What a tribe the size of a fist. “People the size of a fist. "Lilliputians" from the rainforest

Oh, how many tribes live or lived in the vastness of this continent! I once read the notes of Mr. Robert Ripley and believe it or not, in his words, but interesting and unusual facts about this mainland and its indigenous inhabitants would be enough for more than one book. For example, have you ever looked at photographs of Zulu men and women? If yes, then you probably noticed their unusual hairstyles, which are unique and individual. The women of this tribe even use red clay to fix the "Babylons" on their heads and, as this naturalist ironically notes: "not a single self-respecting insect will climb into this" tower ". Do you know how the name Zulu is translated from African? Heavenly man, not much , not a little, right?

Or, for example, do you know how the burial ritual of a Congolese leader is performed? Not? They inflate him like a balloon, stuffing him with the belongings that he acquired during his lifetime, and the richer the leader was, the more magnificent the funeral is. A nightmare for a European, you must agree.

And Maasai is a familiar name, right? This is perhaps the most famous African tribe, which is traditionally considered courageous and very brave. Why? Do not believe it, but they hunt lions with one spear, while the beast is struck by a spear in the heart, and the warrior is covered only by a shield. I especially remember from the game, and today (June 3) Dibrov asked this question, the name of the Bushmen tribe. So these are forest people, and if you literally translate their name, then people from the bushes. It's funny.

Although I am not Mr. Ripley, I had a chance to ride in Tunisia on one excursion to the desert, where the troglodyte Berbers live. So this indigenous people is generally different in that they live in caves, tearing out apartments for themselves there, although now modern cars stand near the caves and the walls are studded with antennas, but a piece of everyday life is preserved. And even if only for tourists, but such a life is of genuine interest. Remembering Tunisia, naturally, memory also turned to Egypt, recalling the Bedouin tribes and the completely distinctive way of life of these African nomads. And remember, everyone has their own story...

But, returning to our little men, who are the size of a fist, I must say that this people is called pygmies, that this is the name of a real, undersized tribe, and not a derogatory nickname for a small nondescript person. Where such confidence? Look at the bottom photo, you can see which tribe won the round.

The name "pygmies" literally translates as "people the size of a fist." In equatorial Africa, there are many ethnic groups whose height could be defined as "a meter in a cap" if these people wore traditional hats. The record holders among the "forest midgets" are Mbuti, their height usually does not exceed 135 cm!

Having visited the Mbuti tribe, any Slav will feel like a giant. Acquaintance with undersized nomads will be interesting, since the Mbuti culture is original, and the structure of society is fundamentally different from the models we are used to. The total number of this ethnic group reaches about 100 thousand people. All Mbuti live in harmony with nature, hunt and gather, but take from the forest only as much as they need to survive. The basis of their worldview is a thrifty attitude to resources.

Mbuti do not have a social hierarchy, they live in large groups, consisting of at least 7 families. There is no leader in the group, everyone has their own responsibilities depending on gender and age. All members of the tribe take part in the hunt: men set up nets, women and teenagers drive the beast, children and elders stay in the camp to build a sacred fire.

Mbuti constantly change their places of deployment, they build dwellings very quickly, using tree shoots and leaves for this. They traditionally made clothes from the bark of trees, kneading it with an elephant tusk. Among the inhabitants of the tribe, loincloths were especially popular. Modern Mbuti do not refuse ordinary clothes, which are exchanged for game from the inhabitants of nearby settlements.

Mbuti consider themselves an integral part of the forest, and react painfully to cutting down trees and poaching. All their amulets and amulets are made of natural materials, at the birth of a baby they bathe in forest water, special magical rituals using amulets woven from vines and tree bark are performed by men going hunting.

Pygmies differ from other African tribes in their height, which ranges from 143 to 150 centimeters. The reason for such a small growth of pygmies is still a mystery to scientists, although some researchers believe that their growth is due to their adaptation to difficult living conditions in the rainforest.

Pygmies were sold to zoos!

The origin of the pygmies is still a mystery to scientists. No one knows who their distant ancestors were and how these little people ended up in the equatorial forests of Africa. There are no legends or myths to help answer these questions. There is an assumption that in ancient times the pygmies occupied the entire central part of the Black Continent, and were later driven out by other tribes into the rainforests. From Greek, the pygmies are translated as "people the size of a fist", the scientific definition interprets the pygmies as a group of undersized Negroid peoples living in the forests of Africa.

