Extra Life

to as the Dobe region, after the name of one of its waterholes. Howell and Lee had made their arduous journey because the Dobe region was the home of the Kung people, a hunter-gatherer society that had been almost miraculously isolated from all the conventions and technology of modern life. The Kung had managed to survive the preceding bloody centuries with almost no contact with other African societies and their European colonizers. They were protected, as Howell would later observe, "by the simple fact that none of the stronger peoples of southern Africa wanted to take their territory away from them, or even share it."

 

Like many surviving hunter-gatherer societies around the world, the Kung people offered Western anthropologists a provocative hint of the ancestral environment that had shaped most of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, before the agricultural revolution first arrived roughly ten thousand years ago. Lee had already visited the Kung society several times before 1967 to study their social organization, their food production techniques, and their strategies for managing and sharing resources within the community. Lee's research had been instrumental in proposing a new way of thinking about hunter-gatherer communities, one that undermined the long-standing view, most famously captured in Thomas Hobbes's description of the "state of nature" as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Observed up close, the Kung did not appear to be struggling to get by, as Hobbes had assumed, in an arduous existence on the edge of starvation. Despite the paucity of natural resources around them, they seemed instead to enjoy a remarkably high standard of living, working less than twenty hours a week to support their nutritional needs. Based on similar research conducted on hunter-gatherer cultures in the Pacific, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins had recently proposed a term for this reimagined model of early human social organization: the "original affluent society."