1Hadza Honey
Lake Eyasi, Tanzania
It was April, the rainy season. Short downpours had brought pockets of colour to the greens and browns of the East African savannah as small delicate flowers bloomed. Nectar was becoming abundant and, with it, honey. I was with a group of Hadza hunters, a scattered population of just over one thousand people. The tribe has lived in the dry bush of northern Tanzania, near the shore of Lake Eyasi, for tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Now, fewer than two hundred Hadza live fully as hunter-gatherers, making them the last people in Africa to practise no form of agriculture. The group I was with had walked far away from the camp and deep into the bush, led by a young man named Sigwazi. As he walked, he whistled.
This wasn’t a melodious tune, more a series of angular ups and downs on a musical scale, each passage finished with a high-pitched twirl. To my ears there was no obvious musical pattern to follow but something in the bush was paying close attention to this whistle. Noticing movement above the trees, Sigwazi broke into a sprint, weaving through the scrub and around baobab trees as he continued the whistle. A wordless conversation was under way, an exchange between a human and a bird. Sigwazi looked towards the flutter of activity in the canopy, and there perched on a branch was an olive-grey bird the size of a starling.
Barring a few flashes of white on its tail, the bird looked plain and unassuming, but after a few more whistles from the hunter, it revealed itself to be exceptional. ‘Ach-ech-ech-ech’ came its reply to Sigwazi’s whistle, signalling that a deal was on. The bird had agreed to lead the hunter to honey hidden among the branches of the giant baobabs. These trees are as wide as they are tall, living for up to a thousand years, fed by a root system so deep that they can access water in periods of extreme drought. Finding a bees’ nest concealed among the baobab’s tall branches can take a hunter-gatherer several hours as they need to inspect tree after tree; with the assistance of a honeyguide, it takes a fraction of that time. The bird’s scientific name captures its talent perfectly: Indicator indicator.
Somehow, over hundreds of thousands of years, the two species, humans and honeyguides, found a way of sharing their different skills. The bird can find the bees’ nests but can’t get to the wax it wants to eat without being stung to death. Humans, meanwhile, struggle to find the nests, but armed with smoke can pacify the bees. Theirs is the most complex and productive of any partnership between humans and wild animals.
To reach the most isolated Hadza camps from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, involves an eighteen-hour drive by jeep. Their home is set among a patchwork of shrubs, rocks, trees and dust, a landscape occupied by humans for at least 2 million years. Looking out across the horizon of Hadza country, it’s possible to see human history in microcosm. Just a few miles north is Laetoli, the site where a group of our distant ancestors walked through wet volcanic ash and left behind the earliest known human footprints. Even closer is the Olduvai Gorge, the place where some of the oldest stone tools and hand axes have been discovered. Within walking distance is the saltwater expanse of Lake Eyasi, where human skeletons, 130,000 years old, have been excavated.
The Hadza are no proxy for our Stone Age relatives; they are thoroughly modern humans. But their foraging way of life is the closest we have to that of early Homo sapiens, and the Hadza diet offers the best insight into the foods that fuelled our evolution. I watched the Hadza follow trails that were impossible for me to see, and read the earth as if it was a much-loved book, knowing exactly where golden Congolobe berries were ripest and Panjuako tubers were at their thickest, where long-snouted bush pigs were likely to feed and when the squirrel-like hyrax might gather. They picked up on sounds I didn’t notice and paused to feel changes in the gentlest of breezes so they could approach animals undetected. It was still a month until the dry season, when the large game congregate around water, making them easier to find. For now, the easiest way of finding meat was to dig it out from underground, which is why earlier Sigwazi had lured a porcupine from its den beneath a baobab tree. The offal (the heart, liver and kidney) were eaten on the spot, cooked for moments on a makeshift fire, but the carcass was carried back to camp, and shared among the rest of the group. Meat, however, isn’t the Hadza’s favourite food. Honey is, which is why the conversation with the honeyguide is so valuable.
