Hadza

I kødet ligger de største tabuer i antropologien: man må ikke ligge med sit eget kød (incestforbud), og man må ikke spise sit eget kød (kannibalisme). Navnkundige tænkere i antropologien som Claude Lévi-Strauss og Marshall Sahlins anfører i deres analyser om tabuer, at der er god grund til, at disse opstod. Det kræver markante tiltag, hvis det at kigge indad, at lade sig nære af det, man allerede har, og det, der skabes indenfor gruppen, skal brydes. Tabuer er i den forbindelse nogle af de stærkeste tiltag, vi har. Incest-og kannibalismetabuerne tilskynder til og nødvendiggør udveksling. Vi er ikke nok i os selv, synes disse universelle tabuer at hviske eller banke ind i os. Du skal vende blikket udad, du skal konfrontere og konfronteres af det, der ikke er dig. Det er det, denne artikel handler om: Med hadza, en gruppe jæger-samlere i Nordtanzania, som case, vil vi se på tabuer, deling af kød og det at møde sin "signifikante anden" for at dele sig selv. Vi lader ideen om incest ligge for nu, men holder fast i kannibalismen og i kødet. Artiklen vil handle om kød som jagtbytte, kød som spise, kød som genstand for deling (sharing), kød som relateret til tabuer og kød med sjæl. Og på en eller anden måde vil det handle om en gruppes aktive modværge mod kannibalisme, at kollektivet kan se sig selv i øjnene og en vedvarende kamp for samfundets fortsatte genskabelse.

The Hadza are one of the last true hunter-gatherers in the world, and there is a great deal we can learn about early human behavior and culture by studying their modern-day ways of life. In this brief paper, we will look at an overview of some key points of their culture, and how they relate to others today.

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We review the history of rock art research in Kondoa District, Tanzania, specifically the area covered by the ‘Kondoa Rock Art Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site’. We examine why, after nearly a century of research, there is neither a broadly agreed upon stylistic sequence for the rock art of the area nor a clear ascription of authorship. We seek to provide a solution to this impasse by introducing a rigorous and systematised analytical approach that considers both the content of the art and the location in which it was situated. The findings of our analysis, as presented here, demonstrate three clearly identifiable traditions of art, each with elements of overlap and borrowing. We provide an evidence based ascription of authorship to each tradition that confirms the ethnic complexity of the settlement of this area and lays the foundation for future studies of rock art interpretation and cultural interaction.

The transition to farming is often written in the language of progress. The search has been for the oldest sedentary farming settlements, the processes of plant and animals domestication and the profound societal alterations that accompanied the choice to change lifeway. Perhaps because most of us come from long-standing farmer ancestry, we tend to assume that farming is a superior and more secure way of life. Is there any data to support this? Evidence from southern Africa since the 1970s has shown that the Kalahari hunter-gatherers living in what is a comparatively harsh environment have/had a relatively easier life, with considerably more leisure time and a longer life expectancy than those living in early farmer groups (Lee and DeVore, 1976). Many hunter-gatherers in East Asia will have had even more comfortable and leisure filled lives than those of the Kalahari Bushmen. It is therefore important to ask the question as to why East Asian hunter-gatherers took up farming and whether all hunter-gatherer groups made this choice swiftly and willingly. I use evidence from studies into hunter-gatherer interactions with farmers in sub-saharan Africa to consider this question. It was originally hoped that groups such as the Bushmen of southern Africa, the Pygmies of central Africa and the Hadza/Sandawe of East Africa could give us glimpses into a universal hunter-gatherer past. Revisionist studies since the 1970s have sought to undermine this hope and have emphasised that early research recorded the end product of at least two millennia of interaction, influence and change from being amongst pastoralists and farmers. Archaeology has made significant contributions to this debate, providing evidence for the nature and extent of interaction, continuity and change. Today we are therefore well-positioned to consider the specifics of how hunter-gatherer groups responded to the coming of livestock keepers and farmers in different parts of Africa. This paper will review African interaction models so as to consider their implications for East Asia. I do not provide a general model for interaction, indeed I would be ideologically opposed to any attempt at this kind of universalism, but I seek to provide a convincing glimpse of the kinds of real-world complexity and contextuality in the choices made by East Asian hunter-gatherers in their responses to the presence and influence of farmers.

