Page 63 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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roots for brewing arrow poison. These are carried by the women,
while the oldest man bears the masks and monkeys’ tails and
paints which are rather more important than the weapons in en­

suring hunting luck. And the whole party moves off, naked and
in high humor, through the thorn scrub.
Throughout the warm lands the picture is much the same.

In the rain forests of the Congo—and of the Amazon—different
animals are hunted, different plants and tubers and small game
collected. And the people have a different physiognomy and a

different language. But the day-to-day problems and the day-to-
day satisfactions are the same. In southern India and in Austra­

lia, and scattered throughout the chain of islands between them
(but not in New Zealand or the Pacific islands, which are still
unknown to man), recognizable cousins of the South African

bushmen live a recognizably similar life. But the great migration
that spread the Australoids across half the world is many many
thousands of years in the past. It has dropped from the recollec­

tion of man millennia ago, and now the scattered communities
know nothing of any land but their own. Their horizon is
bounded by the extent—admittedly widespread—of their own

hunting grounds, and each family group rarely meets even the
next group—though it is the rule that men must seek their women

outside the group.
We shall not meet these hunters of the tropics again in this
book. For them the coming millennium brought no basic change

in mode of life and except in rare cases no contact with the his­
tory we shall recount. But we should not forget that the hunters

are there all the time; that they occupy much of the world’s sur­
face and comprise much of the world’s population; and that while
better-documented events are occurring in Europe and in Hither

Asia, generation after generation of the hunters is being born,
and living, and dying. They are as entitled to their place in the

story of mankind as any literate citizen of Ur or of Thebes or of
Harappa.

No sun rises over the Arctic regions this first day of January
in the year 2000 b.c. But in the desolate lands looking out upon