As a species, we love nature. It could not have been otherwise. For our minds and bodies came of age hundreds of thousands of years ago on the African savannahs, where certain patterns of interaction with nature contributed to our survival and psychological well-being. Back then, for example, we sought out bodies of water, hunted, dug deep for roots, walked the land when our predators did not, and situated ourselves with landscape that could offer prospect and refuge. There were hundreds of such interaction patterns with nature. These patterns are with us still. They comprise part of our essential selves. But in our current technological world, they can be diffi cult to see, and they can sometimes take perverse forms. If we go to a zoo, for example, we can sometimes see a child, or even adult, throwing food or a pebble at an animal, such as a lion, leopard, or great ape — even when the signage says not to. The person is trying to get the animal ’ s attention. Why? Perhaps it is because for the entire history of our species we have not only been aware of wild animals, but we have been aware that they have been aware of us, and the desire for that form of interaction persists in modern times. But how would we know that to be true? How would we know how people interacted with nature so long ago? One answer is to draw on accounts from the 1950s of indigenous African people, the Bushmen, before they had virtually any contact with the West. The Bushmen had lived sustainably in the African landscape for about 35,000 years, with a lifestyle that presumably changed little during that time. Thus, to understand them then, in the 1950s, is to gain access, in a way that bones and fossils cannot offer, to aspects of who we were at an earlier time in our evolutionary history.