The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (9 page)

A map published by anthropologist A. P. Elkin documents the spread of several innovations from the northwest part of Australia toward the southeast. Largely restricted to the northern Kimberley region were cave paintings reminiscent of those in Ice Age western Europe. The Aborigines of northern and central Australia used circumcision as an initiation ordeal, but it never reached Queensland and New South Wales. In New South Wales and Tasmania, initiation involved the knocking out of a tooth; evidence from ancient burials suggests that this may have been the older of the two ordeals.

In the north, some Aborigines practiced tree-platform burials like those of the Andaman Islanders, but this behavior never spread to the south. The Australians transformed the throwing stick into the boomerang, but it never reached Tasmania.

No less interesting was the spread of the so-called section and subsection systems, methods of classifying relatives that some Western scholars find difficult to master. These uniquely Australian systems ensured that everyone you ever came into contact with was classed as a kinsman, letting you know how to behave toward him or her. This was done by extending the terms for relatives outward until they embraced the entire tribe. Since this extension was accompanied by incest prohibitions, the subsection system left only about one in eight members of the opposite sex eligible to marry you.

Although the section/subsection system of classification is considered prototypic of Australia, subsections were in fact an innovation, still spreading in the nineteenth century. According to anthropologist M. J. Meggitt, the Walbiri tribe of the Northern Territory adopted sections no longer ago than 1850; it added subsections some 20 or 30 years later. Such classificatory terms spread 100 miles in about 20 years, and by 1896 the Aranda tribe of the Alice Springs area was adopting subsections in imitation of the Walbiri.

The reason for such a rapid spread, Meggitt felt, was that Aborigines did not like it when their neighbors displayed innovations that they lacked. And Meggitt discovered an equally revealing fact: although we know that the Walbiri began using subsections no more than 150 years ago, they had revised their origin myth to allege that subsections were given to them during the fourth stage of Creation.

The lessons of Australia are many. Yes, the nineteenth-century Aborigines provide insights into a long-ago era, but neither they nor anyone else were frozen in time. From the moment they reached Australia, the Aborigines began creating new ways to organize society, some of which were still spreading when Europeans arrived. The Aborigines also show us that, contrary to popular belief, cosmology and religion are not eternal and unchanging. When societies and their situations change, cosmologies get revised as well.

As we have seen, many of Australia’s innovations failed to reach Tasmania. Rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age isolated that island, preventing some ancient behaviors from being superseded. The Tasmanians hunted with javelins and wooden clubs but missed out on the spear-thrower and the boomerang. They initiated youths by scarring them or knocking out a tooth, but evidently they had never learned about circumcision. They had cremations and simple interments but no tree-platform burial. Like the Andaman Islanders, some Tasmanians wore around their necks the bones of deceased relatives. They were comfortable going naked but liked to wear long necklaces of perforated seashells like those of our Ice Age ancestors.

The Australian Aborigines are among the most extensively studied of all hunters and gatherers. Tragically, the same cannot be said for the Tasmanians. The first European colony on the island was established in 1803, and by 1877 virtually every Tasmanian Aborigine had died of disease, neglect, or outright mistreatment. We must piece together the story of the Tasmanians from the accounts of travelers and European colonists. In these accounts the Tasmanians often sound like an amalgam of Olympic athletes and Navy Seals.

Take, for example, the economic partnership of husband and wife. Armed with an 18-foot wooden javelin, which they could reportedly throw 40 yards, Tasmanian men got within range by stalking kangaroos on their hands and knees. At other times, they set fire to the brush and speared the animals as they emerged. They threw kangaroos onto live embers to singe off the fur, and then they cut them into portions that they dipped into ashes “as if into salt.” Using a wooden throwing stick called a
waddy
(a precursor of the boomerang), the men also killed birds, which were then placed on embers to singe off their feathers.

Tasmanian women, for their part, are said to have caught opossums by shinnying rapidly up gum trees, cutting toeholds, and using a loop of rope “like a telephone lineman.” Considered excellent swimmers, they dived for abalone, prying them from the rocks with wooden chisels. They loved the eggs of black swans, penguins, petrels, and ducks. One Tasmanian woman is alleged to have put Cool Hand Luke to shame by eating, at a single meal, 50 to 60 large eggs of the sooty petrel. Such meals might be washed down with local cider, fermented from the sap of the eucalyptus tree.

