all other living creatures, require mild temperatures and water, many methods of food storage involve keeping food cold (not an option in the tropics before the development of refrigerators) or else drying food. Some foods are sufficiently low in water content in their natural form that they can be stored for months or even years, as is or else after just light drying. Those foods include many nuts, cereals, some roots and tubers such as potatoes and turnips, and honey. Most of those foods are stored in containers or larders built for the purpose, but many root crops can be “stored” or banked by the simple method of leaving them in the ground for months until they are required.

However, many other foods, such as meat and fish and juicy fruits and berries, have sufficiently high water content that they require extensive drying by means such as placing them on racks in the sun or smoking them over fires. For instance, smoked salmon, now a delicate luxury, used to be a staple prepared in large quantities by Pacific Northwest Coast Indians. Dried bison meat, combined with fat and dried berries to store as a mixture known as pemmican, was similarly a staple on the North American Great Plains. Andean Indians dried large quantities of meat, fish, potatoes, and oca by freeze-drying (alternately freezing and sun-drying).

Still other dried foods are obtained by taking a moist raw starting-material and extracting the nutritious component without most of the original water. Familiar modern examples of such foods are olive oil made from olives, cheese made from milk, and flour made from wheat. Traditional Mediterranean peoples, Eurasian herders, and Eurasian farmers respectively have been preparing and storing those same products for thousands of years. Rendering fat to extract it in a form with low water content was widely practised by Maori bird hunters of New Zealand, Native American bison hunters, and Arctic hunters of marine mammals. Pacific Northwest Coast Indians rendered fat from a species of smelt so oily that its English name is candlefish because when dried the fish can be burned like a candle. The staple food of the New Guinea lowlands is sago starch, obtained by extracting the starch from the pith of sago palms. Polynesians and Japan’s Ainu similarly extracted starch from roots, as did the Great Basin Shoshone Indians from mesquite pods.

Numerous other methods of food preservation didn’t involve drying. A simple method in Arctic and northern European areas with sub-zero winter temperatures was to freeze food in the winter and bury it in the ground or in subterranean ice-filled chambers where the food would remain frozen into the next summer. I stumbled upon a vestige of that practice when, as a university student at Cambridge, England, I went on a sight-seeing drive through the East Anglian countryside with British friends with whom I shared the hobby of spelunking (exploring caves). While we were chatting with a local land-owner, he invited us to see a strange building on his land whose purpose nobody understood. It proved to be a brick dome constructed of beautifully set courses of old brick, and with a locked door that our new acquaintance opened for us. Inside, we saw in front of us a brick-lined vertical hole 10 feet in diameter, with a wooden ladder disappearing into it, and so deep that we couldn’t see a bottom.

On the following weekend, we returned with our cave-explorers’ belaying ropes, acetylene torches, helmets, and single-piece overalls. Of course, we were hoping for a deep shaft, side galleries, and a forgotten treasure hoard. As the only American and the lightest member of our group, I was the one selected by my British friends to be the first to risk descending the rotting wooden ladder. To my disappointment, the ladder reached a dirt floor at a depth of only 30 feet, with neither side galleries, treasure, nor any other hint of function except for more beautiful courses of old brick. On my return to Cambridge that evening, I recounted our mysterious discovery over dinner. One of my table companions, an elderly engineer who spent his weekends taking walks through the countryside, exclaimed, “That’s obviously an ice-house!” He told me that such buildings used to be regular features of British estates until refrigerators began to supplant them in the late 19th century. They were excavated to a depth far below the warm surface soil layer, were filled with food and blocks of ice in the winter, and maintained food frozen into the next summer. The quantity of food that our re-discovered ice-house must have been capable of holding was huge.

Another traditional method of food preservation is to boil food so as to kill microbes, then to seal the container while it is still hot and sterile. As recently as World War II, American city-dwellers were urged by the United States government to spare food supplies for our soldiers by patriotically planting backyard victory gardens and storing the boiled produce in air-tight vacuum jars. In the house in Boston where I grew up, my parents maintained a basement room that my mother filled with jars of tomatoes and cucumbers harvested in the autumn, and that my parents and sister and I consumed throughout the winter. My childhood was repeatedly punctuated by explosions of the antiquated pressure cooker in which my mother boiled produce before jarring it, spraying vegetable mush over our kitchen ceiling. New Zealand Maoris similarly preserved meat by cooking it and transferring it still hot into containers sealed with melted fat that kept out microbes. Without knowing about microbes, Maoris somehow discovered this method.