The collaboration between human and bird was chronicled by Portuguese missionaries in the 1500s, but it took until 2016 for outsiders to understand the conversation more fully. When a team of scientists walked through the savannah playing loops of different recordings, they discovered that the attention of the honeyguide wasn’t caught by just any human sound: the birds were listening out for specific phrases. In the case of the Yao people of Mozambique, this was ‘brrr-hm…’, whereas in northern Tanzania the birds responded to the twists and twirls of the Hadza’s whistles. These calls are passed down from one generation of hunter to another and, in each case, the researchers found, repeating the traditional phrases not only doubled the chance of being guided by a bird, but also tripled the chance of finding a bees’ nest and honey.
What makes this even more remarkable is that the honeyguide is a brood parasite; it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. More brutal than the cuckoo, the chicks use their sharp-hooked bills to dispatch their rivals as they hatch. How the bird learns the skill of conversing with the Hadza we still don’t know. One theory is that, just like the hunters, they are social learners; they watch and listen to their more experienced peers. It’s possible this inter-species conversation predates the arrival of Homo sapiens and reaches back a million years or more to our ancestors’ first use of fire and smoke. This idea is part of a compelling argument that it was honey and bee larvae, as much as meat, that made the human brain larger and helped us to outcompete all other species. Meat eating gets all the glory, the argument goes, because stone tools used in hunting turn up in the archaeological record, while evidence of eating honey does not. But there are plenty of other clues. Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – all eagerly gorge on honey and bee larvae, nature’s most energy-dense food. And in the earliest rock art discovered, inside caves in Spain, India, Australia and South Africa, there are depictions of honey collecting dating back at least 40,000 years.
But perhaps the most persuasive evidence of honey’s importance to human evolution is the diets of the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherers, including that of the Hadza. One-fifth of all of their calories across a year comes from honey, around half of which is the result of help from the honeyguide bird. The other half the Hadza can find themselves, as it comes from various species of bee that nest closer to the ground. Some are tiny, gnat-like and stingless, and produce a type of honey that is highly perfumed and delicately tangy. The Hadza find these nests by inspecting trees for the needle-sized tubes used by the bees to get inside the trunk. This type of honey, called kanowa or mulangeko in Hadzane (the Hadza’s language), comes in modest, snack-like portions, and is gathered by chopping into the colonised section of tree. But on this occasion Sigwazi and the honeyguide wanted more. Together they were going to find the honey and wax of the larger (and more aggressive) Apis mellifera scutellata, the African honeybee.
Sigwazi watched as the bird he had attracted with his whistle hovered above one of the baobabs. This signalled there was honey; now it was time for Sigwazi to start climbing. He was short (five feet tall at most), wiry and slim. I figured his physique was the reason he was the member of the group chosen to climb the tree, but I came to realise it was more a question of bravery. Sigwazi was the one least concerned about disturbing a bees’ nest, being stung or, worse still, falling thirty feet to the ground. He handed his bow and arrow to a fellow hunter, stripped off his ripped T-shirt and frayed shorts and removed the string of red and yellow beads from around his neck. By now almost naked, he started to chop up fallen branches with an axe and sharpen them into thin sticks. Baobabs are so soft and sponge-like that hunters can drive these pegs into their trunks with ease to create a makeshift ladder up towards the canopy. Swinging back and forth, Sigwazi made his way up the baobab, forcing a new peg in above his head as he climbed, clinging on, balancing and hammering all at once. As he neared the top of the tree another hunter climbed up behind and handed him a bunch of smouldering leaves. With these, Sigwazi closed in on the nest and immediately launched into a mid-air dance punctuated with high-pitched yelps. Bees were swarming around the honey thief and stinging as he scooped his hand into the nest and pulled out chunks of honeycomb. These rained down on the other Hadza hunters as Sigwazi tossed them below. They cupped their hands to their mouths and started to feast, spitting out pieces of wax as they ate, leaving behind warm melting liquid that tasted both sweet and sour, bright and acidic like citrus. As I joined them I could feel writhing larvae inside my mouth and the crunch of dead bees. The honeyguide bird perched silently nearby, waiting for its share of the raid once the crowd of hunters had gone.
When the rest of the honey was taken back to the camp, women gathered armfuls of baobab pods, each one the size of two cupped hands. With bare feet, they brought their heels down to open the pods with a crunch. Inside were clusters of kidney-shaped seeds coated in a white powdery pulp which tasted like effervescent vitamin C tablets. The seeds, pulp, water and a little honey were placed into a bucket and stirred into a whirlpool with a stick. When everything settled, it looked like a thick creamy soup. Each sip fizzed in the mouth. This, I was told, is a food Hadza babies are weaned on.
