Describing the return of a successful hunting party in the Kalahari Desert, the ethnographer Lorna Marshall summed up the gatherer’s age-old dilemma: “We heard the sound of voices in the encampment, rising in volume and pitch like the hum of excited bees. Some people ran toward the hunters … some danced up and down, children squealed and ran about … I venture to say no women have been greeted this way when they returned with vegetables.”
