There are few true hunter-gatherer societies living in the modern world. One of those societies, the !Kung-San Bushmen of Botswana and southern Africa, provide a unique and provocative look into societal evolution and the behavior of pre-agricultural and industrial societies. The life of the !Kung represents a way of life that was universal for Homo Sapiens until about 10,000 years ago, or with the advent of the agricultural revolution and all it entailed. With the !Kung, modern Anthropologists are able to glean "basic human social forms, language, and human nature." This paper will present an overview of the !Kung Bushmen, commenting on their physical and social environment, population and health, sex roles, childhood, family and marriage, kinship, and division of labor. One initial linguistic note: the Bushmen's oral language consists of a number of clicking sounds which are notated in Arabic letters by the use of an exclamation point "!" - witness the name, !Kung San.
The !Kung San are hunting and gathering people of southern Africa who live south of the Congo basin. For about three hundred years they have been called "Bushmen," but since that term now has pejorative connotations are now called the "San" or "!Kung San." They have lived in southern Africa for over 10,000 years, and archaeological evidence has suggested that their ancestors may have been in the area several thousand years before that.
Over the past few thousand years, however, the San have been somewhat assimilated into the general African population. By 1955, the systematic extermination of many of the southern African peoples of the Bantu region by, among others, the Dutch, had reduced the San population to less than 50,000. Today, the San peoples are found mainly in the Kalahari Desert and fringe regions of Botswana and Namibia. Thus, the physical environment of the San tribesmen is one of harsh desert. Most of the rainfall in the region is...