![Living on the rainforest](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Living_on_the_rainforest.jpg)
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a
human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, cultu ...
living an ancestrally derived
lifestyle
Lifestyle often refers to:
* Lifestyle (sociology), the way a person lives
* ''Otium'', ancient Roman concept of a lifestyle
* Style of life (german: Lebensstil, link=no), dealing with the dynamics of personality
Lifestyle may also refer to:
Bu ...
in which most or all
food
Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is in ...
is obtained by
foraging
Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavi ...
, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild
plant
Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae excl ...
s but also
insect
Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pa ...
s,
fungi
A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately fr ...
,
honey
Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primar ...
, or anything safe to eat, and/or by
hunting
Hunting is the human activity, human practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, or killing wildlife or feral animals. The most common reasons for humans to hunt are to harvest food (i.e. meat) and useful animal products (fur/hide (skin), hide, ...
game (pursuing and/or
trapping
Animal trapping, or simply trapping or gin, is the use of a device to remotely catch an animal. Animals may be trapped for a variety of purposes, including food, the fur trade, hunting, pest control, and wildlife management.
History
Neolithi ...
and killing
wild animal
Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted fo ...
s, including
catching fish), roughly as most animal
omnivore
An omnivore () is an animal that has the ability to eat and survive on both plant and animal matter. Obtaining energy and nutrients from plant and animal matter, omnivores digest carbohydrates, protein, fat, and fiber, and metabolize the nu ...
s do. Hunter-gatherer
societies
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societ ...
stand in contrast to the more
sedentary
Sedentary lifestyle is a lifestyle type, in which one is physically inactive and does little or no physical movement and or exercise. A person living a sedentary lifestyle is often sitting or lying down while engaged in an activity like soci ...
agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating
crop
A crop is a plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence. When the plants of the same kind are cultivated at one place on a large scale, it is called a crop. Most crops are cultivated in agriculture or hydropon ...
s and raising
domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.
Hunting and gathering was humanity's original and most enduring successful
competitive
Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indivi ...
adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of
human history
Human history, also called world history, is the narrative of humanity's past. It is understood and studied through anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. Since the invention of writing, human history has been studied throug ...
. Following the
invention of agriculture
The Neolithic Revolution, or the (First) Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period from a lifestyle of hunter-gatherer, hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and sedentism, ...
, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or
pastoralist groups in most parts of the world.
Only a few contemporary societies of
uncontacted people
Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. ...
are still classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their foraging activity with
horticulture
Horticulture is the branch of agriculture that deals with the art, science, technology, and business of plant cultivation. It includes the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, sprouts, mushrooms, algae, flowers, seaweeds and no ...
or
pastoralism
Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals (known as " livestock") are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The a ...
.
Archaeological evidence
Hunting and gathering was presumably the
subsistence
A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence (the provision of food, clothing, shelter) rather than to the market. Henceforth, "subsistence" is understood as supporting oneself at a minimum level. Often, the subsistence econo ...
strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by ''
Homo erectus'', and from its appearance some 200,000 years ago by ''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
''. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived in groups that consisted of several families resulting in a size of a few dozen people. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the
Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago, and after this was replaced only gradually with the spread of the
Neolithic Revolution.
During the 1970s,
Lewis Binford
Lewis Roberts Binford (November 21, 1931 – April 11, 2011) was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influ ...
suggested that
early humans
''Homo'' () is the genus that emerged in the (otherwise extinct) genus ''Australopithecus'' that encompasses the extant species ''Homo sapiens'' (modern humans), plus several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely relate ...
obtained food via
scavenging
Scavengers are animals that consume dead organisms that have died from causes other than predation or have been killed by other predators. While scavenging generally refers to carnivores feeding on carrion, it is also a herbivorous feeding ...
, not
hunting
Hunting is the human activity, human practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, or killing wildlife or feral animals. The most common reasons for humans to hunt are to harvest food (i.e. meat) and useful animal products (fur/hide (skin), hide, ...
