We note first that Table 8.1 makes no mention of the main causes of accidental death in modern Westernized societies: in descending sequence of death toll, we are killed by cars (Plate 44), alcohol, guns, surgery, and motorcycles, of which none except occasionally alcohol is a hazard for traditional peoples. One might wonder whether we have merely traded our old hazards of lions and tree-falls for our new hazards of cars and alcohol. But there are two other big differences between environmental hazards in modern societies and in traditional societies besides the particular hazards involved. One difference is that the cumulative risk of accidental death is probably lower for modern societies, because we exert far more control over our environment even though it does contain new hazards of our own manufacture such as cars. The other difference is that, thanks to modern medicine, the damage caused by our accidents is much more often repaired before it kills us or inflicts life-long incapacity. When I broke a tendon in my hand, a surgeon splinted my hand, which healed and regained full function within six months, but some New Guinea friends who experienced tendon and bone breaks ended up with no or improper healing and were crippled for life.
Those two differences are part of the reason why traditional people so willingly abandon their jungle lifestyle, admired in the abstract by Westerners, who don’t have to live that lifestyle themselves. For instance, those differences help explain why so many Ache Indians give up the freedom of their lives as forest hunters and settle on reservations, degrading as that may seem to outsiders. Similarly, an American friend of mine traveled halfway around the world to meet a recently discovered band of New Guinea forest hunter-gatherers, only to discover that half of them had already chosen to move to an Indonesian village and put on T-shirts, because life there was safer and more comfortable. “Rice to eat, and no more mosquitoes!” was their short explanation.
As you read through the seven sets of entries of Table 8.1, you’ll see some common themes of dangers that are serious for many or most traditional peoples, but that are rare or surprising for us moderns. Wild animals are indeed a major threat for traditional peoples (Plate 43). For example, jaguars cause 8% of deaths of adult Ache men. Lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, buffalo, and crocodiles do kill Africans, but the animal that kills more Africans than any other is the hippopotamus. !Kung and African Pygmies are killed, bitten, scratched, and gored not just by big carnivores but also by antelope and other injured prey that they hunt. While we are horrified at the idea of !Kung hunters driving prides of lions from carcasses, the !Kung recognize that the most dangerous lion is in fact a lone beast too old, sick, or wounded to catch swift prey and reduced to attacking humans.
Poisonous snakes also rank high as a hazard for the tropical peoples of Table 8.1. They cause 14% of deaths of adult Ache men (i.e., more than jaguars), and even more loss of limbs. Almost every adult Yanomamo and Ache man has been bitten at least once. Ranked even more often as dangerous are trees, as a result both of trees or branches falling on people in the forest (remember my own experience that I described at the start of Chapter 7), and of people climbing a tree to hunt or to gather fruit or honey and falling out of the tree (Plate 42). Domestic fires for warmth are a bigger risk than bush fires, such that most New Guinea Highlanders and !Kung acquire burn scars from sleeping next to a fire as an adult or playing next to it as a baby.
Death from exposure to cold and/or wet weather is a danger outside the tropics, and at high altitudes in New Guinea and elsewhere in the tropics. Even for the Ache living in Paraguay near the Tropic of Capricorn, winter temperatures can drop below freezing, and an Ache caught out in the forest at night without a fire is at risk of dying. On one of New Guinea’s highest mountains, while I was hiking well prepared and warmly dressed in freezing rain and gale-force winds at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I met a group of seven New Guinea schoolchildren who had foolishly set out that morning in clear weather, wearing shorts and T-shirts, to cross the mountain. By the time that I encountered them several hours later, they were shivering uncontrollably, stumbling, and barely able to speak. Local men with me, who shepherded them to a shelter, pointed out to me a nearby rock pile behind which a group of 23 men had sought shelter in bad weather in a previous year and had ended up dying there of exposure. Drowning and being struck by lightning are other environmental hazards for traditional as well as modern peoples.
The !Kung, New Guineans, Ache, and many other foraging peoples are legendary for their ability to follow tracks, read clues in the environment, and detect a barely indicated trail. Nevertheless, even they, and especially their children, occasionally make mistakes, get lost, and may be unable to find their way back to camp before nightfall, with fatal consequences. Friends of mine were involved in two such tragedies in New Guinea, one in which a boy walking with a group of adults wandered off and was never found despite exhaustive searches that same day and on the following days, the other in which an experienced strong man became lost on a mountain in the late afternoon, could not reach his village, and died of exposure in the forest at night.
Still other causes of accidents are our own weapons and tools. The arrows used by !Kung hunters are smeared with a potent poison, with the result that an accidental scratch by an arrow is the most serious cause of hunting accidents for the !Kung. Traditional people around the world accidentally cut themselves with their own knives and axes, as do modern cooks and woodsmen.
Less heroic and much commoner than lions or lightning as causes of accidental death or injury are humble insect bites and thorn scratches. In the humid tropics any bite or scratch—even one from a mere gnat, leech, louse, mosquito, or tick—is likely to become infected, and to develop if untreated into an incapacitating abscess. For example, once when I revisited a New Guinea friend named Delba with whom I had spent several weeks hiking through the forest two years previously, I was shocked to find him house-bound and unable to walk at all, as the result of a simple scratch that had become infected, and that then responded quickly to antibiotics that I carried but that New Guinea villagers don’t have. Ants, bees, centipedes, scorpions, spiders, and wasps not only bite or scratch but also inject poisons that are sometimes fatal. Along with falling trees, stinging wasps and biting ants are the dangers that my New Guinea friends fear most in the forest. Some insects lay an egg under one’s skin, from which hatches a larva that produces a huge and permanently disfiguring abscess.
While these causes of accidents in traditional societies are varied, they yield some generalizations. Serious consequences of accidents include not just death itself but also, even if one survives, the possibility of temporarily or permanently decreased physical effectiveness, resulting in impaired capacity to provide for one’s children and other relatives, decreased resistance to diseases, crippling, and limb amputation. It’s these “minor” consequences, not the risk of death, that make my New Guinea friends and me so afraid of ants, wasps, and infected thorn scratches. A poisonous snake bite that the victim survives may still cause gangrene and leave the victim paralyzed, maimed, or having lost the bitten arm or leg.