Traditional knowledge accumulated over countless generations is being tragically and irretrievably lost as community elders pass away. Younger generations often lack the motivation or resources to record this knowledge as well as the personal life experiences of their elders while the opportunity to do still exists.
We realize that time is rapidly running out to document what remains of traditional knowledge while the elders are still living. By helping community members to document oral history through the use of available technologies (e.g. digital recorders), communities in future will still be able to drawn on this intellectual property (IP) to promote their cultural identity and plan sustainable income generation that capitalizes on their IP as a unique asset. Participatory mapping is also an integral part of the knowledge conservation process as knowledge related to traditional territories is unique to each area and also will inevitably disappear unless recorded.
The traditional knowledge systems also hold great value to humankind in terms of deepening our understanding of long-term ecosystem dynamics, and our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.
Please see our Activity Blog for an update on our activities in documenting vulnerable traditional knowledge of the San, Kgalagadi and other groups around Botswana.
We realize that time is rapidly running out to document what remains of traditional knowledge while the elders are still living. By helping community members to document oral history through the use of available technologies (e.g. digital recorders), communities in future will still be able to drawn on this intellectual property (IP) to promote their cultural identity and plan sustainable income generation that capitalizes on their IP as a unique asset. Participatory mapping is also an integral part of the knowledge conservation process as knowledge related to traditional territories is unique to each area and also will inevitably disappear unless recorded.
The traditional knowledge systems also hold great value to humankind in terms of deepening our understanding of long-term ecosystem dynamics, and our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.
Please see our Activity Blog for an update on our activities in documenting vulnerable traditional knowledge of the San, Kgalagadi and other groups around Botswana.
DID YOU KNOW?
- It is believed that the 'Khoi-San' people of today represent the earliest and oldest branch of the human family tree, having diverged from the common ancestors of all modern day humans over 100,000 years ago, with all other genetic lineages being "younger" in that they diverged more recently. In essence therefore, the San are the closest living descendents to our collective common ancestors (1,2)
- The San genetic lineage was the most numerous group of humans on Earth until as recently as 22,000 years ago. (1,2)
- By 1950, the San population had dwindled to an estimated total population of only 50,000 individuals, due to centuries of annihilation and assimilation by expanding agricultural-orientated (non-hunter gatherer) populations. Today, people who identify themselves as San by way of language and historical cultural affiliation still only number around 125,000 people. (3)
- Those parts of the Kalahari that are the least developed and populated represent the last areas where the San still potentially have access to, and can derive a living from, their traditional territories. Most San today depend in some way on welfare support to survive but a significant number still need access to natural resources to survive.
- Due to changing circumstances and a lack of inter-generational transfer, only a very small percentage of San still possess the unique skills and knowlegde they are most famous for, such as hunting using bows and poisoned arrows and persistence hunting whereby hunting quarry is chased on foot to the point of exhaustion (perhaps Humankind's oldest known hunting method with only 1 known surviving person still capable of this skill).
(1). Shuster et al. 2010. Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from Southern Africa. Nature 463, pp 943–947
(2). Henn, B.M., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Feldman, M.W., 2012. The great human expansion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
109(44), pp.17758-17764.
(3). Suzman, J., 2017. Affluence without Abundance: The disappearing World of the Bushmen. Bloomsbury Publishing.