The World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers

In their own histories, they are a people descended from giants, granted a life among those of the mortal plane before finally returning to the sun from which all life begins. In our histories, they are among the first people ever to venture outward from the cradles of humanity, taking root in the lands now called Tanzania for tens of thousands of years. In today’s world, they are an isolate in every way imaginable. Their ancestral history traces a winding path so far through history that we have little idea of their lineage, and their way of life, although once innate to every human across much of prehistory, is now utterly alien to the vast majority of people across the world today.

They are called the Hadza, and while their homeland today goes by names made up by other people from other lands, it’s known to them as the same thing it’s been for millennia: Hadzaland, the home of the last hunter-gatherers.

Finding Hadzaland

If you’re going to make your way to Hadzaland, you’d better be prepared for a very, very long journey. If you, like many among our audience, are coming from the United States, you’ll need to first cross an entire ocean, and land in places as far afield as France, the Netherlands, Morocco, or Cote d’Ivoire. From there, you’ll need to cross the African continent, to places like Nairobi, or Addis Ababa, or Zanzibar.

From there, you might finally find your way to the Tanzanian capital, Dar-es-Salaam, and start your journey over land. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch a twice-a-week train to the city of Arusha, a cramped, dusty, and altogether unpleasant experience that’ll take you a full afternoon and night, through to the next morning. Then, you’ll catch a taxi and begin the hours-long drive to Babati, and then to Mbulu, and at that point, you’d best find somebody with a dependable jeep.

The next phase of the journey will take hours more, crawling across highlands and valleys, dodging swampland, until finally, you reach the southeastern shores of Lake Eyasi—and your search for the Hadza can truly begin.

If you’re able to find them at all, you’ll likely catch them in one of four places. They might be making camp on the southern end of Lake Eyasi, sandwiched in between the open water and the Yaeda Valley swamplands to the east. Or, you might find them in the Mbulu Highlands, a vast plateau adjoined by a slow, stumbling cascade toward the lake’s shores.

Alternately, you might find them in the quiet lands west of the lake’s southern tip, where little exists but their tribe, or, if you’re really lucky, you might even find them in and around the six-thousand-strong town of Mang’ola, best known for being the so-called onion farm of Tanzania. We say lucky, because at least if you find them in Mang’ola, you might be able to sleep in slightly more comfortable accommodations than the Hadza themselves prefer.

But, then again, you might not find them anywhere. The Hadza are nomads, true hunter-gatherers, and they don’t settle in one place for very long. They forage across a broad range, everywhere from the fringes of the Serengeti Plains to the foothills of Mount Oldeani to the bed of Lake Eyasi itself, as it opens and expands during the dry season.

The lake is nearly empty in the dry months, and often less than a meter deep even during the wet season, an unreliable source of clean-enough drinking water even at the best of times. Instead, the Hadza must keep pace with the movements of the land, if they are to sustain themselves. Skilled in the use of a bow and arrow, they break Tanzania’s prohibitions on Serengeti hunting on a daily basis, although Tanzania has no intention of ever attempting to punish them for it.

Alongside the meat they collect from their local prey animals, the impala and waterfowl that call Lake Eyasi home, they forage for berries and bee honey, taking what they’re able and moving on with faith that the local stock will be replenished when they return.

Of course, move through their range long enough, and you’re bound to come upon the Hadza sometime. They don’t travel as a single people, although with a total surviving population no higher than 1,300, they probably could get by in one roving society if they wished to. Instead, individual bands among the Hadza rarely number more than twenty or thirty except in berry-harvesting season.

They’re all across the landscape, rarely settling down for long, often hunting and foraging by themselves during the course of a day. Their movements, although not at the whims of the landscape, are dictated in large part by what their home communicates to them: when it’s time to hunt game, when it’s time to live off the vegetation, and when it’s time to find and work together with their neighbors to survive the lean months. They claim no homes, they tend no fields, they own no livestock, and they make no stores of food, even small caches that might hold them over through lean periods.

They are true hunter-gatherers, in a time when nearly all people like them have long since disappeared.

The Hadza, Through Hadza Eyes

In the modern day, the Hadza are a fascinating cultural vestige, one that allows a rare, clear look into a largely prehistoric lifestyle. The Hadza’s traditions, their customs, and their way of life have all been preserved remarkably well, so much so that they’ve been described by some sources as uniquely resistant to modernization—but not because of any hostility to the modern world. Unlike the uncontacted tribes of North Sentinel Island or the deep Amazon rainforest, the Hadza are a people keenly aware of the existence of an entire modern world beyond their lands.

