Mucking around

As a Hunter-Gatherer you have a huge amount of free time. You fill it with fun, relaxation, entertainment and games. A ball is possibly the most popular toy in the world (Though it could be the stick – there’s lots you can do with one.) Just make a ball and games can be instantly invented. There are many ball games played by Hunter-Gatherers and, like us, they make up new ones all the time.

How to make a ball

There are many ways to make balls, some of them long and complicated. Hunter-Gatherers don’t waste time - always looking for the quickest and easiest ways to do things.

Take some long grass. Tie a knot in it, tie it again and again until you run out of grass and tuck the ends away – you have a ball. Tie it loosely for a soft ball and tight for a hard one. If you want it to last a long time tie it round and round with tree roots, bramble shoots or anything else that makes instant string.

By adding more grass you can make a bigger ball – the tennis, volley and football have probably been invented and used thousands of times in thousands of places over hundreds of thousands of years. The game Zuni (Played by the Ju/’hoansi ) has been enthusiastically adopted by Palaeoquest but has already seen a remarkable number of variations invented on the spot by children and adults.

If you have a group of people throwing a ball to each other, sooner or later someone will think of a game, or part of one, and then others will join in. Before long the group will have invented a game or games that are just as good as any classic or modern ball game.

About Games

Hunter-Gatherers play games in a subtly different ways to us. They tend to live in small groups so peer-groups do not exist. The result is that everyone plays together – from the youngest to the oldest members of the group. It is interesting to note that though it is common in Hunter-Gatherer cultures to have a strict definition of adulthood (Whereas we do not) actually acting in an adult manner is only employed when necessary (Whereas adults in our society rarely feel brave enough to act with the unselfconscious abandon of a child).

The result of this approach is a culture in which everyone acts and plays as a child except when there is a need to be responsible, at which point the adults do whatever is necessary at the time and then return to ‘mucking around’ mode.

It is tempting to list a number of games here that have been observed by ethnographers and anthropologists, then it would be tempting to play them believing that you were doing as Hunter-Gatherers do. Sadly it would miss the point, unlike us they have no rules or set procedures. If we showed them tennis and a group of them began to play it three things would happen. The first being that they may all join in or drop out as they wished – the number of players on the court could range from one to 50 or so and constantly change. The second thing would be that by the end of the game it would be unrecognisable old and new rules spontaneously invented and later ignored or changed again. The third thing to happen would be the disappearance of competition. Hunter-Gatherers tend to compete with themselves in the same way as a runner in our culture will strive to beat a personal best. They would not try to dominate or show off in a way that would show others to be inferior as this sort of behaviour is almost universally abhorred. They would also help the weaker, elderly, younger people to enjoy themselves as much as anyone else. The personal and social outcome of a game being the enjoyment of physical activity and the game acting as a medium in which humour can be generated.

So in giving you a list of games and rules we would be giving you a very misleading view of Hunter-Gatherers. 

The ball and shuttle (Zuni) pictured here were made of knotted grass, string from tree roots and soft rush and swan feathers.