The Hadza and the Studies That Document Their Use of the Baobab

Abstract

The 1300 or so Hadza are traditionally highly mobile foraging people whose homeland includes the grassy flood plains, gallery forests, and baobab-clad rocky outcrops and uplands that surround Lake Eyasi in the Eastern Rift Valley of northern Tanzania. What sets them apart from their neighbors is their central-place hunting and gathering way of life; the development of this mode of adaptation became the economic foundation of hominin evolution for most of the past four to eight million years, lasting worldwide until the conditions for the success of foraging as an economic way of life began to change with the advent of agriculture and herding a mere 12,000 years ago. The Hadza are now among a small number of extant foragers whose way of making a living is an expression of humanity’s ancestral mode of adaptation. Because of this, they have become one of the most intensely studied kin-ordered societies in the world. By looking at their multipurpose use of the baobab in the context of their central-place hunter-gatherer way of life, this book lays the ground for identifying the baobab as the Hadza’s tree of life and, by extension, humanity’s ancestral tree of life. This chapter introduces the Hadza and the studies that document their use of the baobab.