They don’t prohibit their members from exploring it, or from traveling, or even settling down in the local towns and villages that dot modern Tanzania. But nonetheless, their way of life persists in full view of the rest of the world, offering a unique look at how a hunter-gatherer community like the Hadza see themselves through their own eyes.

The Hadza are vague about their own creation mythologies, with many details suspected to have been lost in translation, and others remembered in different ways by different Hadza, during various interviews throughout time. Like many aspects to Hadza life, their understanding and constructs of spirituality bear little resemblance to the major religions of today’s world. Many Hadza, when asked by Westerners, don’t seem to have a clear answer for the question of just how the Hadza people came to exist, and while anthropologists have reported Hadza mythologies that their people climbed down from the heavens on the necks of giraffes or the branches of the baobab tree, few Hadza seem to share this understanding of their own culture.

The sun and moon do have corresponding deities, in the form of beings called Ishoko and Seta respectively, and the Hadza do claim a third, god-like being called Haine, who at least some researchers have indicated may correspond to the later introduction of the Christian god. But individual Hadza appear to have little consensus on how the three beings relate to each other, whether they have supernatural powers or control over the Hadza’s world, or whether they have any sort of an afterlife, although many individual Hadza express a belief that when they die, they’ll be returned to the sun. The group has no real religious doctrine, no clearly defined oral history past a few generations, and no shrines, religious sites, or anything of the kind.

But what they do have, are stories, and it’s the Hadza’s stories that offer the clearest window into how these people understand themselves. In one telling, researchers Daniel Ndagala and N. Zengu tell of a Hadza history across four historical epochs, successive generations and cultures that eventually led to the Hadza of today.

In the first epoch, great, hairy giants roamed the Hadza’s ancestral land, hunting their prey by running after it until it fell down, exhausted, and making a life without tools or fire. In the second epoch, the giants lost their hair and learned to use fire, as well as medicines, and took to living in caves. The third epoch saw the Hadza people shrink closer to their current size, discover their neighbors, build bows and arrows, and learn both to assemble huts, and to gamble.

The fourth epoch is the one that the Hadza know today, and can describe historically in their own way, going back generation after generation to place certain events.

But the Hadza are not a people grounded in their oral histories, or intent on showing fealty to traditions that dominated the lives of their forefathers. Instead, the traditions that seem to matter most are ones that relate to the here-and-now. Manhood is a particularly important concept, known to the Hadza as “epeme”, and achieved by young men, usually in their early twenties, who prove their maturity by killing large game.

Epeme men consume specially reserved parts of some of the Hadza’s more powerful game, and must eat it only with other epeme men, but although the killing of large game is a rite of passage, it’s not a necessary one. A man in his thirties is likely to become epeme even if that ritual is not complete. So, too, do the legends of the Hadza focus on their ancestral neighbors, the sedentary, agricultural Isanzu people, who the Hadza regard in their mythology as benevolent, and sometimes even heroic allies.

Their legends tell of giants who transformed lions from harmless animal neighbors into dangerous beings, and of cultural heroes across time who venture outward from Hadza territory, and return with the wisdom and the goods of other, nearby cultures.

Modern Hadza society—to the extent that we can call it modern at all—is non-hierarchical, with no internal clan rivalries, no kings or chieftains, and no conception of their people as anything other than a sprawling extended family. Just about every Hadza can trace a kinship pathway to any other Hadza; somebody’s always somebody’s uncle’s wife’s cousin’s son’s girlfriend, that sort of thing. Between individuals, there appears to be no real sense of individual status; an elderly person is treated with a bit more reverence, epeme men have their own privileges, but people of all mature ages and across sexes are considered to be functionally equal.

Each person within a Hadza band, and each family unit, is considered to be fundamentally independent, helped along by the fact that every adult man does eventually become epeme, and is considered able to hunt and forage on his own. Each band forms a small community, with child-rearing responsibilities shared between the group regardless of gender or age of the caretaker, or familial relation to the children. Decisions are made through group discussion, small slights are generally dealt with quite expediently, and the few larger conflicts that do come up, are usually solved when one disputing party voluntarily makes the decision to travel with another band.