. Early humans in the
Lower Paleolithic lived in
forest
A forest is an area of land dominated by trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' ...
s and
woodland
A woodland () is, in the broad sense, land covered with trees, or in a narrow sense, synonymous with wood (or in the U.S., the ''plurale tantum'' woods), a low-density forest forming open habitats with plenty of sunlight and limited shade (se ...
s, which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals for meat, according to this view, they used carcasses of such animals that had either been killed by
predators
Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill th ...
or that had died of natural causes. Archaeological and genetic data suggest that the source populations of
Paleolithic hunter-gatherers survived in sparsely wooded areas and dispersed through areas of high primary productivity while avoiding dense forest cover.
According to the
endurance running hypothesis
The endurance running hypothesis is a series of conjectures which presume humans evolved anatomical and physiological adaptations to run long distances
.
and, more strongly, that "running is the only known behavior that would account for the di ...
, long-distance running as in
persistence hunting
Persistence hunting is pursuit until the prey can no longer flee and succumbs to exhaustion or heat stroke.
History and definition
Some researchers have insisted that the point of persistence hunting is not to induce exhaustion but specifi ...
, a method still practiced by some hunter-gatherer groups in modern times, was likely the driving evolutionary force leading to the evolution of certain human characteristics. This hypothesis does not necessarily contradict the scavenging hypothesis: both subsistence strategies may have been in use sequentially, alternately or even simultaneously.
![World in 2000 BC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/World_in_2000_BC.svg)
Starting at the transition between the
Middle to
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...
period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherer bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of (often larger) game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools such as
fishing net
A fishing net is a Net (device), net used for fishing. Nets are devices made from fibers woven in a grid-like structure. Some fishing nets are also called fish traps, for example #Fyke nets, fyke nets. Fishing nets are usually meshes formed by ...
s, hooks, and bone
harpoon
A harpoon is a long spear-like instrument and tool used in fishing, whaling, sealing, and other marine hunting to catch and injure large fish or marine mammals such as seals and whales. It accomplishes this task by impaling the target animal ...
s. The transition into the subsequent
Neolithic
The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several p ...
period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices.
Agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people t ...
originated as early as 12,000 years ago in the
Middle East
The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (Europ ...
, and also independently originated in many other areas including
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...
, parts of
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
,
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica ...
, and the
Andes
The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S ...
.
Forest gardening
Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly us ...
was also being used as a food production system in various parts of the world over this period. Forest gardens had originated in
prehistoric times
Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the use of the first stone tools by hominins 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of ...
along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of
monsoon
A monsoon () is traditionally a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal osci ...
regions. In the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified, protected, and improved, whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Eventually superior
introduced species
An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived ther ...
were selected and incorporated into the gardens.
Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have continually declined, partly as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in the developing world, either in arid regions or tropical forests. Areas that were formerly available to hunter-gatherers were—and continue to be—encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition,
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American geographer, historian, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books '' The Third Chimpanzee'' (1991); ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Priz ...
has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods, particularly animal resources. In
North
North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography.
Etymology
The word ''north ...
and
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...
, for example, most large mammal species had gone extinct by the end of the
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...
—according to Diamond, because of
overexploitation by humans,
one of several explanations offered for the
Quaternary extinction event
The Quaternary period (from 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present) has seen the extinctions of numerous predominantly megafaunal species, which have resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity and the extinction of key ecolog ...
there.
As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. This process of agriculture-driven expansion led to the development of the first
forms of government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
in agricultural centers, such as the
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent ( ar, الهلال الخصيب) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, together with the northern region of Kuwait, southeastern region of ...
,
Ancient India
According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Quote: "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by m ...
,
Ancient China,
Olmec
The Olmecs () were the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization. Following a progressive development in Soconusco, they occupied the tropical lowlands of the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. It has been speculated that ...
,
Sub-Saharan Africa and
Norte Chico.
As a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures usually live in areas unsuitable for agricultural use.
Archaeologists can use evidence such as stone tool use to track hunter-gatherer activities, including mobility.
Ethnobotany is the field of study whereby food plants of various peoples and tribes worldwide are documented.
Common characteristics
Habitat and population
Most hunter-gatherers are
nomad
A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the po ...
ic or semi-nomadic and live in temporary settlements. Mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available.
Some hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the
indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the
Yokuts
The Yokuts (previously known as MariposasPowell, 1891:90–91.) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. ''Yokuts ...
