Science: The Beetle Eaters

"Since years I am behind Pygmies," says Austrian-born Father Martin Gusinde, 69, who teaches anthropology at Washington's Catholic University of America. Starting in 1934, he studied little brown people in Central and South Africa, the Philippines and the Andes. This year, with the help of a grant from Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society, he went to the interior of Australian New Guinea, where a little-known race of Pygmies lives in the rugged Schrader Mountains. "Such a terrible country!" says Father Gusinde. "In Austria the Alps are a kind of avenue compared to those mountains."

The Pygmies live on high, steep slopes, where they were driven by the bigger, fiercer people of the Ramu valley, and Father Gusinde found them the poorest of the poor. Their rudimentary culture is preStone Age; their few stone weapons and tools they did not make for themselves but got from Stone Age neighbors. In spite of the mountain cold, they wear only G-strings and their little grass huts contain nothing but ashes from their fires. Food is usually scarce, and women are scarcer. Male births among the Pygmies, says Father Gusinde, outnumber female births four to one, and young Pygmy women are apt to be stolen by big, bad lowlanders. "Good number of bachelors roaming around," says Anthropologist Gusinde.

In spite of their hardships and deprivations, Gusinde reports, the Pygmies are a smiling, happy people. They commit no crimes and they wage no wars, while the better-fed people of the lush lowlands are both dour and bloodthirsty.

The contentment of the Pygmies puzzled the anthropologist, and he searched for a reason for it. After studying their diet, he decided that their euphoria is due to one of their favorite dishes: big beetles and their larvae, the size of small sausages. A lucky Pygmy may find as many as 100 larvae in a riddled tree trunk. He bakes them with hot stones in a hole in the ground (New England clambake technique), and when he has eaten his fill, he feels as contented as a Hollywood agent tranquilized with Miltown.

The effect of the happiness beetles, thinks Father Gusinde, is due to their vitamin T, which gives "an agreeable feeling." Other insects contain it too, and other insect-eating people are notably contented with their miserable lots. The only trouble is that neighboring people, who do not eat happiness beetles, get pushy and steal their women. When Father Gusinde, no beetle eater, was in the country of the tranquilized Pygmies, the young women were hidden. During his stay he saw only one, about 15 years old, darting across a clearing. The Pygmies were taking no chances with a non-beetle eater.