Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

In 1951 Elizabeth Marshall Thomas abandoned her studies at Smith College to accompany her family to the Kalahari Desert. With funding from the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the family spent much of the following decade at Nyae Nyae studying and filming the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia. “A scientist from Harvard came there much later, and he interviewed some of them and ended up saying they know almost as much as we do,” Thomas said in 2019. “I have never heard such bullshit in my life. They knew a hundred times more.”