The remaining class of methods preserves food without either drying or freezing or boiling, by pickling and/or fermenting with substances that prevent microbial growth. These substances include salt or vinegar added to the food, or else alcohol, vinegar, or lactic acid developing during fermentation of the food itself. Examples include beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages; the Korean staple of kimchee served with every Korean meal, and commonly including cabbage, turnips, and cucumbers fermented in brine; the fermented mare’s milk of Asian herders; Polynesia’s fermented taro and breadfruit; and the fermented fish of Kamchatka’s Itenm’i people.

Finally, one can achieve the purpose of storing surplus food by converting it into some non-food item that is convertible back into food during a subsequent hungry season. Farmers in our modern cash economy do this by selling their produce for money when they harvest or slaughter, banking the money, and eventually converting the money back into other foods at a supermarket. Pig husbandry by New Guinea Highlanders in effect constitutes food banking, because the staple Highland crop of sweet potatoes can be stored as is for only a few months. However, by feeding sweet potatoes to pigs and waiting several years before slaughtering the pigs, Highlanders bank the sweet potatoes, transform them into pig meat, and effectively preserve them for much longer than a few months.

Diet broadening

Another strategy besides food storage for coping with seasonal food scarcity is to broaden one’s diet and consume foods scorned during seasons of food plenty. In Chapter 6 I mentioned an example from Rennell Island, where people classify edible wild plants in two categories: those eaten normally, and those eaten only in desperation after a cyclone destroyed gardens. But Rennell Islanders usually obtain most of their plant food from gardens, and their classification of wild plants is not elaborate. Preferences for wild plant foods are classified much more finely among the !Kung, because traditionally they were hunter-gatherers and did not farm. They name at least 200 local wild plant species, of which they consider at least 105 edible, and which they divide along a preference hierarchy with at least six categories. Most preferred are plants that are superabundant, widely distributed, available in all months of the year, easy to collect, tasty, and considered nutritious. Number one in the hierarchy, because it meets all of these criteria, is the mongongo nut, which provides nearly half of all plant calories consumed by the !Kung and is rivaled in popularity only by meat. Lower in preference are plants that are scarce, found only locally, available only in certain months, unpleasant-tasting, hard to digest, or considered un-nutritious. When the !Kung move to a new camp, they begin by collecting mongongo nuts and their 13 other favorite plant species, until these become depleted in the vicinity. The !Kung then have to move down their food preference ladder and content themselves with less and less desirable foods. In the hot dry months of September and October, when the least food is available, the !Kung stoop to collecting fibrous tasteless roots that are ignored at other times of year, and that now are dug out and eaten without enthusiasm. About 10 species of trees exude edible resins that are rated low, considered hard to digest, and collected only incidentally as the occasion arises. At the bottom of the ladder are foods eaten only a few times a year, such as an abundant fruit thought to cause nausea and hallucinations, and meat from cows that died from eating toxic leaves. Lest you think that these food preference ladders of the !Kung are irrelevant to the lives of modern First World citizens, many Europeans adopted similar practices during the food shortages of World War II: for example, British friends told me of eating mice then, which they served up as creamed mouse.

Within 300 miles east of the !Kung, at population densities 100 times those of the !Kung, are Gwembe Tonga farmers. When the farmers’ crops fail, the farmers’ high numbers place much greater pressure on the environment’s wild plants than do the relatively few !Kung, and so the Tonga have to reach farther down the preference ladder than do the !Kung. They then consume 21 plant species that also occur in the !Kung area but that the !Kung don’t even consider edible. One of those plants is an acacia tree whose abundant seed pods are toxic. The !Kung could collect tons of those pods each year but choose not to. However, at times of famine the Tonga do collect them and soak, boil, and leach them for a day to wash out the toxins, then eat the pods.

My last example of diet broadening comes from the Kaulong people of the island of New Britain, for whom garden-grown taro is the staple food and pig meat is ceremonially important. What the Kaulong call taim bilong hanggiri in Tok Pisin (i.e., “time belong hunger”) is the local dry season of October through January, when little food is available from gardens. At that time the Kaulong go into the forest to hunt, collect insects and snails and small animals, and gather wild plants about which they are understandably unenthusiastic. One of those plants is a toxic wild nut that has to be prepared by soaking it for several days to leach out its poison. Another of those second-choice plants is a wild palm tree whose trunk is roasted and eaten, and which at other times of year is scorned as pig food.

