The Journal of Heredity 2002:93(5)
© 2002 The American Genetic Association 93:386-387
Book Review |
Human Biology of Pastoral Populations
Department of Pathology, UCSD Medical Center, San Diego, CA 92103
Edited by W. R. Leonard and M. H. Crawford. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2002.
While I was reading this interesting book for review, the Kenyan Masai were donating their most valuable possessions, cattle, to the people of the United States in memory and for the benefit of survivors of the 9/11 events. Such a gift may have struck Americans as being absurd or at least somewhat peculiar—unless they had read this book or were familiar with the pastoral way of life, the topic of the book, which was conceived in discussions by major scholars at a 1997 meeting. It concentrates on the biology and on the health of pastoral groups, "drawing together our current knowledge of the biology, population structure and ecology of herding population."
Human Biology of Pastoral Populations has 12 chapters that review the scholars' primary research and reflect upon the very different types of pastoralism that were studied by these authors. The pastoralists examined in this book are the nomadic and occasionally sedentary tribes with only occasional sporadic nomadism of Asia and Africa. Pastoralism, as is explained by Leonard and Crawford in a lucid introductory chapter, "is an effective means of exploiting marginal environments." But the book also includes considerations of the Basques; the Sámi (formerly known as Lapps), comparing them with Finnish tribes; various Siberian nomads; Turkmen (Yomut); and others. It is a fascinating agglomeration of research that introduced me more deeply to the problems and ways of life of these large numbers of nomads, some comprising more than hundreds of thousands of people. Much genetic research provides the information on Siberian pastoralists in another chapter by Crawford et al. Among other studies, it examines the genetic relation to surrounding tribes and to the origin of Amerinds. But since I have a great interest in South America, I was saddened to find no chapters on the Andean pastoralists or other South American Indian societies. Perhaps future essays will deal with their complex structure as well.
As is discussed in several contributions, some of the pastoralist societies date back many millennia, and many have their own languages that linguistically separate them from adjacent cultures and give rise to interesting speculations as to their origin. Others have very specific societal characteristics that are quite varied in the assemblage of cultures discussed in these essays. For instance, some pastoralists prefer male offspring as one intuitively might expect, but others favor female children for reasons that are not at all obvious. Moreover, despite the widespread preference for marriage to occur within the clan—even taboos existing against marriage outside the pastoral society—it came as a surprise to me to learn that many of the pastoralists encourage cousin marriages. One might thus have expected to find some reference made to the possibly expected results of inbreeding. In the chapters that examine in some detail the causes of death of these nomads, "inbreeding depression," or a discussion on congenital anomalies, or a consideration of genetic diseases in general might be brought up. There is none of that, and one wonders whether they occur and whether they are a problem in such small gene pools. The causes of death relate to accidents (in males), to starvation during periods of drought (which often brings a simultaneous reduction in fertility), and also occasionally to childbearing periods in women. Indeed, dependence on climatic changes, particularly concerning periods of drought and its imposition on the livestock upon which most pastoralists depend, was once the principal problem faced by these nomadic societies. This is changing, though, as political interventions have often commanded that a more sedentary lifestyle be imposed; schools now often attempt to end the prevailing illiteracy, and political boundaries change periodically and arbitrarily, with new laws being imposed by new rulers. Those external influences, more so than climatic changes, are the principal reasons why a reduction of pastoralism is seen worldwide.
Anthropologists will find interesting discussion on physical measurements, origins of languages, division of labor among sexes and children, and much more information in the detailed research results that are provided by the expert authors. The upshot from reading this book for me has been to decry the authoritarian changes that are being imposed by new political forces that demand radical adaptation to new ways of life from a group of individuals who, from experience over millennia, have evolved a system that "rolls with the punches" of the changing environment and have succeeded in survival despite periods of severe hardship. All the more, then, one must admire the Masai tribe that donated its precious livestock to the 9/11 disaster because of its empathy for the tragedy affecting so many Western folk. After reading these pages one only wishes that governments would more prudently employ research by anthropologists before creating sedentary villages for traditional nomadic societies, before demanding fencing for livestock accustomed to nomadic grazing, before erecting political barriers through corridors needed for herding livestock to more productive grazing pastures, and before making other incisions into what has proved successful for these societies in the past. It is as though the only way of life that is worthy of consideration is that of the West, but apparently, this just isn't so—at least for the nomads.
The essays end with a consideration of the genetic distribution of lactose tolerance, a condition regulated by a dominant gene and one that is variably distributed throughout the world. The authors pre sent the three dominant theories of its evolution and show its close correlation with pastoral (milk-dependent) societies rather than, as had been theorized, a relation to an arid environment.
For the non-anthropologist, Human Biology of Pastoral Populations is an excellent introduction into the fascinating world of nomads. For the expert, the book provides numerous pieces of new information, data that tie together many of the nomadic populations' ways of life and their biological features as well. It also gives extensive bibliographic resources. An excellent job of editing has been done on this text and, surprisingly, it contains a most useful index.
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