, lived in particularly rich environments that allowed them to be sedentary or semi-sedentary. Amongst the earliest example of permanent settlements is the Osipovka culture (14–10.3 thousand years ago), which lived in a fish-rich environment that allowed them to be able to stay at the same place all year. One group, the
Chumash Chumash may refer to:
*Chumash (Judaism), a Hebrew word for the Pentateuch, used in Judaism
*Chumash people, a Native American people of southern California
*Chumashan languages, indigenous languages of California
See also
*Chumash traditional n ...
, had the highest recorded population density of any known hunter and gatherer society with an estimated 21.6 persons per square mile.
Social and economic structure
Hunter-gatherers tend to have an
egalitarian
Egalitarianism (), or equalitarianism, is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds from the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all hu ...
social ethos,
although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America) are an exception to this rule.
For example, the
San people
The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia ...
or "Bushmen" of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods.
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
defined this socio-economic system as
primitive communism.
![Mbendjele meat sharing](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Mbendjele_meat_sharing.jpg)
The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total, but is striking when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives,
chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an
alpha male
In biology, a dominance hierarchy (formerly and colloquially called a pecking order) is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of animal social groups interact, creating a ranking system. A dominant higher-ranking individual is so ...
. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by
paleoanthropologists
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship ...
that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of
human consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
,
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
,
kinship and
social organization
In sociology, a social organization is a pattern of relationships between and among individuals and social groups.
Characteristics of social organization can include qualities such as sexual composition, spatiotemporal cohesion, leadership, s ...
.
Most anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.
Within a particular tribe or people, hunter-gatherers are connected by both
kinship and
band
Band or BAND may refer to:
Places
*Bánd, a village in Hungary
*Band, Iran, a village in Urmia County, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran
* Band, Mureș, a commune in Romania
*Band-e Majid Khan, a village in Bukan County, West Azerbaijan Province, I ...
(residence/domestic group) membership.
Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially. Young mothers can enjoy childcare support from their own mothers, who continue living nearby in the same camp. The systems of kinship and descent among human hunter-gatherers were relatively flexible, although there is evidence that early human kinship in general tended to be
matrilineal
Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance ...
.
The conventional assumption has been that women did most of the gathering, while men concentrated on big game hunting. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele's study of the southern African Ju/'hoan, 'Women Like Meat'. A recent study suggests that the sexual division of labor was the fundamental organizational innovation that gave ''Homo sapiens'' the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.
This view was challenged by feminist anthropologists in the 1970s who pointed out that anthropology had historically overly emphasized men. The stereotype of "man the hunter, women the gatherer" may have described a common division of labor, but men in hunter-gatherer societies still help with the gathering, especially when women are tired or sick, or the hunt is unsuccessful. Women hunted with different weapons. Women hunted with dogs or blowpipes and poison darts. Women could trap animals too, using nets or baskets to snare crabs and fish.
A 1986 study found most hunter-gatherers have a symbolically structured sexual division of labor. However, it is true that in a small minority of cases, women hunted the same kind of quarry as men, sometimes doing so alongside men. Among the
Ju'/hoansi people of Namibia, women help men
track down quarry.
In the Australian Martu, both women and men participate in hunting but with a different style of gendered division; while men are willing to take more risks to hunt bigger animals such as kangaroo for political gain as a form of "competitive magnanimity", women target smaller game such as lizards to feed their children and promote working relationships with other women, preferring a more constant supply of sustenance.
9000-year-old remains of a female hunter along with a toolkit of
projectile points
In North American archaeological terminology, a projectile point is an object that was hafted to a weapon that was capable of being thrown or projected, such as a javelin, dart, or arrow. They are thus different from weapons presumed to have ...
and animal processing implements were discovered at the
Andean
The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S l ...
site of Wilamaya Patjxa,
Puno District
Puno District is one of fifteen districts of the Puno Province in the Puno Region of Peru. Its seat is Puno
Puno (Aymara and qu, Punu) is a city in southeastern Peru, located on the shore of Lake Titicaca. It is the capital city of the Pun ...
in
Peru
, image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg
, image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg
, other_symbol = Great Seal of the State
, other_symbol_type = National seal
, national_motto = "Firm and Happy f ...
.