Since most Tasmanians vanished before there were anthropologists to interview them, we have only sketchy details of their social organization. We do know, however, that some tribes fought bitterly. Warriors approached their enemies with their hands clasped innocently atop their head, secretly dragging a spear through the brush by gripping it with their toes. To accept the “gift” of a flaming firebrand was to accept a challenge to combat, something unwary colonists learned to their sorrow.

During the 1890s many residents of Australia, appalled by the demise of the Tasmanians, pressured the government to create a post called Protector of the Aborigines, so that similar genocide would not take place in Australia. One of the early Protectors, a magistrate named F. J. Gillen, teamed up with Melbourne biology professor Baldwin Spencer to write two important books on the Aborigines of central Australia. Spencer and Gillen’s pioneering work soon inspired anthropologists, including A. R. Radcliffe Brown and W. Lloyd Warner, to record native Australian culture before it vanished. For their part, Spencer and Gillen became so closely associated with the Aranda that they were eventually initiated into the tribe—without, one hopes, having a tooth knocked out.

What the Aborigines have since done for themselves, of course, is more important than anything a magistrate or an anthropologist could do for them. One day, in the 1960s, a man named Bill Kurtzman saw a young Aborigine girl peering through the fence at a tennis court in Barellan, New South Wales. Kurtzman encouraged her to enter the court to see if she liked the game. The young girl turned out to be a member of the Wiradjuri tribe; her name was Evonne Goolagong, and such was her aptitude for tennis that by age 18 she was playing at Wimbledon. Ms. Goolagong went on to win 14 Grand Slam titles, four Australian Opens, a French Open, and Wimbledon Championships in 1971 and 1980.

We would do well to remember that every human being on earth is descended from hunters and gatherers, and we should not underestimate any of them.

CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY

The landscape of central Australia featured broad plains with groves of acacia, dry creek beds lined with gum trees, and occasional mountain ranges rising 2,500 to 5,000 feet above sea level. Each rocky outcrop, hot spring, or water hole had a name and a sacred history. Wild yams and other tubers were there to be dug up with sticks, and there were pools of standing water with ducks, pelicans, spoonbills, and ibis. The Aborigines used oval shelters called
wurleys
and ephemeral lean-tos called
mia-mia.
Night found them sleeping in scooped-out hollows, sometimes covered with a kangaroo hide. Day might find them cooking sedge bulbs in hot ashes, like the foragers of Wadi Kubbaniya.

Many Australian tribes, as mentioned earlier, were divided into two opposing moieties. Each moiety, in turn, was divided into six or more clans, each claiming descent from a different ancestor. Men of a specific clan in one moiety were supposed to marry women of a specific clan in the other moiety. In the case of the Arabana tribe, for example, men of the Dingo clan married women of the Waterhen clan, men of the Cicada clan married women of the Crow clan, and so on. Even if she were of the proper clan, a bride might only be eligible for marriage if she were classified as the groom’s “mother’s elder brother’s daughter.”

Needless to say, the section/subsection system greatly reduced one’s choice of a wife. To get around this problem, eligible girls were often betrothed to their future husbands early in life, though they continued to live with their parents until their teens. Sometimes a youth’s relatives arranged for his circumcision to be done by a man whose future daughters would be
nupas,
or eligible brides, for him. This ritual told the youth whom to seek out when the time came. The section system also affected polygamy; a hunter who decided that he could support a second wife might wind up marrying his first wife’s sister, because no one else was eligible.

Each central Australian group owned foraging rights to its territory, but just as with Basarwa territories, the land might be shared with neighbors in good years. Each local band was led by a senior male, called an
alatunja
by the Aranda. Within limits the post was hereditary, passing from father to son or, if no son existed, to a brother or brother’s son. The authority of the alatunja did not extend outside his descent group, and he relied on the advice of a small group of male elders.