* * *
Someone who had watched this exact scene long before me, as a 23-year-old Cambridge student, was James Woodburn. In 1957, to complete his PhD, he travelled to Tanzania in search of Africa’s last hunter-gatherers. He followed two Italian ivory hunters tracking an elephant herd. Near Lake Eyasi, after the animals were killed and the tusks removed, Woodburn watched as Hadza hunters appeared out of the scrubland and into the clearing to take away the mountain of meat (elephants are the only big game that Hadza don’t hunt – they say their poison is not strong enough to kill them). Woodburn followed the hunters back to their camp and spent the next two years living alongside them. To survive Hadza country without Hadza skills, he brought in supplies of rice and lentils to add to the small amounts of wild food he managed to forage for himself.
Woodburn learned to speak Hadzane (his language skills had been honed as a military interpreter), and gained new insights that brought the Hadza to wider attention in the 1960s. This included work carried out with paediatricians, which showed how exceptionally well nourished Hadza children were compared with their contemporaries in nearby farming communities. During the six decades that have followed, Woodburn has returned to Hadza country on a regular basis, staying with the tribe, studying their way of life and recording how it has changed over time. Luckily for me, my visit to Hadza country coincided with one of his.
‘They have stayed as hunter-gatherers because it is a life that makes sense to them,’ Woodburn said as we sat by a campfire, the last of Sigwazi’s porcupine crackling as it cooked, ‘they regard it as a wonderful life.’ It’s a way of life that’s endured, he believes, largely because of the autonomy it brings; no Hadza has control over another, a fact made possible because of the abundance of wild food around them. Apart from the very young and the very old, everyone in the camp is self-sufficient, each skilled enough to feed themselves, even children as young as six. ‘Once this way of life stops making sense to them,’ Woodburn said, ‘it finally comes to an end.’
When Woodburn first met the Hadza, the outside world had stood at a distance. The foragers still didn’t know which country they lived in and their knowledge of what lay beyond Hadza country came largely from encounters with neighbouring tribes – the Iraqw, the Datoga and the Isanzu. With these pastoralists and farmers, the Hadza traded meat, skins and honey for millet, maize, marijuana and metal (to make axes and arrowheads). Other things they knew about the outside world had been passed down the generations, including stories of abductions of their forebears. Tanzania was at the centre of the East African slave trade until the middle of the nineteenth century, which was why the Hadza, until recently, always ran from strangers who appeared in the bush. But in the mid-1960s, there was no avoiding the world outside. Following independence from Britain, the Tanzanian government, encouraged by American missionaries, attempted to settle the Hadza in villages by force. Hunter-gatherers from remote bush camps were taken away in trucks to purpose-built villages, escorted by armed guards. Many became ill from infections and died. Within two years, most of those who had survived returned to their camps and to foraging. Efforts to settle and convert the Hadza, not only to Christianity but also to agriculture, have continued. And yet, against the odds, their hunter-gatherer way of life – the life that makes sense to them – has persisted. Now, though, a new set of forces is bearing down on the Hadza. Agriculture is spilling over into their land and products made by the global food industry have reached the camps. Woodburn said he hadn’t forseen the scale of these pressures on the Hadza. No one had.
* * *
One-third of the Earth’s land surface is now dedicated to food production – a quarter of this for crops, three-quarters for grazing animals – and farming’s expansion into the wild is continuing (nearly 4 million hectares of tropical rainforest are lost each year). Agriculture is reaching into parts of the world once thought impossible to be farmed. Among them, Hadza country. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, tens of thousands of hectares of land used by the Hadza was converted by outsiders into pasture for livestock or to grow crops each year. Along with it went some of the Hadza’s access to wild foods, including giant baobab trees that take hundreds of years to grow. Supplies of nutritious baobab pods were depleted, and so were sources of honey. In 2012, after years of campaigning, the Hadza were awarded rights of occupancy over 150,000 hectares of land, but this still didn’t stop the problem. Neighbouring tribes faced with water shortages caused by irrigation and climate change moved cattle closer to the Hadza’s camps and waterholes. The cattle ate the vegetation that brought in game and disrupted migration routes which meant there was less for the Hadza to hunt. Across the whole of Africa, two-thirds of the continent’s productive land is now at risk of becoming degraded, half of this severe enough to lead to desertification. The biggest cause is overgrazing of livestock.
