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When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was a young adult, her family traveled to southern Africa to study the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Based on her experiences there, she wrote The Harmless People, a book that has not been out of print since it was first published in 1959. In The Old Way, Thomas takes a fresh look at the people of the Kalahari – before the incursion of whites and other African people, before the Bushmen were forced from their old way of life into a modern and destructive world, before the end of their culture as she saw it in the 1950’s.
The Bushmen, or San, as some call them, were hunter-gatherers, who lived in harmony with their natural surroundings. As part of the ecosystem of this hot, dry land, they neither disturbed nor damaged the land, and so they lived there for tens of thousands of years. Thomas and her family, then, witnessed what was the longest surviving culture humankind has ever experienced, one of 50,000 years or more in age.

Thomas, the author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, Tribe of Tiger, Reindeer Moon, and Animal Wife, is always respectful of the people whom she is studying. As she reveals their way of life to us, she connects their strategies for survival with how all of our ancestors must have lived in those distant years of our development into the people we are today.

Reindeer Moon and Animal Wife, both novels of prehistoric times, ring with authenticity, and no wonder. Thomas based her novels on what she had observed of actual hunter-gatherer societies.

Her anthropological methods also figure into her studies of cats and dogs in Tribe of Tiger and The Hidden Life of Dogs, as she studies our “domestic� animal companions and how they fit into our lives.

Have any of you read any of Thomas’s books? If so, you may want to add to your list The Old Way: A Story of the First People.

By a Harford County Librarian