Thea Skaanes worked with Hadza in northern Tanzania. She takes us to three specific material objects – what she calls power objects – belonging to individual Hadza women. She argues that these objects cannot be assessed adequately within a discourse of property and socio-economic value. Instead, she reveals how these objects are materializations of social relations, how they are entwined around identity and names, kinship, time, and ritual. The objects are linked to the spirit of women and their kin relations in the past and in the future. Skaanes argues that since there are conceptual intersections between objects and land, it is promising to look at land and places as materializations of social relations too. She illustrates this with the example of various mountains/gods within the Hadza homeland. Drawing on Appadurai (1996), she suggests comprehending land as different ‘scapes’, e.g. cosmoscapes, kinscapes, or transactionscapes, all of which im- ply social relations. Like the objects she analyzes in her chapter, the maps produced should also be inherently multiple, flexible, and shadowy. She imagines a hodological perspective – connecting kinship, places, and time – as a promising way forward. This kind of mapping, in her view, would allow us a look at the land from within, from the point of view of its inhabitants.

This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.

Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.

Through human microbiome sequencing, we can
better understand how host evolutionary and ontogenetic
history is reflected in the microbial function.
However, there has been no information on the gut
metagenome configuration in hunter-gatherer populations,
posing a gap in our knowledge of gut microbiota
(GM)-host mutualism arising from a lifestyle
that describes over 90% of human evolutionary history.
Here, we present the first metagenomic analysis
of GM from Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania,
showing a unique enrichment in metabolic pathways
that aligns with the dietary and environmental factors
characteristic of their foraging lifestyle. We found
that the Hadza GM is adapted for broad-spectrum
carbohydrate metabolism, reflecting the complex
polysaccharides in their diet. Furthermore, the Hadza
GM is equipped for branched-chain amino acid
degradation and aromatic amino acid biosynthesis.
Resistome functionality demonstrates the existence
of antibiotic resistance genes in a population with little
antibiotic exposure, indicating the ubiquitous
presence of environmentally derived resistances.
Our results demonstrate how the functional specificity
of the GM correlates with certain environment
and lifestyle factors and how complexity from the
exogenous environment can be balanced by endogenous
homeostasis. The Hadza gut metagenome
structure allows us to appreciate the co-adaptive
functional role of the GM in complementing the human
physiology, providing a better understanding
of the versatility of human life and subsistence.

The Cascade Wildlife Monitoring Project uses trained volunteers to monitor the location and movement of wildlife, through snow tracking surveys, in the vicinity of proposed wildlife crossing structures along Interstate-90 in the Washington Cascades between Snoqualmie Pass and Easton. The first field season was successful in meeting multiple objectives: collecting an initial data set on existing wildlife along the interstate; training and utilizing approximately 50 volunteers to carry out a rigorous data collection protocol; and creating a structure for ongoing citizen monitoring of wildlife over time before and after highway construction activities. Nearly all expected common mammal species predicted in the study area were detected, while no rare, threatened, or endangered species were noted. Recommendations for next season include: expanding tracking surveys to non-snow seasons, making minor adjustments to field protocols, adding of a control transect, and minor adjustments to volunteer coordination and training.

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research. The first two issues have both been very successful, as shown by the number of downloads. Back to Kinship I (Read and El Guindi 2013) has had a total of 2,696 download since it was published in 2013, which is an average of 207 downloads per article and an average of 385 downloads per year. Back to Kinship II (El Guindi and Read 2016) has had a total of 2,405 downloads since it was publication in 2016, which is an average of 172 downloads per article and an average of 601 downloads per year. These numbers reflect the ongoing intense interest in kinship research worldwide. These two issues of Back to Kinship focus on the challenges facing kinship research that began to appear in the 1970s, and on the impact these challenges have had on kinship research. As El Guindi (2020:42) puts it in her just published book, ongoing kinship research has confronted "trivializing or dismissive attempts and unfounded claims which diminish the importance of the kinship phenomenon." El Guindi continues: "The history of anthropology has shown that kinship knowledge is integral to the cultural knowledge humans acquire and generate, about what constitutes 'social universe' and what it means to be a relative. A complex notion of society and culture is unique to humans… and is irreducible to a simplistic transmission of traits or an assumed overarching tradition of nurture" (p. 42). She goes on to describe how kinship study today "involves revisiting old issues with fresh data or generating new models to provide new insights while creatively building bridges with different disciplines which would enhance the conceptualization of kinship" (p. 42).