Pygmies are mentioned in ancient Egyptian sources of the III millennium BC. e., later Herodotus and Strabo wrote about them, Homer in his Iliad. Aristotle considered the pygmies to be a very real people, although a lot of fantastic things were written about them in ancient sources: for example, Strabo listed them along with big-headed, noseless, cyclops, pso-heads and other mythical creatures of the ancient period.

It is worth noting that because of their growth, the pygmies have long suffered many disasters and humiliations. The taller Africans drove them from the most favorable places and drove them into the green hell of the equatorial forests. Civilization also brought them some joy, especially at the beginning of contact with white people. Some travelers and colonial officials captured the pygmies and took them with them to Europe and the USA as a curiosity. It got to the point that the pygmies, especially their children, in late XIX- at the beginning of the 20th century, they were sold, as living exhibits, to the zoos of the West ...

It would seem that now this people can live much calmer and more confident in their future, but, alas, this is not so. It's hard to believe, but in the period 1998-2003 during civil war in the Congo it happened quite often that pygmies were caught and eaten like wild animals. A sect of “erasers” is still operating in the same parts, whose members are hired to clean up the territory from pygmies if mining is supposed to take place on it. Cultists kill pygmies and feed on their flesh. Enlightenment has not yet penetrated into the deep layers of the African population, so many inhabitants of the Black Continent believe that by eating a pygmy, they gain some magical power protecting them from witchcraft.

The presence of a considerable number of peculiar pygmy slaves will also seem incredible, although slavery is legally prohibited in all countries. Pygmies become slaves in the same Republic of the Congo, and they are even inherited; according to the tradition existing here, their owners are representatives of the Bantu people. No, pygmies do not walk in shackles, but their master can simply take away from the slaves the fruits and meat obtained in the forest, sometimes he still gives them some kind of provisions, tools and metal for arrowheads. Surprisingly, the pygmies do not arrange any uprisings against the slave owners: as some researchers say, without maintaining relations with the Bantu, they can only get worse,

Why are they so small?

The growth of pygmies ranges from 140 to 150 cm. The smallest people in the world are the pygmies of the Efe tribe, in which the average height of men does not exceed 143 cm, and for women - 130-132 cm. Of course, as soon as scientists learned about the existence of pygmies, they the question immediately arose - what is the reason for their such insignificant growth? If the small pygmies were only a small part of their tribe, their diminutiveness could be explained by a genetic failure. However, due to the general low growth, such an explanation had to be immediately discarded.

Another explanation, it would seem, lies right on the surface - the pygmies do not have good nutrition, and they are often malnourished, which is reflected in their growth. The study showed that the diet of African pygmies is almost the same as that of neighboring farmers (the same Bantu), but their daily food intake is very small. It is possible that this is why their bodies, and, accordingly, their height, decreased from generation to generation. It is clear that little man less food is enough to survive. Even a very curious experiment was carried out: for a long time a small group of pygmies were fed to satiety, but, alas, neither the pygmies themselves nor their offspring grew up because of this.

There is also a version about the effect of lack of sunlight on the growth of pygmies. Spending their whole lives under the canopy of a dense forest, the pygmies do not receive enough sunlight, which leads to a slight production of vitamin D by the body. The lack of this vitamin causes inhibition of bone growth, which results in a very miniature skeleton in the pygmies.

Some researchers believe that the diminutiveness of pygmies is caused by an evolutionary process that adapts them to life in dense thickets. It is clear that it is much easier for a small and nimble pygmy to make his way through a palisade of trees, fallen trunks, entangled in vines than a tall European. It is also known about the predilection of pygmies for collecting honey. Looking for honey, male pygmies spend about 9% of their lives in trees in search of habitats for wild bees. Of course, climbing trees is easier for a person with small stature and weighing up to 45 kilograms.

Of course, the pygmies have been carefully studied by doctors and geneticists, they have found that the concentration of growth hormone in their blood is not very different from the average indicators of an ordinary person. However, the level of insulin-like growth factor was below the norm by 3 times. According to the researchers, this explains the small growth of newborn pygmies. In addition, the low concentration of this hormone in the blood plasma prevents the onset of a period of active growth in pygmy adolescents, who completely stop growing at the age of 12-15 years. By the way, genetic studies made it possible to call the pygmies the descendants of the most ancient people that appeared on Earth about 70 thousand years ago. But scientists have not identified genetic mutations in them.

