It was easy to believe, when you followed women and children digging tubers in the bush, that nothing has ever changed in Hadzaland. Digging sticks are undoubtedly an ancient tool, and tuber use may have been a key piece of our ecology since the time of Homo erectus or before (O'Connell et al., 1999; Wrangham, 2009). It was easy to believe, sitting there in the bush watching their quiet industry, that the Hadza have been lost at the bottom of the rift valley for thousands of years. But the distinctive sound, 30,000 feet overhead, of the morning jet from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza jolts one's attention back to today, and the uncomfortable contrasts between the Hadza world and ours. Everything has changed. But here they were, day after day after day, sharpening their digging sticks, organizing the children, marching out to a tuber hillside, a berry patch, a favorite baobab tree.

One begins to look more carefully. Their digging sticks were sharpened with iron knives before we left camp (Photograph 3.1), and hardened on a fire that perhaps was lit with matches. The Hadza can make fire, and carefully keep glowing coals when needed but the matches were likely gifts from us, a small but popular present. Iron knives have been trade items for a long time, and iron arrow heads have been in use since well before Reche (1914) described Obst's material culture collection made 100 years ago. Iron has been used in East Africa since around 1000 BC, and in the Eyasi basin since AD 200 (Mabulla, 2007). There is a complicated truth somewhere between my tuber digging reverie and the morning jet to Mwanza.

Some of the “new” factors, like the jet to Mwanza, seem to be simply ignored. Someone did once ask Lars Smith who the people were that went in these “birds.” White people and government, a good summary in the mid-1980s, was accepted and shrugged off. The airplane is irrelevant to daily life; but the “doctor who comes in a rocket,” as it was described to me, was not. The short-lived attempt at a flying doctor service for the Hadza at Mangola could have saved some lives, could have persuaded a few people to move nearer to its landing strip. Outcomes might have shown up in our record of mortality and mobility. Few interventions, however, have lasted long in Hadzaland.