It is widely believed that there is strong association between physiological stress and an individual's social status in their social hierarchy. This has been claimed for all humans cross-culturally, as well as in non-human animals living in social groups. However, the relationship between stress and social status has not been explored in any egalitarian hunter-gatherer society; it is also under investigated in exclusively female social groups. Most of human evolutionary history was spent in small, mobile foraging bands of hunter-gatherers with little economic differentiation-egalitarian societies. We analysed women's hair cortisol concentration along with two domains of women's social status (foraging reputation and popularity) in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza. We hypothesized that higher social status would be associated with lower physiological indicators of stress in these women. Surprisingly, we did not find any association between either foraging reputation or popularity and hair cortisol concentration. The results of our study suggest that social status is not a consistent or powerful predictor of physiological stress levels in women in an egalitarian social structure. This challenges the notion that social status has the same basic physiological implications across all demographics and in all human societies.

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Hunted meat is a cherished food for both bellies and thought among the hunting and gathering Hadza. It is festive, celebrated, and in poetics, it is metaphorically associated with sex. Like sex, it is both ordinary, mundane yet also celebrated and extraordinary.
Unfolding big game hunt and meat-sharing among the Hadza, we find aspects of esotericism in combination with the mundane. “If gifts make friends, friends make gifts”, Marshall Sahlins (1972) wrote. Yet, if we consider the ethics of sharing, we might ask what the means of sharing look like in practice, and what the ends of such transactions are? The Hadza have provided scholars with insights on egalitarian meat-sharing, demand- sharing, immediate-return systems, and how to live a society where accumulation is regarded as anti-social, as indeed unethical. Yet, accumulation occurs with the big game hunt, but why, then, is the surplus shared and not exchanged? With this paper, we ask what relations are established with meat sharing? What are the social and esoteric relations in an ecology of human and non-human persons sharing meat-matter? Sharing meat is profoundly anchored in ethics and with ideas of prosperity, collective regeneration and for carving out a shared future.

Aninvestigation of the impact of change innatural resource use inHadza livelihood:a case of Eyasi basinThomas Reuben MollelMaster of Science (NaturalResources Assessment and Management)University of Dar es Salaam, Institute of Resources Assessment, 2016This  study  intended  to  investigate  the  impact  of  change  in  natural  resources  use  in Hadza livelihood for the period 1980 to 2014. The study involved Domanga, Mongo wa Mono  and  Quang’dend  villages  in  Mbulu  and  Karatu  Districts,  respectively. Participatory  approaches  were  used  to  obtain  data  for  this  research.  Household interviews, wealth ranking, transect walk and observation were used to obtain data. The data collected were analyzed using SPSS and Excel programmes.  Findings showed that the  natural  habitats  of  the  Hadza  were  undergoing  fast  changes  now  than  at  any  other time  in  history  which  brings  both  negative  and  positive  changes  to  the  Hadza communities.    This  was  mainly  evidenced  by  increase  of  farms  and  grazing  in traditional hunter-gatherer areas. In Domanga the area settled and cultivated comprised 10%  of  all  land  and  that  in  Quang’dendwas  7%.  This  indicated  a  great  decline  in natural  fruits,  roots,  tubers,  berries  and  wild  animals  which  are  the  major  sources  of food  for  the  Hadza.  Many  water  sources  had  also  dried  out  due  to  increase  in  use  for irrigation  and  for  domestic  use  in  the  growing  human  settlements.  There  was  a noticeable  change  in  the  livelihood  of  the  Hadza  in  Mbulu  District  where  many  had started to diversify their  livelihood by doing some farming and keeping livestock such as  poultry,  and  engaging  in  ecotourism.  In  Karatu District  the  Hadza  were  forced  to change  their  livelihood  due  to  marginalization  by  other  communities  which  deprived them  of  their  natural  food  sources  and  water.  Within  this  process  many  Hadza  had become  impoverished  and  others  had  resorted  to  untraditional  behaviour  of  heavy drinking,  increased  social  conflicts  and  even  starvation.  This  research  recommends meaningful effort from the government and relevant NGOs should be made to help the Hadza  transform  safely  to  modern  livelihoods  while  at  the  same  time granting  them rights to some of their ancestral lands.