The small stature of the pygmies is also explained by their short life span. Alas, these little people live an average of only 16 to 24 years, those who have reached the age of 35-40 are already long-livers among them. Due to the short life cycle, pygmies have an early puberty causing inhibition of body growth. Puberty in pygmies occurs as early as 12 years old, and the highest birth rate in women is noted at 15.

As you can see, there are many factors contributing to the small growth of pygmies. Perhaps one of them is the main one, or maybe they all work together. Yes, due to their short stature, some scientists are even ready to single out the pygmies as a separate race. It is curious that in addition to growth, the pygmies have other differences from the Negroid race - these are light brown skin and very thin lips.

"Lilliputians" from the rainforest

Now pygmy tribes can be found in the forests of Gabon, Cameroon, Congo, Rwanda, and the Central African Republic. The life of these little people is constantly connected with the forest, they spend the main part of their lives in it, get their own food, give birth to children and die. They are not engaged in agriculture, their main occupations are gathering and hunting. Pygmies lead a nomadic life, they leave their camp as soon as there is no game, no fruits, no edible plants, no honey around the camp. Resettlement takes place within the boundaries established with other groups, hunting on foreign land can become a reason for conflict.

There is another reason for moving. It happens when someone dies in a small pygmy village. Pygmies are very superstitious, they believe that since death has visited them, it means that the forest does not want them to continue to live in this place. The deceased is buried right in his hut, funeral dances take place at night, and in the morning, leaving their simple buildings, the pygmies move to another place.

The main occupation of male pygmies is hunting. Unlike the "civilized" hunters who come to Africa to amuse their pride and get hunting trophies, pygmies never kill a living creature if there is no need for it. They hunt with bows with arrows poisoned with vegetable poison and spears with metal tips. Birds, monkeys, small antelopes and deer become their prey. Pygmies do not store meat for future use, they always share the prey fairly. Despite the usual luck of undersized hunters, mined meat makes up only 9% of their diet. By the way, pygmies often hunt with dogs, they are very hardy and, if necessary, are ready at the cost of their lives to protect the owner from the most ferocious beast.

A significant share in the diet of the pygmies is made up of honey and other gifts of the forest. Honey is mined by men who are ready to climb the highest trees for it, but the gifts of the forest are collected by women. Around the camp they look for fruits, wild roots, edible plants, they do not disdain worms, larvae, snails, frogs and snakes. All this goes to food. However, at least 50% of the diet of the pygmies is vegetables and fruits, which they exchange with farmers for honey and other gifts of the forest. In addition to food, through the exchange, the pygmies get the fabrics they need, pottery, iron and tobacco.

Every day, a part of the women remains in the village, making a kind of matter from the tree bark called “tana”, it is from it that the famous aprons of the pygmies are made. For men, such an apron is attached to a leather or fur belt, and they wear a bunch of leaves at the back. But women wear only aprons. However, settled pygmies that have already appeared often wear European clothes. Civilization is slowly but persistently penetrating into the life and life of the pygmies, their culture and traditions, perhaps in a few decades, will become a thing of the past.

Efe - a dwarf people "the size of a fist", living in tropical Africa. Like all Bambuti Pygmies, they have a rather archaic culture. Efe do not know how to make stone tools and make fire. These dwarfs believe that the soul of every person after death incarnates into a totemic animal. Some anthropologists considered the Bambuti to be the descendants of the Neanderthals. But genetic studies have shown that they are ordinary people who received a special gene 50 - 90 thousand years ago.

