A world-renowned Australian paleoanthropologist led me many years ago to immerse myself in the oldest culture and spoken tongue-clicking language in the world, both still being lived to this day by the San tribal people in some of Southern Africa’s most sun-bleached, deserted and arid lands.

The scientist in question was Brisbane-born and Queensland University educated Professor Raymond Dart who worked for many years in Africa while I was living there as a foreign correspondent and journalist.

Professor Dart and a myriad of other anthropologists and anatomists had scientifically determined that the San are, in actuality, the world’s first and oldest living human line descended from the original Homo Sapiens. These people had emanated from what is now Botswana but were forced by cyclic climate change at the time of the ‘Great Migration from Africa’ to find their meagre living in the Kalahari and surrounding deserts.

Raymond Dart believed that the San took to some of the world’s most waterless areas, knowing that these lands abounded with some wild game as a reliable source of protein without possessing any potential animal or human enemies.

Aided and abetted by such a prestigious scientist as South Africa’s Professor Philip Tobias, Dart had constructed from the Sans’ unusual DA markers and other physical evidence that these people are second to our globe’s original ancestral group of humans from whom all the peoples of the world evolved and migrated as colonists to the Northern Hemisphere – and later as far afield as Australasia.

Both Dart and Tobias came to the conclusion that the San first established themselves as a single culture between 120,000 and 140,000 years ago. For this and other scientific research, these two anthropologists both won international scientific acclaim and awards. They also proved conclusively that the San still carry all the genetic elements of the original Homo Sapiens, standing at the top of our historical human record.

During their evolution as a people, the San intermingled at one time in history with the later interloping Khoikhot clan, causing them to now also being known in some lesser quarters as the Khoisan tribal group.

When I met up with Dart and Tobias in the 1950s, they directed me for my own journalistic research purposes to travel to landlocked Botswana which neighbours Namibia on Africa’s Skeleton Coast. I also learned from my two professorial informants that some San people are also to be found in nearby Angola and South Africa, but I was determined to visit the San near their original sun dried out habitat in what has since regained its fertility to become the Okavango swamp land.

After journeying by train and hire car to San country in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills district, I was greeted to my utter surprise by a happy and very friendly group of San semi- nomads who travelled by foot in search of their vital meat protein meals while still on the hoof and foraged for seasonal semi-desert plant vegetables and hidden waterholes.

I soon realised I had no need to take cover even though this San family was at first glance a hunting party of men and women, all armed to the teeth with simple bows and poison arrows. They had just killed an antelope for dinner, indicating to me that nothing would be discarded as they would make use of the bladder as a carry-bag when dried out.

Evidence of the San’s ability not to waste anything around them came to me by the sight of their clothing. The women wore animal skin cloaks while the men were dressed in a leather girdle. Personal adornment was also obviously frowned upon and the young children in the party were the only ones allowed to wear strings of beads made from dry grass nuts and highly coloured insect and desert snail shells. I soon realised that these people from long ago harnessed the essence of everything in their arid environment and were probably the original minimalists!

On this first of my meetings with the earliest known culture on earth, I clumsily managed to convey to them my need to see how they sought out potential life-saving waterholes in one of the most arid stretches of country I had ever experienced. Following a great deal of awkward hand waving and gesticulating on my part, my new acquaintances showed me how they first had to divine for signs of underground moisture with the green stalks of a certain shrub occasionally found in their desert homeland.

After an hour or two of walking and divining in different directions, they mystically pointed to a certain spot in the hard dry encrusted sand. My San family then immediately set to digging a hole in the desert with a wooden stick-cum-scoop before inserting hollow dry grass stems into the depression to gently suck up and sip whatever water there may be below.

I was also freely given a demonstration of how they ‘blow’ a not-so-fresh ostrich egg and then use the empty shell to carry their small but all-essential water supply until they can find the next life-saving waterhole.

On the more than one occasion that I met up with the San people, I found them to be extremely happy, always laughing, smiling, dancing or singing songs without words whenever the sun was going down over the far-off golden African horizon. Their repeated use of tribal melodies without words was apparently part of their culture from their ancestors’ days before language was spoken and when people communicated by means of simple hand gestures.

As the descendants of the world’s oldest people, the San are the originators of what we regard as the modern Western ideal of equality between the sexes. San women have the same rights as their menfolk in all matters including family decisions. For a San man to have more than one wife is an absolute rarity as they know that they might have double trouble when speaking out on controversial subjects!

There are also no tribal chieftains in San culture which is centred on family groups of about 25 people with each of these groups observing strict egalitarian tribal laws. The San also never trade between themselves or with outsiders. Their belief is to only give of themselves or their few prized possessions and never to benefit personally from others.

As a group of people, the San hold regular ritual dances accompanied by reed pipe music and much frantic hand clapping. On special festive occasions, certain dancers go into a Shamanic trancelike state in much the same way as I have watched the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey.

Although the small San families I met on the dry raw plains of Africa in the 1950s were always part of a nomadic tribe of foragers, I have been led to believe that the San people in present day times are starting to lean towards cattle ownership while moving around Botswana instead of actively having to hunt for their meals. They have also become known for proudly assisting Australian and other Western scientific researchers in investigating their ancient cultural background by providing more and deeper genetic material for study as proof of their long-held history as a people following an ageless culture.

Both Dart and Tobias have described the San as the Eskimos of Africa as both groups have almost identical cultural traits and markers. Like the San, for instance, age rules all Eskimo families and their most cherished activities are hunting, foraging for nature’s bounty, dancing, playing music and very boisterously telling each other their personal stories. The only real difference between the two groups is that the San have to deal with hot desert wastelands while the Eskimos are surrounded by plains of ice and snow.

Although the San were first acknowledged by Dart and Tobias as having the world’s oldest culture, these two scientists claimed that they did not possess a civilisation due to their not possessing a group-ordered society. Instead, they gave our Australian Aboriginal people the great distinction of having the world’s longest surviving civilisation going back over 70,000 years.