While the culture is mostly a monogamous one, that monogamy does not appear to be enforced, and partnered couples are similarly free to live with the family of either person, or go off on their own if they so choose. When it comes to the Hadza lifespan, historically, people haven’t typically lived past the age of forty, although now, adults are living more and more often into their elderly years.

And when we say that the Hadza don’t stay anywhere for long, we really do mean it. Hadza bands have a wide range of reasons to leave a place at any time; not only do they need to keep up with the movement of water around their lands from season to season, and the movement of prey animals with it, but they’re inclined to frequently split up as needed, and only sometimes expect that they might come back together anytime soon. A band will depart camp when somebody falls seriously ill, especially if they die, in hopes of avoiding whatever made that person sick.

When there are berries and tubers to harvest, several bands might join together to pick and eat them, moving along when the harvest is done. When a large animal is killed far from camp, the camp will move to the animal, rather than trying to move the animal to the camp. And, sometimes, the groups simply move around because they’d like to, exploring potential better hunting spots or looking to assess an area they’ve not been to in a while.

All they have, will typically be carried on their backs from place to place, forming camps that can be assembled and taken apart again in the space of a day or less.

For the Hadza, hunting is a work of art, often involving ambushes of game at a watering hole, or long nighttime hunts that are done in pairs, using poison-tipped arrows in hopes of catching prey unawares. So, too, is foraging a well-developed skill, with foragers, particularly women, equipped with a range of tools to do their work. While most Hadza don’t use or rely on hunting dogs, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule either; some, adopting the custom from neighbor tribes, use dogs that they’re closely bonded with. And nor is the gender breakdown in hunting versus foraging set in stone, either; Hadza women are welcome to bring home animals they catch, and if a man stumbles upon a tree overflowing with fruit, he’s just as likely as his sister would be to bring some of it back.

And finally, there’s one other fascinating part of Hadza society that bears looking into: their symbiotic relationship with one specific wild animal, the greater honeyguide. A woodpecker-like bird that lives all across sub-Saharan Africa, the greater honeyguide has picked up on the Hadza’s tendency to forage for liquid honey, in beehives that the birds cannot brave by themselves. Over the centuries, the Hadza and the greater honeyguide have developed a unique relationship; the honeyguide will use a specific chattering call to get the attention of Hadza foragers, while the Hadza will shout and whistle to attract a nearby honeyguide to help in their cause.

The honeyguide leads the Hadza to a bee’s nest, where the Hadza are more than happy to inundate the next with smoke, chop into the nest, and acquire the honey they’re after. The bird, in return, gets precious beeswax. That’s not to say that the exchange is fair, exactly; often, the Hadza will hide or burn excess beeswax, in hopes that the honeyguide won’t have its hunger completely sated, and will instead choose to solicit help from the Hadza again in the future.

If the bird minds, it certainly doesn’t say so; instead, the Hadza and the honeyguide are frequent collaborators, and have been for long enough that the honeyguide features prominently in Hadza storytelling.

The Hadza, Through History

When we compare the Hadza to their global neighbors in the twenty-first century, it should go without saying that these are a highly unique people. But as it turns out, their uniqueness runs a lot deeper than even the Hadza could have known without twenty-first-century technology to help out. In fact, the Hadza are among the most genetically unique people in the world.

They are a pre-Bantu people; that is, an aboriginal population descended from the people who lived in Tanzania before something called the Bantu Expansion. That expansion took place when a population that was probably first based in what is now modern-day southern Cameroon, migrated across much of sub-Saharan Africa roughly two to four thousand years ago. The Hadza were the people before, and unlike many groups that found themselves in the way of Bantu expansion, they were able to retain their status as a group, apparently without too many procreative interactions, and survive the violence that has almost certainly befallen them at various points across the centuries.

