Historical Significance of the Bushmen

The video above portrays the race known to the Western world as the Bushmen. The particular tribe they're following is the San, a tribe regionally, ethnically, and linguistically similar to the !Kung. While the video doesn't directly speak of the !Kung, it is still valuable in that the tribes are so similar that comparisons can be drawn.

If one subscribes to the Eastern Africa theory of evolution, then this video is a shocking glimpse into the origins of man. They have markers in their genes foreign to all other races making them the "root of the tree". Some say the Bushmen may date as far back as 60,000 years. Located in the Kalahari Desert, the sandy sea of isolation potentially preserved their culture for thousands of years. While this is making the bold and improbable assumption that the Bushmen haven't vastly changed, it still does provide a valuable contrast between the decisions of migrating south or north during the early stages of human development.

 For those that moved north, they became the other ethnic groups of the world. They evolved into the modern, space-traveling, skyscraper building, technological socialites that populate the vast majority of the world today, however. Those that moved south appear to have sustained themselves off of a stagnated hunter-gathering existence. It's interesting to think that this is how early humans survived. Think about this, you are related to them. Somewhere along the evolution tree we, as a whole, branched off from them. This has tremendous anthropological and historical significance; historians are always stuck looking at vague clues and deducing what might have been. With the Bushmen, historical anthropologists have a live show to the culture of early humans. They can actually see where we were as a species and truly appreciate how far we've come.

A lot of people will condescendingly look upon these people and say, "What a pity? How can they live like this?" I retort, how can you determine our way of life is better? How do you define a "good" life? By the number of years lived? By the number of Facebook posts you have? The fact of the matter is they've survived as long as we have and they'd probably outlive us if our atomic bombs didn't affect them.

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Source:

1) "The San Bushmen of South Africa."Bradshaw Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2012. <http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bushman/index.php