At the 1966 "
Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists
Richard Borshay Lee
Richard Borshay Lee (born 1937) is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus o ...
and
Irven DeVore
Irven DeVore (October 7, 1934 – September 23, 2014) was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropolog ...
suggested that
egalitarianism
Egalitarianism (), or equalitarianism, is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds from the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all hu ...
was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population. Therefore, no surplus of resources can be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were
flux in territorial boundaries as well as in
demographic composition.
At the same conference,
Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "
Notes on the Original Affluent Society", in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers lives as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", as
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5/15 April 1588 – 4/14 December 1679) was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influ ...
had put it in 1651.
According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more
leisure
Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Leisur ...
than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they were satisfied with very little in the material sense.
[Sahlins, M. (1968). "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", ''Man the Hunter.'' R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp. 85–89. . See also: Jerome Lewis]
"Managing abundance, not chasing scarcity"
, ''Radical Anthropology'', No. 2, 2008, and John Gowdy
"Hunter-Gatherers and the Mythology of the Market"
in Lee, Richard B (2005). ''Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers''. Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, whereas people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.
Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years. They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies.
Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a "
gift economy."
A 2010 paper argued that while hunter-gatherers may have lower levels of inequality than modern, industrialised societies, that does not mean inequality does not exist. The researchers estimated that the average Gini coefficient amongst hunter-gatherers was 0.25, equivalent to the country of Denmark in 2007. In addition, wealth transmission across generations was also a feature of hunter-gatherers, meaning that "wealthy" hunter-gatherers, within the context of their communities, were more likely to have children as wealthy as them than poorer members of their community and indeed hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate an understanding of social stratification. Thus while the researchers agreed that hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than modern societies, prior characterisations of them living in a state of egalitarian primitive communism were inaccurate and misleading.
Variability
Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on
climate zone
Climate classifications are systems that categorize the world's climates. A climate classification may correlate closely with a biome classification, as climate is a major influence on life in a region. One of the most used is the Köppen climate ...
/
life zone, available technology, and societal structure. Archaeologists examine hunter-gatherer tool kits to measure variability across different groups. Collard ''et al.'' (2005) found temperature to be the only statistically significant factor to impact hunter-gatherer tool kits. Using temperature as a proxy for risk, Collard ''et al.'s'' results suggest that environments with extreme temperatures pose a threat to hunter-gatherer systems significant enough to warrant increased variability of tools. These results support Torrence's (1989) theory that the risk of failure is indeed the most important factor in determining the structure of hunter-gatherer toolkits.
One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems.
James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarianism and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian.
Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it.
Delayed return foragers store the surplus food.
Hunting-gathering was the common human mode of subsistence throughout the
Paleolithic, but the observation of current-day hunters and gatherers does not necessarily reflect Paleolithic societies; the hunter-gatherer cultures examined today have had much contact with modern civilization and do not represent "pristine" conditions found in
uncontacted peoples
Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. ...
.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one-way process.
It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an
adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.
In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.
Nowadays, some scholars speak about the existence within
cultural evolution
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation a ...
of the so-called mixed-economies or dual economies which imply a combination of food procurement (gathering and hunting) and food production or when foragers have trade relations with farmers.
Modern and revisionist perspectives
![Shoshoni tipis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Shoshoni_tipis.jpg)
Some of the theorists who advocate this "revisionist" critique imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" disappeared not long after
colonial
Colonial or The Colonial may refer to:
* Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology)
Architecture
* American colonial architecture
* French Colonial
* Spanish Colonial architecture
Automobiles
* Colonial (1920 au ...
(or even agricultural) contact began, nothing meaningful can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly,
24–29; see Wilmsen
[
])
Lee and Guenther have rejected most of the arguments put forward by Wilmsen.
Doron Shultziner and others have argued that we can learn a lot about the life-styles of prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers—especially their impressive levels of egalitarianism.
![Bathurst Island men](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Bathurst_Island_men.jpg)
There are nevertheless a number of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples who, after contact with other societies, continue their ways of life with very little external influence or with modifications that perpetuate the viability of hunting and gathering in the 21st century.
One such group is the
Pila Nguru (Spinifex people) of
Western Australia
Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...
