The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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A white envelope arrived in my mailbox a week later, the address printed in blue ink with wobbly
block letters. The return address read “Chris Knight.” A rubber-stamped message on the back delivered a
warning: “This correspondence is forwarded from the Kennebec County Jail. Contents have not been
evaluated.”
Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. Smoothing it flat on my desk, I saw it
was from the article I’d mailed him about the tribe known as the Hadza, who live in the Rift Valley of
Tanzania. The story had appeared in National Geographic, and I’d included color copies of the
photographs along with my text.
Knight had returned one of the images, a portrait of a Hadza elder named Onwas. The article mentioned
that Onwas was about sixty years old and had lived his entire life in the bush, camping with an extended
family of two dozen. Onwas did not keep track of years, only seasons and moons. He lived with just a
handful of possessions, enjoyed abundant leisure time, and represented one of the final links to the deepest
root of the human family tree.
Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and for more than ninety-nine percent of
human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Though the groups
may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts
of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking
prey in the wild. This is who we truly are.
The agricultural revolution began twelve thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East,
and the planet was swiftly reorganized into villages and cities and nations, and soon the average person spent
virtually no time alone at all. To a thin but steady stream of people, this was unacceptable, so they escaped.
Recorded history extends back five thousand years, and for as long as humans have been writing, we have
been writing about hermits. It’s a primal fascination. Chinese texts etched on animal bones, as well as the
clay tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from Mesopotamia dating to around 2000 B.C., refer
to shamans or wild men residing alone in the woods.
People have sought out solitary existences at all times across all cultures, some revered and some
despised. Confucius, who died in 479 B.C., seems to have spoken in praise of hermits—some, he said, as
recorded by his disciples, had achieved great virtue. In the third and fourth centuries A.D., thousands of
hermits, devout Christians known as the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, moved into the limestone caves
on both banks of the Nile River in Egypt. The nineteenth century brought Thoreau; the twentieth, the