The first mention of strange little people is in ancient Egyptian inscriptions of the 3rd millennium BC. e .. Later, Homer wrote about fabulous dwarfs, which were similar in size to frogs and often became victims of cranes that flew over the turbulent ocean and "bringing death and murder to the pygmy family."
In the 7th century AD, the Chinese historian Li Tai described in detail dwarfs only 3 chi (90 cm) tall, living south of the Roman Empire. The first Europeans encountered the Matimba, a short people, in the 16th-17th centuries in West Africa. In the 19th century, the existence of the Pygmies was confirmed by German and Russian travelers exploring the Ituri river basin. In 1934, the Efe tribe was discovered by the expedition of M. Guzinde. After that, no one doubted the reality of the existence of dwarfs. The growth of male pygmies does not exceed 142-145 cm. Characteristic features are: a large torso on short legs, light brown skin, curly dark hair, thin lips, narrow and low nose bridge. Outwardly, they are a bit like Negroids, but are considered a separate race.
Before the Bantu settlement, the Pygmies occupied all of central Africa, but then they were pushed back into the forests. Now they are so accustomed to living in the thicket that they cannot stand the direct rays of the sun and, once in open space, they try to return to their native jungle as soon as possible. Africans normal growth despise their little neighbors. Because of this, the Efe tribes living in the Ituri basin were the least mixed with their neighbors. But cases of marriage of tall men to tiny efe women still happen.
So it was with Obama. A few years ago, this Bantu man married a girl from his tribe, but their first child died and the wife could no longer conceive. Abamu took a pretty girl from the Efe tribe as his second wife. Men of the Efe tribe are not enthusiastic about such marriages, because for them finding a life partner is a problem. But they, despite this, give their girlfriends to the Bantu for free, as they are happy to intermarry with high patrons. If a child is born from the connection of a pygmy man and a black woman, then he is expelled from a tall tribe. His only way is to the forest thicket, to relatives - pygmies, who even in the 21st century did not reach the Stone Age in terms of development.
Efe, like all pygmies, still do not know how to make fire and carefully carry the flame with them, making sure that it does not go out. Their day is 99 percent hunting and gathering plants. Stone tools are also unknown to these children of the rainforest. For hunting, they use a bow and arrows with poisoned tips. Pygmies exchange something with other tribes for game, obtained by hunting, which they always have in abundance, because they are excellent hunters. Favorite meat is elephant, but this delicacy is a rarity, once every few years. The usual prey is antelopes, monkeys. They do not disdain fish either. Pygmies use a special method of catching fish - poisoning with plant poisons. The fish falls asleep, floats to the surface, and can be collected by hand. Efe collect as many fish as necessary, and lower the rest (she wakes up in half an hour).
Men also collect a delicacy - honey. This work is considered difficult and dangerous. If precious prey is obtained, then the miners gorge themselves on honey so that their bellies become like drums. According to Robert Bailey, about a tenth of the efe's time is spent looking for honey. Honey makes up about 14 percent of the calories in an efe's total diet. Every day women, accompanied by children, collect wild root crops, leaves of edible plants and fruits around their camp, catch worms, snails, frogs, snakes and fish. After all the snails are eaten and all the roots are dug up, the Efe change their habitat.
Despite the nomadic way of life, each tribe has its own territory, moves to another area of ​​the forest, but wandering within the established boundaries. Hunting in foreign lands can lead to hostile clashes. Such clashes are rare, because at their core, the Efe pygmies are non-aggressive. All researchers note that they rejoice at any occasion. A special reason for enthusiasm is a successful hunt. To make it successful, efe strictly observe superstitious hunting rules and prohibitions, and perform magical rites. They turn to the forest spirit - Torah, asking him to help in fishing.
Since each genus has its own animal totem (most often a leopard, a chimpanzee, as well as snakes, various monkeys, antelopes, ants, etc.), it is treated as a close relative, called “grandfather”, “father”. Savages believe in the origin of childbirth from their totems. During the feast, the use of the meat of a totem animal is excluded. After the feast, they sing and dance, often for 4-5 hours in a row. On the full moon, the dancing drags on all night. Little people dance selflessly, to the roar of drums. The elephant hunt dance is the most famous and popular among the Pygmies.
The birth of a child is not a reason to celebrate. A child can die from a snakebite, from a fever, a cheetah can drag him away. The holiday comes when a person enters the time of maturity and a pair of working hands appears in the tribe. Usually then the savages feast for 3-4 days, dance and drink palm wine. The rite of initiation is one of the most important among the pygmies, and only after its successful completion does the young man become a full-fledged member of the tribe. Rites are performed collectively over a whole group of boys from 9 to 16 years old. They are subjected to circumcision and other severe trials: they are beaten, smeared with various impurities, intimidated by dancing in terrible masks, forced to lie motionless on their stomachs. The whole ritual of initiation is connected with the image of the forest spirit Tore. Initiations are seen as a kind of introduction to the magical power needed by the hunter.
Girls' initiation is called "ima". Ima is an expensive and rare holiday with a feast on the mountain and dancing until you drop. Most often, two or three families celebrate ima for their daughters at the same time. The heroes of the occasion the day before are locked up in a ceremonial hut for 2 months. Only the old women come to them, teaching the mind-reason. For the holiday, they prepare "mbugu" - a festive cape made of bast matter. Its production is a real art. You need to find a special kind of vine. The dressed fabric is then dyed, painting with patterns that are a real work of art. First, the fabric is treated with tato fruit juice (it gives a black color when mixed with eels from a fire). The craftswoman covers the fabric with an intricate pattern of intersecting lines. Then red paint from the core of the ndo tree is used. Then another color is added, yellow, from the roots of the binjali plant. Cape is ready! The outfit is completed with intricate headbands made of parrot feathers. The heroes of the occasion will now be in the center of male attention.
The trends of the new time are also present. In the lips of the beauties, banknotes should be clamped - a symbol of wealth. Without them, the efe girl will not look prosperous. Unfortunately, holidays for a small people are becoming less and less. They faced a big problem - the death of the rainforest. Their patrimony is exterminated for the sake of new agricultural land, animals and birds disappear. Efe are forced to go further and further into the forest, breaking their usual ties with the Bantu. Their lives are at stake.