But even the Hadza’s aboriginal status doesn’t do justice to just how dissimilar they are to any other humans on Earth. In fact, genetic studies on the Hadza have shown only an extremely distant relationship to other, similar groups in Africa. Prior to genetic analysis, the Hadza were thought to be related to click-speaking African populations because of how the Hadza language works; more on that in just a moment. But as it turns out, the Hadza population diverged from the rest of Africa’s click-speaking peoples no later than thirty-five thousand years ago. Their closest known genetic neighbors, a group called the Sandawe who live within about 150 kilometers, 90 miles, of Hadza territory, split off at least fifteen thousand years ago—meaning that since that time, the Hadza have remained entirely distinct. The Hadza population doesn’t just predate, say, the Industrial Revolution, or the Roman Empire, or even the ancient Egyptians—although, to be sure, they predate those things too. The Hadza predate agriculture, they predate the domestication of dogs, cats, and what we would consider to be farm animals; they predate the extinction of the sabre-toothed cats and the woolly mammoth, and they might even predate the first known gene for blond hair. Since that time, the Hadza have remained entirely their own people, likely spending millennia isolated in their own lands with only minimal exposure to the communities around them.

So, too, is the Hadza language seemingly unsullied by time. The language itself is called Hazane by its own people, for whom the word “Hadza” literally translates to “human being”. Although it uses click consonants, putting it in a similar-sounding category to several other languages of the African continent, it doesn’t actually appear to have anything in common with those other languages. Despite a couple of loan words—that is, words taken from other languages—and the occasional passing resemblance to the language of the nearby Sandawe people, Hazane is basically its own thing. Its grammar, although highly structured, has little in common with other grammars in global language, and the rules of Hazane word order—whether, for example, subjects are supposed to come before objects, or verbs, or whatever—have been basically indecipherable despite intense efforts to figure it out. And in, perhaps, its most unique touch, Hazane includes a whole list of names for animals that refer to them only after they’ve been killed in a hunt. Some researchers argue that Hazane is particularly close to the first human language, or might even be more closely related to humanity’s first language than to most of the languages of the modern day, although there’s no real evidence to support or debunk that claim.

And when it comes to their historical way of life, archaeological evidence suggests that the Hadza have been deeply rooted to their own territory for basically their entire history. They’re located near to a place called Olduvai Gorge, an incredibly important archaeological site where a staggering number of early hominid fossils can be found. This is a site where archaeologists can trace human evolution from biting and gnawing, to cutting with a stone tool, see how the human diet evolved across tens of millennia, and watch as many successive human species found their way to the kinds of social interaction that define us.

So, too, do the Hadza live near to Laetoli, a place where footprints from some of the earliest bipedal hominids can be seen even today. At a minimum, the Hadza’s territory has been continually occupied for fifty thousand years, with no reason to suggest that the Hadza’s ancestors might have left and come back, instead of remaining and roving across their modern territory for innumerable generations.

Because the Hadza are a people with no written language, they are also a people with no written history, but we can at least presume, with reasonable confidence, that their role in that history has been largely unchanged through time. Archaeologists and historians can trace a path for the Hadza through changes and migrations happening around them: the arrival of the Bantu, and thus of farmers with sophisticated tools and weapons, around 1,500 years ago, and the displacement of other hunter-gatherer groups around the Hadza, who almost certainly would have had to integrate with the Bantu. We can rely on the history of the Hadza’s more recent neighbors, like the generally friendly Isanzu, and Hadza oral histories can recall periods of violence with other neighboring tribes and peoples.

In particular, we know that the Hadza were hunted and killed at times as reprisal after they’d hunted other groups’ livestock, since the notion of animal ownership was foreign to them. Even the Isanzu are believed to have captured Hadza for sale into slavery in some periods, and generally, the more settled peoples surrounding the Hadza have had a history of viewing them as a rather backward band of nomads and exiles, with little awareness of the complex history of the people right on their doorstep.

It took a very long time for Europeans to record movement in and around the Hadza’s territory, something that wasn’t written down until the 1890s during the broader Scramble for Africa. In the early days of European exploration, the Hadza took care to keep out of the way, instead being documented mostly second-hand during interactions with other groups who described the frontiersmen spread around Lake Eyasi. Although accounts of the Hadza show some variation during the early 20th century, they were largely described living in a similar way to what they do today.

Like most aboriginal communities coming into contact with Europeans, the Hadza were ravaged by infectious diseases, although they proved much more resistant to any attempts to settle them into communities. The British would try and fail to do so a few times, and so would the Tanzanian government after independence, but the Hadza showed a remarkable immunity to the idea of staying in one spot. Notably, that doesn’t seem to be due to any inherent pride or efforts to preserve their way of life.

Instead, when they’ve been provided stable dwellings, they stay for a bit, and when things get lean, they return to what they’ve always done during lean times: roving and living off the land. One village provided to them years ago is sometimes used for a couple of months here and there, while another hosts a school where some Hadza children do attend, but by and large, they’ve decided to maintain the way of life that works for them.

