The expedition begins with Alex van den Heever - close friend, seasoned wildlife tracker and founder of the Tracker Academy. We want to understand how closely the Bushmen people are still living in tune with nature. We want to find out what skills have been lost and what still survive. We want to understand whether the ancient hunting skills associated with the art of tracking are still being taught.
To explore this place at the intersection of nature and the human psyche, is my deepest calling. To be with the Bushmen people, is to go back through time to where this intersection is closer to the surface of consciousness. We are going into a rare place in these modern times. We are going back to the wild.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The San people is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen because that is how they asked me to refer to them.
-- The Tracker Academy was established to preserve the indigenous knowledge of wildlife tracking.
- The persistence method is possibly one of the oldest forms of hunting, practiced long before the invention of bows and arrows, and the domestication of dogs. It is also known as the great dance, and together with the art of tracking, it has evolved into more sophisticated levels that are still practised today, by modern hunter-gatherers, in some parts of the world.
Timestamps
(0.44) Alex van Heerden, Renias Mhlongo and the Tracker Academy
(9.23) Preparing for the Kalahari
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