This is how the word pygmalios is translated from the Greek, which was called the smallest people living in the tropical forests of Africa. There is an assumption that the Pygmies once occupied the whole of Central Africa, but then were driven out from there by other tribes. Today they can be found in the forests of Gabon, Cameroon, Congo, Rwanda and the Central African Republic.

Until now, the origin of the pygmies remains a scientific mystery. They have no legends, no myths, no fairy tales that would help solve it. Nevertheless, this people has been known since ancient times.

Colorful myths about real people

The first mention of strange little people are in ancient Egyptian inscriptions of the 3rd millennium BC. The story of the Egyptian Hufhor, a nobleman of the era of the Old Kingdom, has been preserved, in which he boasts that he brought a dwarf from his campaign. He was intended for the amusement of the young king and was called "dng". It is significant that even today this name has been preserved in the languages ​​​​of the peoples of Ethiopia, in which the dwarf is called "deng" or "dat".

Many centuries later, Homer wrote about fabulous dwarfs, which did not exceed frogs in size and often became victims of cranes. For him, cranes appear as people from the other world, and the meaning of the myth is in the struggle of life and death.

Some ancient scientists explain the enmity between the pygmies and the cranes by turning into a crane a pygmy girl who was at enmity with the tribe. At the same time, it is not entirely clear whether we are talking about real Africans or mythical creatures.

Usually the pygmies in Greek myth-making are a fabulous people of dwarfs living in Libya or Asia Minor. They ranged in size from an ant to a monkey. The "father of history" Herodotus has pygmies - a special tribe that lives in Africa in the upper reaches of the Nile. According to him, they are closely associated with the cult of the fertility god Nile and are identified with the dwarfs, surrounded by whom the Nile was depicted. Hence the idea of ​​the pygmies as an agricultural tribe, hairy and black men living in the fertile layer of the earth.

However, Aristotle considered the pygmies to be a very real people. In turn, the geographer Strabo listed them together with large-headed, noseless, cyclops, half-dogs and other mythical creatures of antiquity. Indicative is the legend in which Hercules defeated the son of the goddess of the earth, the Libyan giant Antaeus. When the hero was resting after the struggle, he was attacked with weapons by pygmies who lived like ants in the sand. Hercules took them all into a lion's skin and took them with him. Perhaps the legends about the pygmies among the Egyptians and Greeks are connected with the existence of dwarfs in tropical Africa. After all, their images are on the frescoes in Pompeii and Herculaneum. And the favorite plot on Greek vases was the comic war of the pygmies with the cranes.

In the 7th century, the Chinese historian Li Tai described in detail dwarfs 90 centimeters tall, living south of the Roman Empire. His information strangely intersects with ancient Greek mythology. Europeans first encountered the undersized Matimba people in West Africa back in the 16th-17th centuries. And in the 19th century, the existence of pygmies was finally confirmed by German and Russian researchers.

