Elephant trails as the highway of the hunter-gatherer

Human migration as a kind of elephant tourism? Actual hard evidence is maybe a bit wanting but Gary Haynes makes an interesting suggestion on how (prehistoric) hunter-gatherer are aided in their exploration of their environment by the landscape management of several elephantine species in past and present times. Read his papers 'Mammoth landscapes: good country for hunter-gatherers' and 'Elephant landscapes: human foragers in mammoths, mastodonts, and elephants'. For elephant trails as desire trails see earlier.

Studies of elephants in the wild show clearly that proboscideans make complex mental maps of water points, mineral sources, forage patches, fruit trees, travel routes, and socializing sites. My own studies confirm that travel routes between these important places can be effortlessly found by human foragers and other animal taxa. Proboscidean trails are well used, clearly identifiable, and easy to follow. They tend to be flat surfaced (because elephants have flat feet and great weight which compresses the ground so much), measure about 45 cm wide or more, and are consistently placed year to year. Human hunters or scavengers would have recognized these trails, read the signs to be found on them, and made use of them to track and follow vulnerable animals moving from water source to forage to cover to mineral licks and back again.

The modern literature on African and Asian elephants shows that they frequently move long distances, exploring for new forage, new mates, or new ranges. Proboscideans also habitually re-use old trails seasonally or more often, thus establishing clear networks of widely separated places connected by paths. Such networks of fixed and dependable trails would provide a means to encourage exploratory mobility by human pioneers into new ranges.

Mineral pit dug by elephants

'Molongo' is the new buzz word

In a paper called "Long-Term Foraging Expeditions (Molongo) among the Baka Hunter-Gatherers in the Northwestern Congo Basin, with Special Reference to the 'Wild Yam Question'" Hirokazu Yasuoka "describe[s] and analyze[s] a long-term foraging expedition (molongo) among the Baka of the northwestern Congo Basin as an example Long-Term Foraging Expeditions of foraging life in tropical rainforests. On the basis of these data, I then discuss the potential of tropical rainforests as a human habitat." 

There is lot of energy intake calculating going on in this paper but for our purpose it is enough to give you a few of the images and that part of the text that explain the daily proceedings of the Baka life during the vacations expedition. What amazes me is how slow the trek proceeds. The final camp is roughly 50 kilometres away but it takes 16 days to get there while it only takes 6 days to get back. On the molongo people take it slow. 

An important sociocultural aspect of molongo is the value placed on a nomadic life in the forest. When on the move, the group would usually decamp at about eight o’clock in the morning, often breaking into several sections to variously hunt such animals as they encountered or gather plants and honey. In the early afternoon when they decided on the location of the new camp, the women began to build huts of saplings and large Marantaceae leaves, while the men again went hunting with spears or to look for honey. When fresh tracks of a large animal were found, the hunter and his assistants perused it with the gun. The Baka moved the campsite every few days before arriving at the final camp of Mongungu, where they continued to use the forest intensively for their 43 night stay. 

Once at the Mongungu camp the men set cable snares along seven routes of 2–4 km stretching in a radial pattern from the camp. Hunters visited their snares every three days, because trapped animals spoiled within two days of dying. Men searched for honey or hunted with spears on the other days. The women went out digging for wild yams every two or three days, sometimes accompanied by their husbands. The wild yam species harvested most frequently was Dioscorea praehensilis, which can be found in large quantities in one place. Almost all of the cable snares and the major gathering sites for wild yams were within 3 km of the camp, so the most intensively used area was approximately ∼30km2.

The article is behind the academic firewall, with many tanks to a reader for the PDF.

Eskimo songlines / Eskimo highways

"The Trail as Home: Inuit and Their Pan-Arctic Network of Routes" by Claudio Aporta is a dense article connecting Canadian Inuit land use and oral knowledge in recent and historic times with personal observation that give some stunning insights into the Eskimo way of life and the human talent for humanizing a harsh terrain. A related article by the same author is here and here.

