The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

This series of Massey Lectures begins by proposing the concept of the ethnosphere, “the myriad of cultures [that] make up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet,” and the “the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness” (2). This web of human culture is being destroyed even faster than its counterpart, the biosphere, with language loss being the “canary in the coal mine” (3) of this decline into cultural homogeneity. At least half of the world’s languages will soon be extinct, and this precipitates the loss of the cultural genius coded into each of these tongues.

Across the earth there is a 99.9% unanimity of genetic code. Contemporary DNA analysis simultaneously disproves the concept of scientifically significant differentiation of ethnicities and allows us to track the prehistoric spread of humanity throughout the continents. Until some 60,000 years ago, all humanity lived in Africa and from there migrated across the earth. Science can track these waves of migration into specific epochs.

The variations in human appearance and culture was historically used to promote racial elitism. In the 19th century, the nascent field of anthropology helped justify a European worldview that positioned Victorian England at the peak of social advancement. Taking the recent works of Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus as their foundation, anthropologists descended into the creation of pseudosciences such as phrenology and eugenics, which falsely confirmed Europe’s racial elitism. These racially biased pseudosciences were elitist and also dangerous—eugenics was used to justify Nazi genocide. This same elitism, bolstered by poor science, helped justify colonial destruction of indigenous peoples; early academic explorations of these cultures accounted for their “savagery” and “backwardness” without taking any initiative to understand their worldviews.

This history manifested as widespread skepticism of anthropological science that still exists to this day. However, “science is only one way of knowing” (16), and today the science of anthropology affirms the same fact genetics proves: the equality of humanity and its cultures. Davis writes, “There are no sharp genetic differences among populations” (17), and therefore each culture shares an equal genius and equal answer to the fundamental question of what it means to be human. No answer supersedes any other, and no culture is justified in subjugating, eliminating, or assimilating another. Each one is uniquely valuable and valid. The real threat to remaining indigenous peoples is not science but the ideological pursuit of power by industry, governments, and other hostile bodies.

The San people of the Kalahari Desert are as close as any culture comes to the peoples who inhabited Africa before migrations out of this continent began. The San, “quite possibly the oldest culture in the world” (20), survive as hunter-gatherers and speak a language unrelated to any other living tongue. Their way of life is defined by the desert’s dry and wet seasons, an ancient rhythm of interchange with the landscape. The month of April marks hunting season, when men range the landscape hunting with bows and arrows tipped with a deadly toxin derived from two species of beetle. The San are incredibly skillful trackers who can read the landscape, effectively hunt hippos, elephants, and birds, and scare lions off kills, all with only basic weapons. Highly athletic, San hunters can run down antelope.

Just as the alternation of dry and wet seasons are the crux of the San calendar, “the hunt is the metaphor that brings us into the very heart of San life” (24). A successful hunt is required of boys to become men and marry. The arrow “represents the highest achievement of San technology” (25). It is both a tool and prominent exchange gift. Meat and fire are also important symbolic elements of life.

Davis notes that “language, stealth, spirit, [and] adaptive genius […] were the tools that allowed the San to survive the Kalahari” (26). These same tools kindled humanity’s incredible history; they are the first components of human genius. Modern homo sapiens evolved 200,000 years ago in Africa. Our first art—cave paintings of animals at Chauvet, Altamira and Lascaux—emerged in the Paleolithic period, roughly 27,000 years ago. Such paintings are thought by some to be a record of a moment in human history in which we began to differentiate ourselves from animals, crafting our first religious symbols from the landscapes around us. In the Neolithic period, beginning roughly 10,000 years ago, this relationship with the landscape became agrarian: Nomads settled in pastoral and farming societies, domesticating plants and animals for the first time. This new sedentary lifestyle allowed the production of agricultural surplus and the accompanying growth of social hierarchies and specialization, “the hallmarks of civilization” (32). This history brought us here, to our modern resource-driven industrial world. But this is not the only world that exists—other cultures that refused the sedentary lifestyle still maintain ancient and egalitarian relationships with the earth.