The Hadza are ill-equipped to stop this encroachment; they have no possessions, no money and no leaders. They’re skilled hunters but they avoid conflict. Instead of confronting tribes arriving on their land, they move deeper into the bush. But even here, farmers edge ever closer, expanding pasture and planting sorghum and corn, though there’s barely enough water to irrigate crops. The Hadza have to contend with the effects of climate change too; they see its impact in the lack of water, disappearance of edible plants and decline in nectar and therefore quantity of honey they find. To survive, many rely on food from NGOs and missionaries. The last hunter-gatherers in Africa are being pinched from all sides.
* * *
A thirty-minute drive from Sigwazi’s honey hunting, we reached a crossing point where different tribes gather to take water from a newly installed pump. Here, they also visit a small mudbrick hut lit by a single light bulb that hangs from the corrugated roof. Inside, from floor to ceiling, are shelves stacked with cans of sugary sodas and packets of biscuits. We were hours from the nearest city, an enormous wilderness lay between us and the nearest road, and yet some of the biggest food and drink brands in the world had made it this far.
In the place where our ancestors first evolved, sugar in plastic bottles is replacing the sweetness of the food that helped to make us human, honey. Scientists who monitor birdlife in the savannah describe melancholy scenes of birds swooping down, calling ‘ach-ech-ech-ech’ in the hope of a reply, as their interaction with humans becomes rarer. The conversation between the two species, thousands, possibly millions of years in the making, may soon fall silent.
Encircling the mudbrick hut were newly planted fields of corn. I felt I could have been watching a film in which hundreds of thousands of years of human history was being played on fast-forward, from wild to farmed and from foraged to processed, bottled and branded.
2Murnong
Southern Australia
For as long as anyone could remember, there were only a couple of places left where foragers were guaranteed to find murnong, a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut. One was a cemetery on Forge Creek Road in the town of Bairnsdale, Victoria, where the plant’s bright yellow flowers could be seen clustered around gravestones; the other was along a nearby railway track, where a line of tall fences protected the bullet-sized root and its shoots from grazing animals. Before European invaders arrived in the eighteenth century, the grasslands and rocky hillsides of Victoria had been covered in these plants, a crop that grew so thick that from a distance it seemed to form a blanket of yellow.
The first humans to make the journey from the Afro-Asian land mass to Australia did so more than 60,000 years ago, and when they arrived, the plants and animals they found would have been alien to them. But just as the Hadza do today, these hunter-gatherers knew that, armed with digging sticks, a guaranteed supply of food could be found underground. Seeds, fruits and honey are seasonal, but roots and tubers are available all year round, and as the storage organs of plants, they’re energy-rich. In south-eastern Australia, the most important of these subterranean foods was murnong. For the tribes who lived here over tens of thousands of years, including the Wurundjeri, the Wathaurong, Gunditjmara and Jaara, the importance of this one root is hard to overstate. Without murnong, life in south-eastern Australia would have been precarious, perhaps impossible. But by the 1860s the food was as good as extinct, making its retreat into cemeteries and sidings, places where either the dead were resting or the living kept away, and knowledge of the plant was lost to generations of Aboriginal people.
In 1985, a botanist in her sixties, Beth Gott, marked out a plot of land at Monash University in Melbourne. It was to be a garden dedicated to Aboriginal wild plants. Gott had become interested in indigenous foods and medicines during fieldwork in the Americas and Asia, and on her return to Australia she embarked on the most thorough study of Aboriginal plant knowledge ever conducted. From her base at Monash, she catalogued more than a thousand different species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones picked from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks. After years of study, she concluded that one indigenous food in particular had been crucial to pre-colonial life in Australia. Some Aboriginal people called it the yam daisy, but most referred to it as murnong. Gott set out to find the plant in the wild, and grow it in her garden, but finding murnong wasn’t easy and uncovering its history was just as hard. So much knowledge had been lost, much of it through violence.