We were traveling the route that days before Abraham Tagunak had mapped for us. Tagunak, a well-known elder and traveler from Naujaat, had followed that same route for the first time when he was a little boy several decades ago. It was the same trail that members of the Fifth Thule expedition used in the 1920s. It had also been used by Captain Hall’s Inuit guides in the 1860s. In fact, it seems certain that this trail and the place names around it were known to Iligliuk, the Inuit woman who acted as a guide for Captains Parry and Lyon in the 1820s. What is remarkable about this is that trails in the Arctic are not permanent features of the landscape. On the contrary, they disappear when the sled tracks get covered after a blizzard, and as the snow and ice melt at the end of each spring. The spatial itinerary, however, remains in people’s memory and materializes again when the next trailbreaker makes the trip.

to Inuit, the Arctic was in fact a network of trails, connecting communities to their distant neighbours, and to fishing lakes and hunting grounds in between. Based on the data collected during that trip and after mapping over sixty trails in several communities of the territory of Nunavut, I argue here that this network extends across most of the Canadian Arctic, most likely including areas that were not the focus of this research. Since Inuit did not use maps to travel or to represent geographic information, this enormous corpus of data has been shared and transmitted orally and through the experience of travel since time immemorial. Although new trails or new segments of trails are sometimes created to accommodate new travel needs and transportation technologies, while a few others are abandoned, most of these trails are so old that they are part of Inuit’s distant history, perhaps beyond oral memory and certainly beyond the limits of written documentation.

The implications of this premise are several: (1) it rejects the idea of the Arctic as a barren place, or an empty land inhabited by geographically remote and isolated communities (still present in the popular imagination); (2) it implies that Inuit have made systematic use of the Arctic environment as a whole; (3) it suggests that trails are, and have been, significant channels of communication and exchange across the Arctic; (4) it presumes that some  types of oral history and knowledge can be accurately transmitted through generations, and (5) it proposes that an important part of Inuit cultural identities is better understood in terms of moving as a way of living.

On place names:

The importance of place names in Inuit culture has been pointed out by several authors. I have elsewhere shown the connection between trails and place names. The mapping of place names makes this connection evident to the point that often the existence of trails can be guessed just by knowing where the named places are. In other words, the spatial layout of the names suggests the existence of a particular itinerary. Figure (above) indicates the presence of a trail across the northern tip of Baffin Island. Through the use of these names, a narrator can describe a trail, identifying creeks, lakes, hills, portages, stone cairns, and landing spots. The oral description of the trail (or the narrative of the journey) will help a listener picture how the horizon will look from the trail, and what kind of features a traveler should expect.

The trail as home:

During his travels in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, Knud Rasmussen documented a ritual just before a newborn child undertook her first journey. After describing the ritual and the prayer, Rasmussen noted that “this was the child’s first journey, and the little girl ... had to be introduced to life by means of [a] magic formula”. Being introduced to the first journey was, in a way, being introduced to life, as if both living and moving were part of the same journey. The trail was a place where life unfolded. Life on the trail involved the learning from an early age of an immense amount of geographic and environmental information, as the individuals experienced the land through actual or figurative travel. Through that process, a sense of community was also developed. The oral and experiential knowledge learned on the trails is, in fact, intertwined with information on and understanding of topographic features, environmental dynamics, and ecology of the familiar region. As Inuit travel to less familiar or more distant regions, this knowledge needs to be acquired from neighboring communities, which suggests a system of tenure in which knowledge equals survival (social and physical). It is through accessing this corpus of knowledge that Inuit travelers from distant communities would be able to find the good trails and the resources necessary to live in other regions.

Yanomami forage trails / ethnocartography of reticular space

"Ethnogeography and Resource use among the Yanomami" looks at the hunting and forage trails used by a Brazilian Yanomami village. It argues that space to the Yanomami is organized reticular and not concentric and zonal. Reticular? I've looked it up for you, it means: "1) Resembling a net in form; netlike. 2) Marked by complexity; intricate." I'm not entirely sure what the observations that the Yanomami use different systems of pathways adds to the table of forage psychogeography. Maybe it is a way of showing that paths connects places without laying claim to the space it traverses?

The spatial patterns of the Yanomami’s use of forest natural resources have traditionally been described or represented by anthropologists as concentric zones of exploitation (gardening, hunting, and gathering) outlined by approximate contours. Three types of concentric zones are usually distinguished: one close to the collective house, which includes the gardens, one for daily hunting, gathering, and harvesting, and, finally, one for long-distance collective hunting expeditions (hwenimu) and wild fruit gathering (waimi huu, yanomoa˜i-). This anthropological “zonal model,” which lacks any indigenous cultural recognition, projects onto Yanomami productive activities an ethnocentric conception of successive “rings” of decreasing degrees of resource exploitation similar to the classic agricultural model proposed
by J. H. von Thunen.