Life Among the Hadza

Yet one thing that the modern era has brought to the Hadza in abundance, is visitors, and while we here on Places haven’t gotten to make the trip yet—although how cool would that be—we can still rely on the accounts of people who’ve gotten to live alongside them. And, no, to clarify, we won’t be relying on the accounts of people who’ve bought some of the several-thousand-dollar, “immersive experience” tours we’ve found being offered online, but…good for them, or whatever.

One recent account comes by way of a genetic epidemiologist named Tim Spector, out of King’s College in London, who traveled to Hadzaland for a several-day trip relating to his work around diversity in the gut microbiome. We won’t get into that too much today, but the basic gist of it is, a more diverse gut biome is a healthier gut biome, and the Hadza’s gut biome is incredibly diverse, so, go live with the Hadza and see what happens. In his later writing via The Conversation, Spector describes the Hadza spending their nights on the open ground around the fire or in modest grass huts, paying little mind to the snakes or the various eight-legged night stalkers around them. He describes eating a thick, very filling porridge made from pods of the baobab trees, and foraging in the bush for extremely fibrous Kongorobi berries. During the following days, Spector would join the Hadza in tracking down two relatively rare porcupines and digging out their burrows, and eating golden-orange wild honey alongside the Hadza band that hosted him. According to Spector, the Hadza consume up to six hundred different species of plants and animals, mostly birds, and despite the demands of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Spector described Hadzaland as a place where wild animals and foraged food are abundant. What the Hadza made of him, a guy who seemed to have come across continents to pick up and study little bits of everyone’s poop, is rather less clear.

Another account comes from writer Kathy Porto Chang, who spent time with the Hadza in 2015. Chang describes a complex hunting expedition she witnessed, not by Hadza adults, but by younger boys, in hopes of chasing after a baboon. Chang described the encroachment of farmers and herders onto Hadza land, and related stories from the Hadza of how, when the Tanzanian government most recently attempted to settle them into a village, they snuck away from government envoys in the middle of the night to go back to their roving lifestyle. She also described the avid cannabis consumption of the Hadza, at all ages, although as Chang witnessed directly, their chill vibes appeared to have no diminishing effect on their hunting ability.

Finally, a 2014 account of life alongside the Hadza, written by National Geographic reporter Matthieu Paley as part of a series on the human diet, related the extreme self-sufficiency of the Hadza population, even when it came to declining foreign aid that was readily available to them. Paley described long, silent forays across the Tanzanian landscape, occasionally sighting a lion, and frequently bringing nothing home in exchange for the journey—but trusting that, on balance, enough members of the hunting band have had success that all mouths will be fed. Paley describes an hours-long hunt in which a single Hadza, named January, is able to wound and nearly kill a giraffe using a single poison-tipped arrow, although it recovers and escapes.

Wrote Paley: “Our ancestors all had that lifestyle at some point in history. Your ancestors too.”

One common thread between most narratives of the Hadza are just how welcoming, and seemingly happy, they appear to be. As Paley describes, the concept of “worry” in the present moment isn’t represented in the Hadza language at all. By all accounts, the group’s neighbors and the Tanzanian government only very rarely will have problems with the Hadza, and even those are quickly worked through.

With a command of the Hadza language being one of the clearest determinants of who the Hadza consider a temporary guest, versus who is a trusted insider, even if they’re foreign, the barriers to entry within the Hadza community are lower than most. Living their lifestyle alongside them, is a whole other story, but at least based on their statements to outsiders, there is no resentment from the Hadza toward people hailing from other lands, cultures, lifestyles, or, in many ways, different periods in human evolution. The outside world isn’t taken to be particularly good, or particularly bad; it’s simply elsewhere, while the Hadza are in Hadzaland, and would quite like to remain.

Present and Future

In the twenty-first century, the lives of the Hadza are similar to the lives of the few other groups like them that still exist. They’ve gotten through to the present day, in their current lifestyle, because they’ve avoided the sorts of conflict that might have seen them wiped out, and they’re lucky enough to live on remote land with neighbors disinterested in kicking them off of it. But their way of life is still fundamentally unlike that of the rest of their country, and the rest of the world, and some elements of that difference are harder to reconcile than others.