* * *
In the deserts of southern Australia, between 1953 and 1957, the British government exploded nuclear bombs, part of a series of missile tests that continued well into the 1960s. Clearing the area for these explosions involved patrols rounding up the remaining 10,000 or so Aboriginal hunter-gatherers who roamed the Western Desert. As a result, the last of Australia’s self-sufficient foragers were forced off their land and into the industrialised world. In other parts of the country, Aboriginal people had been moved off their land long before and confined to reservations. This latest clearance destroyed most of what was left of the living knowledge accumulated and practised over 60,000 years. In the 1980s, Gott set out to see if any of this knowledge had survived and to record it. If she could find some of the wild foods and medicinal plants, she would try to save those too.
Her source material, perhaps ironically, included the journals of the early colonists. The first reports sent back to Britain in 1770 by Captain James Cook and botanist Joseph Banks gave no information about the food eaten by the Aboriginal people or about anything that resembled a food culture, save for ‘small fires and fresh mussels broiling upon them’ and ‘vast heaps of the largest oyster shells I ever saw’. The impression Cook and Banks gave was that ‘the natives’ were few in number, nomadic and basically savages. But a few decades later, another Englishman told a different story. William Buckley was transported to Australia as a convict but escaped from Sullivan Bay in Victoria and ended up living with members of the Wathaurong tribe for thirty years. This so-called ‘wild white man’ told of surviving on a diet of wild meat and murnong and how ‘a man may live on the root for weeks’. In 1837, another settler described the tribe’s diet consisting of the ‘meat of the country when they can kill it, but chiefly roots’.
As she uncovered more documents, Beth Gott built up a picture of murnong’s presence in the open spaces and woodlands of southern Australia, where it grew in the ‘millions’. In 1841, George Augustus Robinson wrote how murnong was picked by women ‘spread over the plain as far as I could see them … each had a load as much as she could carry’. Edward Curr, a Yorkshireman who settled in Australia in the 1820s, described the ‘yams as so abundant and so easily procured that one might have collected in an hour, with a pointed stick, as many as would have served a family for the day’.
There are images too. In the State Library of Victoria are hundreds of sketches made by a nineteen-year-old settler called Henry Godfrey, who arrived in Australia in 1843. Women gathering murnong shows two central figures against the backdrop of a forest canopy. Long cloaks and small sacks hang from their shoulders. One of the foragers is holding a hatchet which is about to be sunk into the ground to break the earth. The other has a stick in hand ready to dig. It’s a joyful scene; children are playing with dogs as others sit around relaxing among the trees, arms raised, animated as they talk and gather food.
* * *
Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the swollen tubers can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots. When broken, every part of the plant exudes a milky liquid that leaves fingers stained. Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape. From the journals and diaries, it was clear Aboriginal people were aware of this, which is why some argue they should be considered the world’s earliest farmers.
Fire also played a role. The plant needs direct sunlight, and so in the dry season Aboriginal people would set the bush alight. They did this with precision, knowing exactly when and where to start a fire, and where the fire would end. This cleared away dead vegetation, but left murnong, with its tubers underground, unharmed. Harvesting was also easier in this open ground, and the ash left from the fire fertilised the soil. With this technique, a patchwork of murnong was created across south-eastern Australia. Beth Gott was ridiculed in the 1980s for researching Aboriginal fire techniques, but by January 2020, the world had caught up with her. Vast tracts of Australia burned in the worst bush fires in living memory, 11 million hectares of land scorched, thousands of homes destroyed, and tens of people killed. In the Aboriginal communities, in which people knew how to fight fire with fire, the damage was less severe; lighting hundreds of small fires during the year had tamed the undergrowth and prevented bigger fires from taking hold.
Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts in which reed baskets filled with murnong, stacked three feet high, were cooked over fire. These sweet, nutritious roots were eaten with seeds, shellfish and possum. The only time of year when this didn’t happen was winter, when the tubers were less succulent and often tasted bitter. But across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never-ending.
Copyright © 2021 by Dan Saladino
Copyright © 2023 by Dan Saladino