shift camp from time to time. Without beasts of burden, the nomads have to carry everything on their backs: babies, children under the age of four unable to walk at the group’s pace, weapons, tools, all other material possessions, and food and water for the journey. To add to that load old or sick people unable to walk at all is difficult or impossible.
The other set of circumstances arises in environments, especially Arctic regions and deserts, where severe food shortages periodically occur, and where food surpluses large enough to carry the group through the period of shortage cannot be accumulated. If there isn’t enough food to keep everyone fit or just alive, the society must sacrifice its least valuable or least productive members; otherwise, everybody’s survival will be endangered.
However, it is not the case that all nomads and Arctic and desert peoples sacrifice all of their elderly. Some groups (such as the !Kung and African Pygmies) seem more reluctant to do so than are other groups (such as the Ache, Siriono, and Inuit). Within a group, the treatment of a particular old person may depend on whether a close relative is available to care for and defend the old person.
How are burdensome old people jettisoned? At the risk of my using language that may appear unfeeling or gruesome, there are five methods that can be arranged in a sequence of increasingly direct action. The most passive method is merely to neglect old people until they die: to ignore them, give them little food, let them starve, let them wander off, or let them die in their own filth. For example, this method has been reported among the Inuit of the Arctic, the Hopi of the North American deserts, the Witoto of tropical South America, and Aboriginal Australians.
The next method, practised in various forms by the Lapps (Saami) of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Omaha and Kutenai Indians of North America, and the Ache Indians of tropical South America, is intentionally to abandon an old or sick person when the rest of the group shifts camp. A variant of this method among the Ache, reserved for old men (but not for old women, who are killed outright), is to take men out of the forest to a “white man’s road” and leave them to walk off and never be heard from again. More often, a weak person is left in a shelter or in the camp being evacuated, and provided with some firewood, food, and water, so that if the abandoned person recovers strength, he or she can try to catch up with the rest of the group.
The anthropologist Allan Holmberg happened to be with a group of Bolivia’s Siriono Indians when such an abandonment occurred. Here is his account of what took place: “The band decided to make a move in the direction of the Rio Blanco. While they were making preparations for the journey, my attention was called to a middle-aged woman who was lying sick in her hammock, too sick to speak. I inquired of the chief what they planned to do with her. He referred me to her husband, who told me that she would be left to die because she was too ill to walk and because she was going to die anyway. Departure was scheduled for the following morning. I was on hand to observe the event. The entire band walked out of the camp without so much as a farewell to the dying woman. Even her husband departed without saying goodbye. She was left with fire, a calabash of water, her personal belongings, and nothing more. She was too sick to protest.” Holmberg himself was ill and went off to a mission station for medical treatment. When he came back to the campsite three weeks later, the woman was not there, so he followed a trail to the group’s next campsite, where he found the woman’s remains stripped to her bones by ants and vultures. “She had tried her utmost to follow the fortunes of the band, but had failed and had experienced the same fate that is accorded all Siriono whose days of utility are over.”
A third method for disposing of the elderly, reported for the Chukchi and the Yakut of Siberia, the Crow Indians of North America, the Inuit, and the Norse, involves the older individual choosing or being encouraged to commit suicide, by jumping off a cliff, going out to sea, or seeking death in battle. The New Zealand physician and sailor David Lewis related how an aging friend of his, the navigator Tevake from the Reef Islands in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, made a formal farewell and then set off to sea alone on a boat journey from which he did not return and evidently did not intend to return.
Whereas that third method constitutes unassisted suicide, the fourth method can be described either as assisted suicide or else as killing with the victim’s cooperation, e.g., by strangling, stabbing, or burying alive. Old Chukchi people who submitted to voluntary death were praised and assured that they would receive one of the best dwelling places in the next world. The wife of the victim held his head on her knees, while two men on opposite sides pulled tight a rope around his neck. Among the Kaulong people of southwestern New Britain, strangling of a widow by her brothers or son immediately after her husband’s death was routine until the 1950s. This act was an obligation that, although emotionally shattering for the executioner, was considered shameful to avoid. One Kaulong son described to Jane Goodale how his mother humiliated him into doing it: “When I hesitated, my mother stood up and spoke loudly so all could hear and said that the reason I hesitated was that I wished to have sex with her.” Sick and old people in the Banks Islands begged their friends to end their suffering by burying them alive, and the friends did so as an act of kindness: “a man at Mota buried his brother, who was in extreme weakness from influenza; but he [the survivor] heaped the earth loosely over his [the victim’s] head, and wept, and went from time to time to ask him whether he were still alive.”
The final widespread method is to kill the victim violently without the victim’s cooperation or consent, again by strangling or burying alive, or else by suffocating, stabbing, delivering an ax blow to the head, or breaking the neck or back. One Ache Indian man interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado described his methods of killing old women (as mentioned above, old men were instead left to walk off): “I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts [classificatory aunts] when they were still moving (alive)…. I would step on them, then they all died, there by the big river…. I didn’t used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. When they were still moving I would break them [their backs or necks]…. I wouldn’t care for old women; all by myself I would stick them [with his bow].”
Our reaction to these accounts of spouses, children, brothers or sisters, or fellow band members killing or abandoning an old or sick person is likely to be one of horror—just as is our reaction to the accounts in Chapter 5 of a mother killing her newborn baby if it is a twin or born damaged. But, just as in those cases of infanticide, we have to ask ourselves: what else could a nomadic society, or a society with not enough food for the whole group, do with its elderly? Throughout their lives, the victims have already watched old or sick people being abandoned or killed, and have probably already done it to their own parents. It is the form of death that they expect, and in which in many cases they cooperate. We are fortunate that we do not face that same ordeal ourselves as victim or suicide assister or killer, because we have the good fortune to live in societies with surplus food and medical care. As Winston Churchill wrote of the Japanese admiral Kurita, who had to choose between two equally awful courses of action in wartime, “Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him.” In fact, many of you readers of this book have endured or will endure a similar ordeal yourselves, when you find yourself forced to decide whether to tell the physician caring for your aged or sick parent in failing health that the time has come to halt further aggressive medical intervention, or just to administer pain-killers, sedatives, and palliative care.
Usefulness of old people
What useful services can old people perform for traditional societies? From a cold-blooded adaptive perspective, societies in which old people do remain useful will tend to prosper if those societies care for their elderly. More often, of course, young people who care for their elders couch their reasons not in terms of that evolutionary advantage but in terms of love, respect, and obligation. However, when a group of hunter-gatherers is starving and debating whom they can afford to feed, cold-blooded considerations may be voiced explicitly. Of the services rendered by older people, the first ones that I shall mention are also performed by younger people but are still within the power of older people, while other services involve skills perfected by long experience and hence especially suitable to old people.
People eventually reach an age at which men can no longer spear to death a lion, and women can no longer trot miles with a heavy load to and from the mongongo nut grove. Nevertheless, there are other ways in which older people can continue to obtain food for their grandchildren and thereby ease the provisioning burden on their children and children-in-law. Ache men continue to hunt and gather into their 60s by concentrating on small animals, fruit, and palm products and breaking trail when the band shifts camp. Older !Kung men set animal traps, gather plant food, and join younger men on hunts in order to interpret animal tracks and propose strategies. Among Hadza hunter-gatherer women of Tanzania, the age group working the hardest consists of post-menopausal grandmothers
