Скачать или смотреть Meeting a 100 year old Kalahari Bushman

Since around the time our species was getting ready to make the great journey out the African continent, various Bushmen cultures have lived here. The term "Bushmen" is an exonym that has been used to name indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures in Southern Africa spanning Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa. However these cultures, they prefer to name themselves as their individual nations, such as ǃKung, ǀXam and others.

The community we visited are the !Xoõ (or Taa in English) of Botswana. They're one of the smallest groups of Bushmen but speak what is considered to be the hardest language in the world by most linguists. It has the highest number of phonemes and it contains over 120 different clicking sounds.

When we visited Kayete, they called themselves Bushmen and were proud of being called as such. Since the people we met had no issue with this term and in order to make this video accessible to larger audiences, we decided to use the term.

Their ancestors have been here for nearly two hundred thousand years. They have been the subjects of countless anthropological studies and ethnographies; because they may offer a rare glimpse into the very nature of our species.

They are the oldest known hunter-gatherer societies on the planet. However, their culture is coming to a sudden end during our lifetime due to a rapidly changing world and inhumane government policies. Although you can find some Bushmen today practicing their traditional lifestyles, most of them are part of living museums or manufactured environments; gimmicks that tourism boards—run by said same governments—use to attract people to their countries.

In this video, we set out to document the beauty and tragedy of this story. We were fortunate enough to meet Kayete, a man who was alive before modernization reached this part of the world, and who fondly remembers “the olden days”. But in order to illustrate the tragedy of what was lost, we journeyed to the remotest parts of the continent to find one example of the thousands of cave art they left behind. Their depictions are usually of the animals they hunted, and most fascinating of all, of half human and animals hybrids, which show a complex system of ancient beliefs and shamanistic ceremonies.

00:00-02:56 Intro
02:56-05:25 Meeting Kayete
05:25-06:23 Modern Bushmen struggles
06:23- 07:33 What does this mean for humanity?
07:33- 09:53 Early humans and rock art
09:53- Final dance