In large agricultural societies, hereditary leadership is often linked to social inequality. In the case of the alatunja, it had a different origin: passing the role of headman from father to son protected the ritual secrets of the group from outsiders. To understand how important these secrets were, we need to look at central Australian social logic.

At birth, a child’s spirit left a state of purity and entered a profane world. Women were thought to remain profane throughout their lives. Men were profane as youths because they were still ignorant of their clan’s sacred lore. As a result, elders paid little attention to younger men. Eventually, beginning with his initiation, a youth would embark on an education that would return him to a state of purity. Sons were prized because they could become warriors, bring brides and victories to their clan, and eventually become elders. The sacred knowledge imparted to them was denied to women, but the latter had their own ritual secrets.

Here we see a premise common to many societies with clans: one is not simply born Aranda or Arabana or Murngin or Walbiri; it takes years of effort to become a full member of one’s group.

In the process of becoming Aranda, young men were taken to places where sacred paraphernalia were hidden. For example, they might be shown the bull-roarer—a slab of acacia wood on a cord—and see it whirled to produce a roaring sound, thought to be the voice of an ancestor. Called a
churinga,
or “sacred object,” each bull-roarer was alleged to have been made early in the world’s history. To handle it for the first time was to share in the lives of heroes past.

Conflict, Peacemaking, and Death

In Rousseau’s day the existence of religion was routinely attributed to the fact that humans are the only creatures who know that they will eventually die. While this explanation may sound plausible to educated Westerners, it does not work with most hunters and gatherers. To the Australian Aborigines, for example, there was no such thing as inevitable natural death. Death resulted either from homicide or witchcraft. One way to kill an enemy was to point in his direction with a special stick, singing over it to give it magical power. Especially deadly was the sharpened arm bone of a corpse. The pointing of this bone might be accompanied by the curse, “May your heart be rent asunder.”

Sometimes a dying man would whisper the name of the person whose magic he believed was killing him. Then an avenger, his body coated with charcoal to make him invisible at night, his footsteps muffled by emu-feather slippers, set out to kill the offender. In the case of group offenses, Raymond Kelly’s principle of social substitutability applied. A vengeance party left to kill members of the offending group, traveling as far as 80 miles with spear-throwers, shields, boomerangs, and clubs. Eager to end hostilities, the offending group might agree to surrender two or three of its least popular members as long as the rest were spared.
Figure 4
depicts the whole process, from bone-pointing to group revenge.

While many tribes had enemies for neighbors, there was one person who could travel widely without fear of death: this was the sacred messenger. The messenger might, for example, be carrying the red-painted forearm bone of a deceased relative, showing it to normally hostile groups and inviting them to attend his relative’s final burial. Owing to his sacred mission, the messenger could not be harmed. However, after the burial ceremony, the bone might be given by the deceased’s father to his father’s sister’s sons. Their task was to avenge the decedent’s death, presumed to be caused by witchcraft.

Australian burial ritual varied by tribe. Often it reflected the increased importance of ancestors in societies with clans. The Warramunga exposed corpses on tree platforms and then crushed and buried all the bones except for the one to be carried by the sacred messenger. When that last bone was finally interred, the deceased could be reincarnated. The Luritcha tribe sometimes cannibalized their enemies, adding insult to injury by destroying the forearm bones so that their victims could not be reincarnated.

Burial in Murngin clans consisted of interring the dead, exhuming them later, defleshing the bones, and saving skeletal parts as sacred relics. We call attention to this ritual because archaeologists have detected it in the earliest village societies of the Near East, strongly suggesting that those ancient societies also had clans.

POTENTIAL INEQUALITY IN FORAGING SOCIETIES WITH CLANS

By itself, the formation of clans and moieties did not dramatically increase inequality. To be sure, the men in Aborigine clans did not believe in gender equity, insisting that women could never become as ritually pure as initiated men; yet to obtain eligible brides, men were prepared to make generous gifts to a girl’s family. It is also true that some headmen inherited their position, but it carried limited authority and served mainly to preserve the clan’s ritual secrets. Young Aborigines deferred to their elders but fully expected to become elders themselves one day. Perhaps most importantly, there is no evidence that any clan outranked another.