Avoiding the Sun

It turned out that in Africa there really is the smallest people in the world. In male pygmies, growth ranges from 142-150 centimeters. They are characterized by a large body with short legs, light brown skin, curly dark hair and thin lips. But there are tribes in which the average height of men does not exceed 141 centimeters, and women - 130-132 centimeters. Despite the fact that these people resemble Negroids, they are considered a separate race. The exact number of representatives of the tribe is not known. According to various sources, there are from 40 to 280 thousand people. The average life expectancy for men is no more than 45 years, while women live a little longer.

Because of their height and other differences, these people have always experienced a lot of disaster and humiliation from their taller neighbors. Before the Bantu settlement, the pygmies occupied the whole of Central Africa, but then they were driven out of the most favorable places into the green hell of the equatorial forests. Now they are so accustomed to living in the thicket that they cannot stand the direct rays of the sun, and once in open space, they try to return to their native jungle as soon as possible. Ordinary Africans despise their little neighbors. Because of this, the pygmies almost never mix with other tribes, although there are still cases of foreign men marrying tiny women.

When white people appeared, little Africans had even more problems. Some "civilized" travelers and colonial officials at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries looked at the pygmies as a rare curiosity. There are cases when they were taken to Europe and the USA, where adults, and especially their children, were sold as living exhibits to zoos. There they were shown to idle onlookers along with exotic wild animals from various countries peace.

This is not possible in the West today. But at home, the situation has not changed much. It's hard to believe, but in Africa there is still a belief that by killing and eating a pygmy, you can get a magical power that protects against witchcraft. And this is not only a belief, but also a practice. Not only in the distant past, but literally today - during the civil war in the Congo in 1998-2003, pygmies were caught and eaten like wild animals.

But those tribes on whose territory minerals are found are especially unlucky. In this case local residents just exterminate. For these purposes, there is even a sect of "erasers", whose members not only kill pygmies, but also feed on their flesh.

In the 21st century, slavery is prohibited in all countries. But in the same Republic of the Congo, pygmy slaves still exist in Bantu families, which are inherited. It is practically impossible to eradicate this phenomenon, since the slaves themselves do not protest against their position. On the contrary, despite their lack of rights, they are convinced that without living together with the Bantu, they can only get worse.

rainforest dwarfs

The life of the pygmies is invariably connected with the forest. In the tropical wilds, they earn their livelihood, marry, give birth to children and die. Pygmies do not engage in agriculture, preferring gathering and hunting. Therefore, they lead a nomadic lifestyle and leave their camp only when there is no game and edible plants around it, or someone dies. These people are very superstitious, since the death of a tribesman is explained by the fact that the forest does not want them to live in this place. The resettlement takes place within the borders existing with neighbors, since hunting on foreign land can become a reason for conflict.

The main occupation of male pygmies is hunting birds, monkeys, antelopes, deer and other inhabitants of the forest. Unlike professional hunters, they never kill an animal unnecessarily and do not store meat for future use. The prey is always divided fairly and eaten immediately after the hunt. Fishing is a seasonal activity. When fishing, pygmies use a special grass that is thrown into the water, and the fish falls asleep, but does not die. The catch is collected downstream. The tropical jungle is not only a home, but also a constant threat to people. They are teeming with various dangerous animals, which even hunters are wary of. They are especially afraid of pythons. If you accidentally step on a python, then there is practically no chance of salvation, and life ends in the deadly embrace of a snake.

A significant proportion of the diet of pygmies is honey, but fruits, berries, various root crops and plants, as well as worms, larvae, snails, frogs and snakes are also eaten.

Meat in the forest menu is only 9%, while at least 50% are vegetables and fruits, which are exchanged with neighbors in exchange for gifts from the jungle.

The life of little people who live in the jungle is devoid of romance and consists in a constant struggle for survival. The main task of each of them is to get food, so a successful hunt is the most desirable occasion for a holiday and a feast. After a hearty meal, they selflessly sing and dance. In these cases, the roar of drums can sound in the jungle for 4-5 hours in a row, or even all night. And in the morning you have to look for food again. And so from year to year, and so on throughout life, until civilization destroys primitive traditions.

Evgeny YAROVOY