The methodology we adopted, allowing a fine-grained record of the Yanomami’s exploitation of natural resources, enabled us to produce a very different spatial model, this time structured by the collective knowledge and use of a web of identified forest paths (principal and secondary) tying together notable sites labeled by toponyms (hunting and gathering camps, former habitation and garden sites, groves of fruit trees, geographic features, and so on). In Yanomami cultural cartography, this complex network of paths and places is, moreover, closely interwoven with the intricate branching of the hydrographic network (made up of named rivers and streams), which constitutes another primary spatial reference.

From this new perspective, the Yanomami ethnogeographic organization of space appears to be reticular—structured by a crisscrossing network of sites (points) and routes (lines)—rather than zonal. By taking into account this emic structuring of space based on networks, as opposed to the conventional etic perspective in anthropology and geography, we aim to contribute toward a spatial model of tropical-forest resource use through data that are both quantitatively more precise and qualitatively more compatible with Yanomami social practices and cultural concepts.

Outrunning a bull Kalahari style

"Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers" is a paper that deals with the outrunning of game, an ancient practise today only known to be used by Kalahari hunters. The paper does a great job describing the problems of persistence hunting, goes on to detail the environmental knowledge involved in a hunt before again moving on explain how all this is related to human energy consumption patterns. All that and more in nine pages. 

An average speed of 6.3 km/hr may not seem very fast, but the challenge to the hunter is not so much the speed as the difficult conditions that need to be overcome, including extreme heat, soft sand, and sometimes thick bush. The hunter may be slowed down when he loses the trail. The most difficult task for the tiring hunter is keeping on the right track when the animal joins the rest of the herd again, since its tracks must be distinguished from those of the other animals. When the animal is still running strongly, this can be very difficult, but when it starts to show signs of tiring it becomes easier to distinguish its tracks. Another difficulty is that the animal may circle back onto its own tracks and the hunter must decide which set of tracks to follow. The hunter does not always run on the tracks but often leaves the trail in order to pick it up ahead, and a number of times the hunter lost time following the wrong trail and then going back to find the right one. The trail may also be lost when herds of other antelope species cross the tracks. Losing the tracks was the main reason the hunters gave up in unsuccessful attempts. [The f]igure  plots the route of Karoha running down a kudu bull in October 2001, showing the kudu crossing back over its own tracks a number of times and joining other groups of kudu bulls.

...

When running down a herd of kudu, trackers say that they look to either side of the trail to see if one of the animals has broken away from the rest of the herd and then follow that animal. The weakest animal usually breaks away from the herd to hide in the bush when it starts to tire, while the others continue to flee. Since a predator will probably follow the scent of the herd, the stronger animals have a better chance of outrunning it, while the weaker animal has a chance to escape unnoticed.

The forest made human: the legacy of trail trees

Trail trees (or signal trees or thong trees) are trees "modified by the American Aboriginal peoples in order to signify trails, campsites, or special locations (water supply, food, safety, etc.). Often these were oak saplings that are given a unique bend, usually pointed in the direction of the point of interest." The scope and spread of these trees seems to be a recent discovery and a certain hesitance to affirm them as man-made abounds. There is a (or has been, the site is dated) fabulous project attempting to map the location of all known trees and the trails they collectively mark in order to confirm them as human artefacts rather than flukes of nature.

The locals know their way through the forest and I guess that these trees are meant for travellers and visitors. How wonderful it must be to have travelled for days through high forest, alone and out of reach of humanity and then to suddenly cross the path of a signal tree pointing you into the direction of a human settlement. These trees are historic artefacts and this humanising effect is even larger today. Now the forest is empty and the old ways have disappeared: the trail tree is a reminder of what has been, a melancholic marker, not the promising announcement of being welcomed by friends and family. 

An earlier post on wayfinding in the Amazon.

A map showing the location of signal trees and the trail they create. Wish it was bigger!

 

 

When desire trails turn nasty

These are a fascinating set of screenshots from a Youtube video (I can't find it at present) showing how pressure from the outside world creates the need to make trails for the demarcation of ownership, not for any practical use.