One of the more difficult elements of the Hadza’s recent existence, has been to square their way of life with the hard reality of land rights in modern society. The Hadza have, at times, had to adjust to people who’ve acquired part of their land, which the Hadza themselves make no claim to. Today, some of their land is set aside in a government-recognized reserve, but other parts of Hadzaland have been settled.

Technically speaking, the Hadza are supposed to stay on a reservation within the recognized reserve, and even there, they aren’t allowed to hunt. However, enforcement of those rules is extremely limited. More problematic, are the farms and settlements set up across the swampy Yaeda Valley area, where herders have driven away wild animals and cleared out large sections of land.

With cattle now a part of the landscape, the movement of water is far less dependable than it once was, and in some parts of the Hazda range, there’s no longer enough food to get by on hunting and foraging alone.

Then, there are the many temptations of settled life, many of which aren’t outwardly harmful or aren’t perceived as such by the Hadza, but can still change their lives in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Alcoholism is a major issue for the Hadza community, with alcohol poisoning deaths on the rise, and many among the Hadza have chosen to settle down for part or even all of the year, in the town of Mang’ola. There, increased Western awareness of their existence has made them into a tourist attraction.

It’s easy enough for Hadza living in town to take a few tourists out for a day’s hunt, and tuck them into bed at night in cool, modern-style accommodations. But while the Hadza who do choose to make use of these arrangements are generally well-compensated compared to their neighbors, even that compensation is a small portion of the money made by the companies and agents facilitating these foreign visits.

And against the backdrop of this slower, or more monotonous tendency away from the traditional Hadza way of life, have come more significant recent scares—most notably in 2006, when a safari company representing clients from the United Arab Emirates’ royal family in Abu Dhabi attempted to lease the entire, 6,500-square-kilometer arc of territory traditionally considered to be Hadzaland. The deal was approved outright by the local government, for use of what the UAE themselves said would be a “personal safari playground” for the royals. With this deal came attempts to evict the Hadza, and imprisonment of those who resisted.

Despite the safari company’s claims that the Hadza had been included in the process to lease their land, the Hadza community themselves made clear that that had not been the case. After an international media pressure campaign, the deal eventually fell through, and it was followed by legal action within Tanzania to at least take limited steps to prevent a similar incident in the future. But nonetheless, it was a clear signal of just how vulnerable the Hadza really are.

So many elements of their way of life exist in a way that’s fundamentally separate from the laws, customs, and way of life of the nation that claims them and their territory. With that largely extralegal status, comes a lack of clarity on just how badly the Hadza could be exploited, if future leaders in Tanzania become less protective of the Hadza than the country’s current leaders seem to be.

Where the future of the Hadza is concerned, it’s likely that the coming decades will be tougher, leaner, and even more tenuous for their culture than the last few have been. As their local climate continues to change, water is expected to become more scarce, making the regional ecosystem harder to sustain. Trends of pastoral encroachment on Hadza territory and Hadza openness to settlement are moving in a way that would make a constrained, even sedentary Hadza population more likely, not less.

And without better, more sophisticated legal protections around their status—legal protections that the Hadza themselves seem disinterested in advocating—the community will likely lack the means to protect against future abuses when they come. After all, these are a people who still rely on bows and arrows as a means of defense, and who still trust that they can disappear into the landscape…but there should be no confusion about who will win in a contest between the Hadza and the modern world, if the modern world decides to place itself at odds with these people and their land.

As for the language Hazane, it’s not thought to be on the verge of dying out anytime soon, even though low estimates place the total number of language-speakers under one thousand remaining people. Nor is it a written language, meaning that once it’s gone, it’s gone. But although many Hadza can speak Tanzania’s national language, Swahili, in the modern day, Hazane is considered to be a vulnerable language at worst, and nowhere near extinction. Not only is it still taught to most children, used in Hadza communities, and spoken throughout the life course, but it also plays a distinct identity role as well. As we mentioned previously, whether or not a person speaks Hazane is the primary determinant of whether or not they are considered to be Hadza. While that distinction is only good for as long as it matters, the Hadza identity is one that appears to be on track to survive for a very long time, regardless of whether the Hadza lifestyle survives with it.

Make no mistake; the Hadza have proven themselves across time, as one of the most hardy, resilient people in all of human history. In the modern day, they are a true isolate in every way, from their genetic code, to their language, to the way they interact with the world. We can hope—and certainly, we hope very much—that the Hadza living on the shores of Lake Eyasi today will never have to consider themselves the last of their kind.

