Fragments of the Hunt: Persistence Hunting, Tracking and Prehistoric Art

1. What they did

Why did people start making images? Mikko Ijäs, an artist writing a doctoral thesis in an art department, looks for the answer in hunting, and in particular in persistence hunting: running and tracking an animal, without projectile weapons, until it overheats and can no longer run. He says plainly that he writes as an artist, not as a specialist in the fields he draws on.

He builds on two lines of work. One is the “shamanic approach” of David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson, who linked rock art to the altered states of consciousness reached in hunter-gatherer trance rituals. The other is the persistence hunting and endurance running work of David Carrier, Dennis Bramble, Daniel Lieberman and the tracker Louis Liebenberg.

He sets out eight conditions that the activity behind early ritual and image-making would have to meet. It would need to be ancient, central to survival, mentally demanding enough to push brain evolution, able to cause altered states, still part of African ritual, visible as “fragments” in early images, and still practised and enjoyed today. He then works through the evidence chapter by chapter:

• San peoples and rock art: the history of the San of southern Africa, and rock art sites he visited in Namibia.
• Human evolution: endurance running, systematic scavenging and persistence hunting from Homo erectus onwards.
• The Kalahari persistence hunters: accounts from Liebenberg, the Marshall family, Silberbauer and the Finnish explorer Henrik Jacob Wikar (1778 to 1779). He adds his own conversations with Ju/’hoan hunters while tracking with them in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia, in late 2014.
• The psychology of running and trance: runner’s high, and how the San healing dance can bring on altered states.
• The images themselves: Upper Palaeolithic and southern African rock art, especially part-human, part-animal figures (therianthropes) and depictions of tracks.

The thesis is a long argument drawn mostly from published sources, with some first-hand fieldwork. Shamanism is discussed in Chapters 6 to 10, and tracking in rock art in Chapters 13 and 16.

2. What they found

Persistence hunting (from the literature)

• Liebenberg recorded the last persistence hunts in the central Kalahari, Botswana: one was reported to him in 1985, and he joined the 1990 “Kudu Chase” on foot. Since the 1990s the only persistence hunters lived in the central and northern Kalahari (Botswana and Namibia), and hunts were still possible as recently as 2001.
• Hunters choose the hottest weather and drink beforehand. Slower runners keep to the tracks while the fastest runner keeps the animal moving, and a runner who loses the spoor is caught up by those still on it. Older Ju/’hoan hunters told Liebenberg in 2009 that they drank nothing while running after eland, and could follow an eland spoor for 30 km in three to six hours.
• The main reason for giving up is not exhaustion but losing the track, especially when the animal rejoins a herd.
• Eland were the easiest to run down: docile, heavy with fat, and stubbornly running upwind. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas records Ju/’hoan hunters running down eland in the early 1950s. They ended the chase by grabbing the tail and spearing the animal, or, without a weapon, by smothering it.
• The earliest first-hand account the author found is Wikar’s journal from the Orange River area. In the hot season, hunters would rest in shade, then follow a steenbok’s spoor and flush them again until, by the third or fourth time, they could catch them by hand.

Becoming the animal

• During the 1990 Kudu Chase, Liebenberg felt “as if I myself actually became the kudu”, leaping from one set of tracks to the next. He was so focused on the spoor that he did not notice his own exhaustion.
• Ju/’hoan tracker and interpreter Kxao told the author: “When I see an animal spoor, I become the animal. When I dance, I become the animal.” Kxao had never been in a deep trance, but he said tracking was connected to the healing dances.
• The thesis also reports, from the ski historian Nils Larsen, that skiing hunters of the Altai Mountains in northern China feel they become the animal they pursue over days of tracking.

Tracking skill (from the literature and fieldwork)

• Liebenberg’s three levels of tracking: simple (following clear prints), systematic (gathering many signs to build a picture of the animal), and speculative (forming a working hypothesis and looking for signs where expected, a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning).
• Kalahari trackers can recognise each person in a small band from their footprints. Kxao told the author he could identify everyone in his village from their spoor, and sometimes why they had gone out. People fetching water leave light, fast tracks going and slow, heavy tracks coming back, sometimes with drips of water.
• A cited study (Stander and colleagues, 1997) found Ju/’hoan trackers identified individual animals from their spoor correctly in 93.8% of 569 cases.
• Ju/’hoan men and women analyse every spoor they see, “in good humour”, like reading the newspaper. Younger hunters can be too imaginative and older ones more conservative.
• In 2013, three Ju/’hoan trackers read Ice Age human footprints in four French caves. They identified the age and sex of the people, how many there were, and in part what they were doing (Pastoors, Lenssen-Erz and colleagues, 2015).

Tracks and signs in rock art

• In Lascaux, some aurochs are painted with a hoof print, seen from above, in place of a hoof. The author argues only a tracker would think of this.
• Red dots in Chauvet and Lascaux may be blood spoor (following Dale Guthrie).
• Liebenberg reads bell-shaped figures in El Castillo cave, Spain, long seen as female symbols, as the hoof prints of a jumping animal in soft mud or snow.
• Engraved tracks are common at /Ui-//aes (Twyfelfontein), Namibia. Painted bear tracks were seen in Cascadia Cave, Oregon.
• Direct hunting scenes with weapons are rare in both European and southern African rock art. The author suggests this fits a hunting method that needed no weapons. Some Brandberg paintings may show runners following spoor, some partly transformed into animals.

3. What they concluded

• Persistence hunting and the evolution of tracking skills were crucial to human evolution. Human ancestors may have been persistence hunters for some two million years, and at least for the last 200,000. Good food and the mental demands of ever more complex tracking may together have helped drive brain growth.
• The intense focus of tracking, combined with endurance running, heat and dehydration, can lead the hunter to the experience of becoming the hunted animal. The author proposes that this experience arose in everyday hunting long before any ritual. Ceremonies such as the San healing dance may later have been developed to bring it on deliberately.
• Many features that the shamanic approach links to trance (“fragments of the dance”) could also be “fragments of the hunt”. These include therianthropes, tracks, blood spoor, nosebleeds, running people and animals, and the absence of weapons. The famous Rosetta panel at Game Pass Shelter, South Africa, with a dying eland held by the tail by a transformed figure, could be an allegory of a persistence hunt.
• He offers this as an extension of the shamanic approach, not a replacement for it. The hypothesis does not explain how people became image-makers. It may explain the powerful personal experience of becoming an animal that gave people the urge to show it to others in images.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is a central subject of the thesis, mostly drawn from Liebenberg’s work and other literature. The author also spent his days tracking with Ju/’hoan hunters in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia, in late 2014, including following a kudu with two hunters and Kxao, and sleeping on the tracks while following prey. The thesis does not report data from this tracking. It reports conversations and observations, such as Kxao’s account of identifying people from their footprints. Photographs show Ju/’hoan trackers examining a wildebeest spoor and digging out a springhare. Tracks and signs discussed include footprints, blood spoor, scat, urine, feeding signs, paths, and signs left by wind and rolling stones.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The Ju/‘hoan trackers the author tracked with (Kxao, G/aqo and Bo) are described as hunters and trackers, with no certification or test of their skill reported. Liebenberg is called a “master tracker”, also without a certification given. The thesis cites one test of Ju/’hoan trackers’ skill (Stander and colleagues, 1997, 93.8% correct identification of individual animals from spoor), but not of these trackers.