Aggregation and dispersal

Along with food storage and diet broadening, the remaining traditional solution to the problem created by a predictable season of food scarcity is to follow an annual cycle of population movement, aggregation, and dispersal. When food resources are few and concentrated in a few areas, people gather to live at those areas. At favorable times of year when resources are widely and uniformly distributed, people spread out over the landscape.

A familiar European example is that farmers in the Alps spend the winter at their farmhouses in the valleys. In the spring and summer they follow the growth of new grass and the melting of snow cover up the mountain slopes, to take their flocks of cows and sheep to alpine pastures. Similar seasonal cycles of aggregation and dispersal occur among many other farming societies around the world, and among many hunter-gatherer societies including Aboriginal Australians, Inuit, Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, Great Basin Shoshone, !Kung, and African Pygmies. The times of population concentration during the lean season provide the opportunity for annual ceremonies, dances, initiations, marriage negotiations, and other occasions of group social life. The following two examples illustrate how these cycles unfold for the Shoshone and the !Kung.

The Great Basin Shoshone Indians of the western United States live in an extremely seasonal desert environment whose summers are dry and hot (day temperatures over 90° or even 100° Fahrenheit), winters are cold (temperatures often below freezing all day), and most of the low precipitation (under 10 inches per year) falls in the winter as snow. The main foods consumed during the winter, which is the season of food scarcity, are stored pine nuts and mesquite starch. In the fall people concentrate at pine groves to harvest, process, and store large quantities of nuts within a short time. Groups of between 2 and 10 related families then spend the winter in a camp at a nut grove with a source of water. In the spring, as warming temperatures bring a resumption of plant growth and animal activity, the camps break up into nuclear families that spread out over the landscape to higher and lower elevations. The widespread and varied food resources during the summer enable the Shoshone to expand greatly their diet: they forage for seeds, roots, tubers, berries, nuts, and other plant food; they gather grasshoppers, fly larvae, and other insect food; they hunt rabbits, rodents, reptiles, and other small animals, plus deer, mountain sheep, antelope, elk, and bison; and they fish. At the end of the summer they gather again at their pine groves and group winter camps. In another desert environment, this one in southern Africa, the !Kung similarly follow an annual cycle dictated by water availability and food resources dependent on water. They concentrate at the few permanent waterholes during the dry season, and spread out over 308 less reliable or seasonal water sources during the wet season.

Responses to danger

Finally, now that we’ve discussed traditional dangers and responses to those dangers, let’s compare actual measures of danger (in whatever way it is measured) with our responses (i.e., how much we worry about dangers, and how extensively we defend ourselves against them). A naive expectation might be that we are completely rational and informed, and that our reactions to various dangers are proportional to their seriousness as measured by the number of people that each type of danger actually kills or injures each year. This naive expectation isn’t upheld, for at least five sets of reasons.

First, the annual number of people killed or injured by a certain type of danger may be low precisely because we are so aware of it and go to such great efforts to minimize our risk. If we were fully rational, perhaps a better measure of danger than the actual annual number of deaths inflicted (easy to count up) would be the annual numbers of deaths that would have been inflicted if we hadn’t taken counter-measures (hard to estimate). Two examples stand out among those that we have discussed in this chapter. Few people in traditional societies normally die of famine, precisely because so many of a society’s practices are organized so as to reduce the risk of dying of famine. Few !Kung are killed each year by lions, not because lions aren’t dangerous, but instead because they are indeed so dangerous that the !Kung take elaborate measures to protect themselves against lions: don’t leave camp at night, constantly scan the environment for tracks and signs of lions while out of camp during the day, constantly talk loudly and travel in groups while women are out of camp, watch out for old or injured or hungry or solitary lions, and so on.

A second reason for the mismatch between actual danger and our acceptance of risk is a modified version of the Wayne Gretzky principle: our willingness to expose ourselves to danger increases steeply with the potential benefits from the dangerous situation. The !Kung drive lions off carcasses with meat on which to feast, but they don’t drive lions off resting places without carcasses. Most of us wouldn’t enter a burning house just for the fun of it, but would do so to rescue our child trapped in the house. Many Americans and Europeans and Japanese are now making agonizing reappraisals of the wisdom of building nuclear power stations, because on the one hand Japan’s Fukushima nuclear station accident emphasizes the dangers of nuclear power, and on the other hand those dangers are offset by the benefits of reducing global warming by reducing coal, oil, and gas power generation.