But the question of whether Hadzaland, and its people, can survive in the way they choose, has never been quite so dire as it is today. The last of the true hunter-gatherers still roam across our planet today…so let’s hope they stick around, for a very long time to come.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do the Hadza people live?

The Hadza people live in Tanzania, specifically in the region known as Hadzaland. They are often found around Lake Eyasi, the Mbulu Highlands, and the town of Mang’ola.

What is the traditional lifestyle of the Hadza?

The Hadza are hunter-gatherers. They do not settle in one place for long, moving frequently to follow the movements of water, prey animals, and seasonal resources. They hunt with bows and arrows and forage for berries, honey, and other plants.

How many Hadza people are there?

The total surviving population of the Hadza is no higher than 1,300 individuals.

What is the Hadza language like?

The Hadza language, called Hazane, uses click consonants but is distinct from other click-speaking languages in Africa. It has a unique grammar and includes specific names for animals only after they have been killed in a hunt.

What is the significance of the concept ‘epeme’ in Hadza culture?

‘Epeme’ is the concept of manhood in Hadza culture. It is achieved by young men, usually in their early twenties, who prove their maturity by killing large game. Epeme men have specific privileges and rituals associated with their status.

How do the Hadza interact with other tribes and modern society?

The Hadza are aware of the modern world and do not prohibit their members from exploring it. They have interactions with neighboring tribes like the Isanzu and have had conflicts with other groups over livestock and land. They also interact with tourists and researchers who visit their region.

What challenges do the Hadza face in the modern world?

The Hadza face challenges such as land encroachment by farmers and herders, scarcity of water due to climate change, and the temptation of settled life which can lead to issues like alcoholism. They also face threats from potential exploitation by external entities seeking to lease their land.

How do the Hadza view their own history and creation?

The Hadza have vague creation myths and do not have a clear oral history beyond a few generations. They view their ancestors as giants who evolved over time, and their stories focus on their interactions with neighboring tribes and the natural world.

What is the relationship between the Hadza and the greater honeyguide bird?

The Hadza have a symbiotic relationship with the greater honeyguide bird. The bird leads the Hadza to beehives, and in return, the Hadza provide the bird with beeswax. This relationship is featured prominently in Hadza storytelling.

How do the Hadza organize their society?

Hadza society is non-hierarchical and egalitarian. Decisions are made through group discussion, and there are no internal clan rivalries or chieftains. Each band is considered independent, and conflicts are resolved by one party voluntarily moving to another band.

Sources

• Original Places video: The World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers
• https://tanzania-specialist.com/national-parks/lake-eyasi/
• https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/majors-and-minors/environmental-studies/hadza
• https://innovativeresearchmethods.org/the-hadza-language-in-northern-tanzania/
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hadza-language
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513814000877?via%3Dihub
• https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/24/10/2180/1071196?login=false
• https://www.routledge.com/Who-Needs-the-Past-Indigenous-Values-and-Archaeology/Layton/p/book/9780415095587#:~:text=Description,communities%20have%20in%20the%20past
• https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hadza/
• https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/africa/stories-in-africa/the-hadza-helping-hunter-gatherers-protect-their-homeland/
• https://www.survivalinternational.org/galleries/hadza
• https://www.exoticca.com/us/blog/hadza-tanzanias-most-unique-tribe/
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/hadza
• https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/oct/22/hadza-the-last-hunter-gatherer-tribe-in-tanzania-in-pictures
• https://farandwild.travel/experiences/hunt-with-the-hadza-tribe
• https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/05/health/hunter-gatherer-diet-tanzania-the-conversation/index.html
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp17z
• https://innovativeresearchmethods.org/hadza-copy/
• https://medium.com/@kwchang/hunting-with-the-hadza-1fd918f21ea5
• https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
• https://www.newscientist.com/article/2379293-hunter-gatherers-in-tanzania-have-incredibly-diverse-gut-microbiomes/
• https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/evoreligion/files/high_levels_of_rule_bending_in_a_minimally_religious_and_largely_egalitarian_forager_population.pdf
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/we-are-what-we-eat-hunting-the-hadza-way-with-bows-arrows-and-ingenuity
• https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/2579
• Hero image source by WFP/Abubaker Garelnabei / openverse, by.