The final widespread method is to kill the victim violently without the victim’s cooperation or consent, again by strangling or burying alive, or else by suffocating, stabbing, delivering an ax blow to the head, or breaking the neck or back. One Ache Indian man interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado described his methods of killing old women (as mentioned above, old men were instead left to walk off): “I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts [classificatory aunts] when they were still moving (alive)…. I would step on them, then they all died, there by the big river…. I didn’t used to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. When they were still moving I would break them [their backs or necks]…. I wouldn’t care for old women; all by myself I would stick them [with his bow].”
Our reaction to these accounts of spouses, children, brothers or sisters, or fellow band members killing or abandoning an old or sick person is likely to be one of horror—just as is our reaction to the accounts in Chapter 5 of a mother killing her newborn baby if it is a twin or born damaged. But, just as in those cases of infanticide, we have to ask ourselves: what else could a nomadic society, or a society with not enough food for the whole group, do with its elderly? Throughout their lives, the victims have already watched old or sick people being abandoned or killed, and have probably already done it to their own parents. It is the form of death that they expect, and in which in many cases they cooperate. We are fortunate that we do not face that same ordeal ourselves as victim or suicide assister or killer, because we have the good fortune to live in societies with surplus food and medical care. As Winston Churchill wrote of the Japanese admiral Kurita, who had to choose between two equally awful courses of action in wartime, “Those who have endured a similar ordeal may judge him.” In fact, many of you readers of this book have endured or will endure a similar ordeal yourselves, when you find yourself forced to decide whether to tell the physician caring for your aged or sick parent in failing health that the time has come to halt further aggressive medical intervention, or just to administer pain-killers, sedatives, and palliative care.
Usefulness of old people
What useful services can old people perform for traditional societies? From a cold-blooded adaptive perspective, societies in which old people do remain useful will tend to prosper if those societies care for their elderly. More often, of course, young people who care for their elders couch their reasons not in terms of that evolutionary advantage but in terms of love, respect, and obligation. However, when a group of hunter-gatherers is starving and debating whom they can afford to feed, cold-blooded considerations may be voiced explicitly. Of the services rendered by older people, the first ones that I shall mention are also performed by younger people but are still within the power of older people, while other services involve skills perfected by long experience and hence especially suitable to old people.
People eventually reach an age at which men can no longer spear to death a lion, and women can no longer trot miles with a heavy load to and from the mongongo nut grove. Nevertheless, there are other ways in which older people can continue to obtain food for their grandchildren and thereby ease the provisioning burden on their children and children-in-law. Ache men continue to hunt and gather into their 60s by concentrating on small animals, fruit, and palm products and breaking trail when the band shifts camp. Older !Kung men set animal traps, gather plant food, and join younger men on hunts in order to interpret animal tracks and propose strategies. Among Hadza hunter-gatherer women of Tanzania, the age group working the hardest consists of post-menopausal grandmothers (Plate 21), who spend on the average seven hours a day foraging for tubers and fruit—even though they no longer have dependent children of their own to feed. But they do have hungry grandchildren, and the more time that a Hadza grandmother spends foraging for food, the faster her grandchildren gain weight as a result. Similar benefits have been described for 18th- and 19th-century Finnish and Canadian farmers: analyses of church and genealogical records show that more children survive to adulthood if they have a living grandmother than if both grandmothers are dead, and that every decade that a post-menopausal woman survives past age 50 is associated with her children producing on the average two extra children of their own (presumably because of the grandmother’s help).
Another service that older people can render even past the age of digging tubers seven hours a day is baby-sitting. That frees up the older person’s children and children-in-law to spend more time foraging unencumbered for their own children, the grandchildren of the older person. !Kung grandparents often take care of their grandchildren uninterruptedly for several consecutive days, thereby enabling their children to undertake overnight hunting and gathering trips on which the grandchildren would be an encumbrance. A main reason that elderly Samoans give today for migrating to the United States is to care for their grandchildren, and thus to enable their children to hold jobs outside the house and to face fewer burdens inside the house.
Old people can make things for their grown children to use, such as tools, weapons, baskets, pots, and woven textiles (Plate 22). For example, older Semang hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula were noted for making blowguns. This is an area where the elderly not only try to hang on to earlier abilities but are likely to exceclass="underline" the best basket-makers and potters are often older people.
Other areas in which abilities grow with age include medicine, religion, entertainment, relationships, and politics. Traditional midwives and medicine men are often old, as are magicians and priests, prophets and sorcerers, and the leaders of songs, games, dances, and initiation rites. Older people enjoy a huge social advantage, insofar as they have spent a lifetime building up a network of relationships, into which they can then introduce their children. Political leaders are usually older people, so much so that the phrase “tribal elders” has become virtually a synonym for tribal leaders. That remains generally true even in modern state societies: for instance, the average age on taking office is 54 for American presidents and 53 for American Supreme Court justices.
But perhaps the most important function of older people in traditional societies is one that may not have occurred to readers of this book. In a literate society the main repositories of information are written or digital sources: encyclopedias, books, magazines, maps, diaries, notes, letters, and now the Internet. If we want to ascertain some fact, we look it up in a written source or else online. But that option doesn’t exist for a pre-literate society, which must rely instead on human memories. Hence the minds of older people are the society’s encyclopedias and libraries. Time and time again in New Guinea, when I am interviewing local people and ask them some question to which they are unsure of the answer, my informants pause and say, “Let’s ask the old man [or the old woman].” Older people know the tribe’s myths and songs, who is related to whom, who did what to whom when, the names and habits and uses of hundreds of species of local plants and animals, and where to go to find food when conditions are poor. Hence caring for older people becomes a matter of life or death, just as caring for one’s hydrographic charts is a matter of life or death for modern boat captains. I’ll illustrate this value of old people by the story of a case involving knowledge essential for a tribe’s survival.