The Hadza are little known and primitive, they still live as our ancestors did thousands of years ago, reaping the fruits of the land and hunting game, without a real village where to take refuge, but only a fire around which to sit together overnight.
They are the direct descendants of Homo erectus and speak an archaic language that is not closely related to any other spoken by other populations. Today they are facing an uncertain future due to clashes with other larger and more evolved tribes and one of the resulting is less land available.
The Hazda are among the most primitive people inhabiting our planet. They live in a small area in Northern Tanzania, and they are the direct prehistoric ancestors of Homo erectus, who lived along the Rift Valley hundreds of thousands of years ago.
A study conducted by researchers of the Genographic project has determined that about 150,000 years ago, a prehistoric population of Homo sapiens in the Eastern Central Africa region split into two groups, who migrated and colonised other lands; the ancestors of the Hadza settled in Northern Tanzania, while the other group, the ancestors of San, moved to Northern Namibia and settled there.
The lifestyle of the Hadza has virtually remained unchanged for millennia. They do not practice either breeding or farming, they do not work the iron, but they get what they need by practicing bartering with the neighbouring Datoga tribe.
They only live on hunting and gathering wild fruits, such as berries, tubers and honey.
They are the last tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and they live in small groups of 20 to 30 individuals and use mobile camps to move around easily in the pursuit of animals to hunt and berries and fruits.
The Hadza have no formal social organisation; they are peaceful people and prefer to move to other areas to avoid conflicts.
Their life has become increasingly difficult because of larger and better organised groups of herders, such as the Maasai, who have gradually invaded much of their land, destroying wildlife and plants, which are their staple food.
The region where they currently live is limited to a plain comprising Lake Eyasi in the Central Great Rift Valley and the nearby Serengeti plateau.
The Hadza speak an archaic language that uses unusual sounds to our phonetics. In particular, some consonants have a sound like a “click” or a “snap”; to reproduce this sound they click their tongue against the palate or against the teeth.
These particular sounds can be found in 30 other languages of the African continent, but they are almost all concentrated in Southern Africa, only two are isolated and have been classified as language families in their own right: the language spoken by the Hadza and the Sandawe, both resident in Tanzania.
