The Gods Must Be Crazy

8 Pages 2085 Words

In their mythology, God created all of southern Africa for the San (Bushmen). Then he created the San, and then he created the San’s animals for and even from the San. They believe God left them to guard it all, which they did for years, until we (the more advanced people) arrived. The Bushmen are the world’s oldest surviving pragmatic environmentalists.
The Bushmen are some of the last nomadic hunter-gatherers on earth. But let’s not forget that before the start of the Agricultural Revolution, all humans were hunters-gatherers. The Agricultural Revolution entailed humans first discovering the technology of domesticating plants and/or animals. The result was mankind becoming more sedentary vs. nomadic. This led to a significant increase in our population growth.
At the start of the Agricultural Revolution, the Bushmen had all of Africa up to the southern edge of the Sahara, except for the Pygmies occupying the Congo, and the Bantu black having only the western most west of Africa.
The majority of the Sans were ethnically cleansed for their land in South Africa by the Dutch who landed in 1652, invading from the south, and by the Zulus and other black migrating from the north. By 1890, the last of the Bushmen had been exterminated in South Africa, leaving only their haunting rock paintings and a few of their genes. The last of the Bushmen survived into the 20th century only in the world’s fourth largest desert, the Kalahari, despite the bounty on their heads in the early 1900’s. This was simply because it was a harsh daunting land avoided by all others. The Bushmen learned to live despite there being no surface water. The 70,000 or so Kalahari Bushmen that survive today are in Botswana, Namibia and a few in Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
The various Bushmen groups live in the desert areas of Namibia, Botswana and Angola. The Bushmen, originally known as the Sans, were given their name by the Dutch in South Africa.
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