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    The Old Way: A Story of the First People
    The Old Way: A Story of the First People
    The Old Way: A Story of the First People
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Old Way: A Story of the First People

    Written by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

    Narrated by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    One of our most influential anthropologists reevaluates her long and illustrious career by returning to her roots-and the roots of life as we know it

    When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas first arrived in Africa to live among the Kalahari San, or bushmen, it was 1950, she was nineteen years old, and these last surviving hunter-gatherers were living as humans had lived for 15,000 centuries. Thomas wound up writing about their world in a seminal work, The Harmless People (1959). It has never gone out of print.

    Back then, this was uncharted territory and little was known about our human origins. Today, our beginnings are better understood. And after a lifetime of interest in the bushmen, Thomas has come to see that their lifestyle reveals great, hidden truths about human evolution.

    As she displayed in her bestseller, The Hidden Life of Dogs, Thomas has a rare gift for giving voice to the voices we don't usually listen to, and helps us see the path that we have taken in our human journey. In The Old Way, she shows how the skills and customs of the hunter-gatherer share much in common with the survival tactics of our animal predecessors. And since it is "knowledge, not objects, that endure" over time, Thomas vividly brings us to see how linked we are to our origins in the animal kingdom.
    The Old Way is a rare and remarkable achievement, sure to stir up controversy, and worthy of celebration.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 1, 2006
    ISBN9781400173075
    Author

    Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

    One of the most widely read American anthropologists, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed dogs, cats, and elephants during her half-century-long career. In the 1980s Thomas studied elephants alongside Katy Payne—the scientist who discovered elephants' communication via infrasound. In 1993 Thomas wrote The Hidden Life of Dogs, a groundbreaking work of animal psychology that spent nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her book on cats, Tribe of Tiger, was also an international bestseller. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on her family's former farm, where she observes deer, bobcats, bear, and many other species of wildlife.

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    Reviews for The Old Way

    4.5/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The book is structured, as I read it, into three parts. The first being the shortest, was concerned with our evolutionary past. The second, being the longest, were various topics about the Bushmen tribe Elizabeth Thomas was with. And the third was about the current, dismal, situation of the Bushmen which is not unlike the state of life found in reservations in America today.The meat of the book covers topics such as their religion, their interaction with animals, their social organization and interaction, gender relations, and hunting and survival amongst others.I found the book to be a fun and quick read, not dense at all. Reading it has a unique feel to it, being (I'm assuming) written after the fact from memory and diary entries.I feel The Old Way is a good book that everyone can benefit from reading. It's only limitation is that it is not a source for anthropological reference, but mind you, these were not its intentions.
    • 5/5
      I first heard of the Bushmen through National Geographic's Genographic Project (Spencer Wells "The Journey of Man") which found genetic evidence suggesting Bushmen are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world--a "genetic Adam" from which all the worlds ethnic groups can ultimately trace genetic heritage. Within the face of a Bushmen one can see all the genetic expressions of the world (Asian eyes, African nose, Indian skin, etc..) So I was delighted when this new book appeared by bushmen expert Elizabeth Marshall Thomas who, along with her brother and parents, were one of the first westerners to live with and scientifically document the Bushmen in the 1950s (when Elizabeth was a teenager). Her parents and brother went on to become famous Bushmen experts and proponents in their own careers.Older members of the Bushmen tribe were valued and respected for their wisdom, likewise Elizabeth is passing down her knowledge and experience for later generations. The Bushman way of life she saw in the 1950s, perhaps as old as 150,000 years, no longer exists - all it took was one generation and the long unbroken chain known as "The Old Way" has disappeared. It is the same sad story told the world over from Native Americans to Tibet to Eskimos. Yet Elizabeth reveals a deeper lesson, which is the "myth" that the Bushmen ever wanted it any other way - they want the comforts of modernization, just as we would prefer not to hunt and gather food each day. Bushmen want to travel, see the world, be a part of wider humanity, and for that we can celebrate and welcome all they have to teach. This book provides that introduction.