The MIRC is a miniaturized multimodal interaction recorder for children which has been designed for a research project on communication development in Hadza hunter-gatherer infants in Tanzania. It records physiological arousal, the distance of major caregivers and interactional partners (who wear a related device), the general whereabouts of the child using a relative GPS and the vocalizations infants make and the audio input they experience (though the speech is not intelligible for privacy reasons). It has been developed from similar devices that have been used successfully in ornithological studies at the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen over the last years.

The background of developing the MIRC was that by observing infants interacting with their environment, we have no information about the processes that happen inside the child. Arousal, particularly the level of arousal, plays a role in learning. However, physiological measurements on infants have mainly been dependent on lab situations. A small, wearable device is particularly necessary when working with infants and in the field. The use of the wearable device allows the researcher to learn from infants’ interaction and communication without disturbing these processes or the natural environment in which they live.

The MIRC was developed to make physiological measurements possible in real life situations instead of a laboratory setting. Additionally, by using one device instead of several that are commercially available (e.g. to make audio recordings such as the LENA Pro or measure physiological activity like the Sproutling) the information is synchronized and can be analyzed in relation to each other. Moreover, the MIRC is smaller than the multiple devices that the infants would have to wear otherwise and can be adjusted to a wide age range. The MIRC is as small as a flash drive and is built into a holster that the infants wear. This enables the infants to move and interact freely, which facilitates the measurement while reducing the child’s discomfort in the situation.

The MIRC is a logger and the data is recorded on a micro SD chip. The device is powered by 3 AAA batteries. The transmitter has been adjusted to very close communication, therefore the output power (-20 dBm) of the radio is extremely low: 200 000 times lower than that of a mobile phone. The electrodes for picking up the signal for the heart rate is realized like a common heart rate chest strap. These are widely available for adults to measure their heart rate during exercise but not available for infants, as far as we know.

First experiences using the MIRC in the field with Hadza infants will be presented here.

We are not a classic pair-bonded species. We are not a polygamous, tournament species either…. What we are, officially, … is a tragically confused species. (Robert Sapolsky) Robert Sapolsky is spot on with his observations. Studies show that the proportion of mostly monogamous vs promiscuous people is roughly 50:50, with men only having a slightly higher disposition towards promiscuity. Some researchers have interpreted this as two relatively stable evolutionarily stable strategies or bifurcating equilibria. However, there is more to this story. Different equilibria may well be caused by different evolutionary environments. The connection between promiscuity and caddishness may be obvious for us, but it is wellgrounded in life-history strategy (formerly known as r/K-selection). Species with shorter life histories invest more in mating effort than in parenting effort (e.g. rats), whereas it is the other way round with species with longer life histories (e.g. elephants). As far as homo sapiens is concerned, we couldn't be much more K-selected. Most of us take care of our offspring for 20+ years.

Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research. There are 5 articles in this Special Issue, covering a wide range of kinship research questions and topics The first two articles, by William Young and Warren Shapiro, respectively, employ ethnographic evidence as to the reason for revising previous kinship ideas. The next two articles, by Robert Parkin and Dwight Read, respectively, focus on kinship terminology and revisit theoretical issues. The last article, by Alain Matthey de l’Etang, discusses theorizing by Dwight Read challenging the “received view” of kin terms being derived through a genealogical framework and proposing, in its place, that kin terms are structurally organized through a generative logic for the terminology

It is widely believed that there is strong association between physiological stress and an individual's social status in their social hierarchy. This has been claimed for all humans cross-culturally, as well as in nonhuman animals living in social groups. However, the relationship between stress and social status has not been explored in any egalitarian hunter-gatherer society; it is also under investigated in exclusively female social groups. Most of human evolutionary history was spent in small, mobile foraging bands of huntergatherers with little economic differentiationegalitarian societies. We analysed women's hair cortisol concentration along with two domains of women's social status (foraging reputation and popularity) in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza. We hypothesized that higher social status would be associated with lower physiological indicators of stress in these women. Surprisingly, we did not find any association between either foraging reputation or popularity and hair cortisol concentration. The results of our study suggest that social status is not a consistent or powerful predictor of physiological stress levels in women in an egalitarian social structure. This challenges the notion that social status has the same basic physiological implications across all demographics and in all human societies.