we overreact to pesticides and underreact to surgery.
Accidents
When we imagine the dangers facing traditional societies, our first association is likely to be with lions and other environmental hazards. In reality, for most traditional societies environmental dangers rank only third as a cause of death, behind disease and human violence. But environmental dangers exert a bigger effect on people’s behavior than do diseases, because for environmental dangers the relation between cause and effect is much quicker and more easily perceived and understood.
Table 8.1 lists the main reported causes of accidental death or injury for seven traditional peoples for whom summaries are available. All seven live in or near the tropics and practise at least some hunting and gathering, but two (New Guinea Highlanders and the Kaulong) obtain most of their calories by farming. Obviously, different traditional peoples must face different dangers related to their different environments. For instance, drowning and being carried out to sea on an ice floe are risks for the Inuit of the Arctic coast but not for the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, while being struck by a toppling tree and being bitten by a poisonous snake are risks for Aka Pygmies and the Ache but not for the Inuit. Falling into a collapsing underground cavern is a risk for the Kaulong but for none other of the seven tabulated groups, because only the Kaulong live in an environment with many thinly roofed sinkholes. Obviously too, Table 8.1 lumps together the differences between sexes and age classes within a society: accidents kill more men than women among the Ache, the !Kung, and many other peoples, not only because hunting animals by men poses more dangers than does plant gathering by women, but also because men tend to be more risk-seeking than are women. But Table 8.1 still suffices to suggest some conclusions.
Table 8.1. Causes of accidental death and injury
| Ache (Paraguay) | 1. Poisonous snakes. 2. Jaguars, lightning, getting lost. 3. Tree-fall, falling from tree, infected insect bites and thorn scratches, fire, drowning, exposure, cut by ax. |
| !Kung (Southern Africa) | 1. Poisoned arrows. 2. Fire, large animals, poisonous snakes, falling from tree, infected thorn scratch, exposure. 3. Getting lost, lightning. |
| Aka Pygmies (Central Africa) | Falling from tree, tree-fall, large animals, poisonous snakes, drowning. |
| New Guinea Highlands | 1. Fire, tree-fall, infected insect bites and thorn scratches. 2. Exposure, getting lost. |
| Fayu (New Guinea lowlands) | Scorpions and spiders, poisonous snakes, pigs and crocodiles, fire, drowning. |
| Kaulong (New Britain) | 1. Tree-fall. 2. Falling from tree, drowning, cut by ax or knife, collapse of underground cavern. |
| Agta (Philippines) | Tree-fall, falling from tree, drowning, hunting and fishing accidents. |
We note first that Table 8.1 makes no mention of the main causes of accidental death in modern Westernized societies: in descending sequence of death toll, we are killed by cars (Plate 44), alcohol, guns, surgery, and motorcycles, of which none except occasionally alcohol is a hazard for traditional peoples. One might wonder whether we have merely traded our old hazards of lions and tree-falls for our new hazards of cars and alcohol. But there are two other big differences between environmental hazards in modern societies and in traditional societies besides the particular hazards involved. One difference is that the cumulative risk of accidental death is probably lower for modern societies, because we exert far more control over our environment even though it does contain new hazards of our own manufacture such as cars. The other difference is that, thanks to modern medicine, the damage caused by our accidents is much more often repaired before it kills us or inflicts life-long incapacity. When I broke a tendon in my hand, a surgeon splinted my hand, which healed and regained full function within six months, but some New Guinea friends who experienced tendon and bone breaks ended up with no or improper healing and were crippled for life.
Those two differences are part of the reason why traditional people so willingly abandon their jungle lifestyle, admired in the abstract by Westerners, who don’t have to live that lifestyle themselves. For instance, those differences help explain why so many Ache Indians give up the freedom of their lives as forest hunters and settle on reservations, degrading as that may seem to outsiders. Similarly, an American friend of mine traveled halfway around the world to meet a recently discovered band of New Guinea forest hunter-gatherers, only to discover that half of them had already chosen to move to an Indonesian village and put on T-shirts, because life there was safer and more comfortable. “Rice to eat, and no more mosquitoes!” was their short explanation.
As you read through the seven sets of entries of Table 8.1, you’ll see some common themes of dangers that are serious for many or most traditional peoples, but that are rare or surprising for us moderns. Wild animals are indeed a major threat for traditional peoples (Plate 43). For example, jaguars cause 8% of deaths of adult Ache men. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, buffalo, and crocodiles do kill Africans, but the animal that kills more Africans than any other is the hippopotamus. !Kung and African Pygmies are killed, bitten, scratched, and gored not just by big carnivores but also by antelope and other injured prey that they hunt. While we are horrified at the idea of !Kung hunters driving prides of lions from carcasses, the ! Kung recognize that the most dangerous lion is in fact a lone beast too old, sick, or wounded to catch swift prey and reduced to attacking humans.
Poisonous snakes also rank high as a hazard for the tropical peoples of Table 8.1. They cause 14% of deaths of adult Ache men (i.e., more than jaguars), and even more loss of limbs. Almost every adult Yanomamo and Ache man has been bitten at least once. Ranked even more often as dangerous are trees, as a result both of trees or branches falling on people in the forest (remember my own experience that I described at the start of Chapter 7), and of people climbing a tree to hunt or to gather fruit or honey and falling out of the tree (Plate 42). Domestic fires for warmth are a bigger risk than bush fires, such that most New Guinea Highlanders and !Kung acquire burn scars from sleeping next to a fire as an adult or playing next to it as a baby.
Death from exposure to cold and/or wet weather is a danger outside the tropics, and at high altitudes in New Guinea and elsewhere in the tropics. Even for the Ache living in Paraguay near the Tropic of Capricorn, winter temperatures can drop below freezing, and an Ache caught out in the forest at night without a fire is at risk of