Third, people systematically misestimate risks—at least in the Western world, where psychologists have made extensive studies of the phenomenon. When Americans are asked about dangers today, they are likely first to mention terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear accidents, even though those three dangers combined have killed far fewer Americans over the last four decades combined than do cars, alcohol, or smoking in any single year. When Americans’ rankings of risks are compared with actual annual deaths caused (or with probability of death per hour of the risky activity), it turns out that people greatly overrate the risk of nuclear reactor accidents (ranked as the number-one danger by American college students and women voters), and also overrate the risks of DNA-based technologies, other new chemical technologies, and spray cans. Americans underrate the risks of alcohol, cars, and smoking, and (to a lesser extent) of surgery, home appliances, and food preservatives. Underlying these biases of ours are that we especially fear events beyond our control, events with the potential for killing lots of people, and situations involving new, unfamiliar, or hard-to-assess risks (hence our fear of terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear reactor accidents). Conversely, we are inappropriately accepting of old familiar risks that appear to be within our control, that we accept voluntarily, and that kill individuals rather than groups of people. That’s why we underrate the risks of driving cars, alcohol, smoking, and standing on step-ladders: we choose to do those things, we feel that we control them, and we know that they kill other people, but we think that they won’t kill us because we consider ourselves careful and strong. As Chauncey Starr expressed it, “We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.”

Fourth, some individuals accept, or even seek and enjoy, danger more than do other individuals. Such people include recreational skydivers, bungee-jumpers, compulsive gamblers, and race-drivers. Databases compiled by insurance companies confirm our intuitive sense that men seek out danger more than do women, and that male risk-seeking peaks in one’s twenties and then declines with age. I recently returned from a visit to Africa’s Victoria Falls, where the enormous one-mile-wide Zambezi River drops 355 feet into a narrow crack drained by an even narrower gorge into a pool (appropriately called the Boiling Pot) through which plunges the river’s entire volume. The roar of the falls, the blackness of the rock walls, the mist filling the entire crack and gorge, and the churning of the water below the falls suggest what the entrance to hell must be like, if there is a hell. Just over the Boiling Pot, the gorge is traversed by a bridge across which pedestrians can walk between the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe, whose border is formed by the river. From that bridge, tourists so inclined bungee-jump into the black, roaring, spray-filled gorge. As I watched the scene, I could not bring myself even to walk towards the bridge, and I reflected that I couldn’t have bungee-jumped there even if I were told that that was the only way to save the lives of my wife and children. But we were later visited by one of my son’s 22-year-old classmates, a young man named Lee, who did bungee-jump into that gorge, by plunging head-first off the bridge with a rope tied to his ankles. I was astonished at Lee’s voluntarily paying to do something so terrifying that I would have paid all my life’s savings in order to avoid doing it—until I reflected on some equally horrible experiences that I had chosen to undergo as a student cave-explorer at that same age of 22, when I was equally risk-seeking.

Finally, some societies are more tolerant of accepting risks than other, more conservative societies. Such differences are familiar among First World societies and have been observed among Native American tribes and among New Guinea tribes. Just to mention one current example: during recent military operations in Iraq, American soldiers have been described as more risk-taking than French and German soldiers. Speculative explanations for this difference include the lessons learned by France and Germany from the slaughter of almost 7,000,000 of their citizens during the two world wars in often foolishly risky military operations; and the founding of modern American society by emigrants from other lands who were willing to accept the risks of uprooting themselves to move to a strange new homeland, leaving behind risk-averse countrymen in their land of origin.

Thus, all human societies face dangers, although different types of dangers lie in store for peoples at different localities or with different lifestyles. I worry about cars and step-ladders, my New Guinea lowland friends about crocodiles and cyclones and enemies, and the !Kung about lions and droughts. Each society has adopted a spectrum of measures for mitigating the particular hazards that it recognizes. But we citizens of WEIRD societies don’t always think as clearly as we should about the dangers that we face. Our obsession with the dangers of DNA technologies and spray cans would better be focused on the homely hazards of cigarettes and cycling without helmets. Whether traditional peoples make similar misestimates of their lives’ dangers remains to be studied. Are we WEIRD moderns especially prone to misestimate risks because we get most of our information second-hand from television and other mass media that emphasize sensational but rare accidents and mass deaths? Do traditional peoples estimate risks more accurately because they instead learn only from the first-hand experiences of themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors? Can we learn to think more realistically about dangers?