, whose habitat in the
Great Victoria Desert
The Great Victoria Desert is a sparsely populated desert ecoregion and interim Australian bioregion in Western Australia and South Australia.
History
In 1875, British-born Australian explorer Ernest Giles became the first European to cros ...
has proved unsuitable for European agriculture (and even pastoralism). Another are the
Sentinelese
The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group ...
of the
Andaman Islands in the
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by t ...
, who live on
North Sentinel Island
North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island. It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous people in voluntary isolation who have defended, often by ...
and to date have maintained their independent existence, repelling attempts to engage with and contact them.
The Savanna
Pumé of Venezuela also live in an area that is inhospitable to large scale economic exploitation and maintain their subsistence based on hunting and gathering, as well as incorporating a small amount of manioc horticulture that supplements, but is not replacing, reliance on foraged foods.
Americas
Evidence suggests big-game hunter-gatherers crossed the
Bering Strait from Asia (Eurasia) into North America over a land bridge (
Beringia), that existed between 47,000 and 14,000 years ago.
Around 18,500–15,500 years ago, these hunter-gatherers are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...
megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the
Laurentide
The Laurentide Ice Sheet was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the Northern United States, multiple times during the Quaternary glacial epochs, from 2.58 million years a ...
and
Cordilleran ice sheets. Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using
primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific coast to South America.
![Glyptodon old drawing](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Glyptodon_old_drawing.jpg)
Hunter-gatherers would eventually flourish all over the Americas, primarily based in the
Great Plains of the United States and Canada, with offshoots as far east as the
Gaspé Peninsula on the
Atlantic coast, and as far south as
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...
,
Monte Verde
Monte Verde is an archaeological site in the Llanquihue Province in southern Chile, located near Puerto Montt, Southern Chile, which has been dated to as early as 18,500 cal BP (16,500 BC). Previously, the widely accepted date for early occu ...
. American hunter-gatherers were spread over a wide geographical area, thus there were regional variations in lifestyles. However, all the individual groups shared a common style of stone tool production, making
knapping
Knapping is the shaping of flint, chert, obsidian, or other conchoidal fracturing stone through the process of lithic reduction to manufacture stone tools, strikers for flintlock firearms, or to produce flat-faced stones for building or facing w ...
styles and progress identifiable. This early Paleo-Indian period
lithic reduction
In archaeology, in particular of the Stone Age, lithic reduction is the process of fashioning stones or rocks from their natural state into tools or weapons by removing some parts. It has been intensely studied and many archaeological industrie ...
tool adaptations have been found across the Americas, utilized by highly mobile bands consisting of approximately 25 to 50 members of an extended family.
The
Archaic period in the Americas
Archaic is a period of time preceding a designated classical period, or something from an older period of time that is also not found or used currently:
*List of archaeological periods
**Archaic Sumerian language, spoken between 31st - 26th cent ...
saw a changing environment featuring a warmer more
arid
A region is arid when it severely lacks available water, to the extent of hindering or preventing the growth and development of plant and animal life. Regions with arid climates tend to lack vegetation and are called xeric or desertic. Most ...
climate and the disappearance of the last megafauna. The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers. Individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally, however, and thus archaeologists have identified a pattern of increasing regional generalization, as seen with the
Southwest
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sepa ...
,
Arctic
The Arctic ( or ) is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), Danish Realm (Greenland), Finland, Iceland, N ...
,
Poverty Point
Poverty Point State Historic Site/Poverty Point National Monument (french: Pointe de Pauvreté; 16 WC 5) is a prehistoric earthwork constructed by the Poverty Point culture, located in present-day northeastern Louisiana, though evidence of t ...
,
Dalton
Dalton may refer to:
Science
* Dalton (crater), a lunar crater
* Dalton (program), chemistry software
* Dalton (unit) (Da), the atomic mass unit
* John Dalton, chemist, physicist and meteorologist
Entertainment
* Dalton (Buffyverse), minor ch ...
and
Plano traditions. These regional adaptations would become the norm, with reliance less on hunting and gathering, with a more mixed
economy
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...
of small game,
fish
Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of ...
, seasonally
wild vegetables and harvested plant foods.
Scholars like Kat Anderson have suggested that the term Hunter-gatherer is reductive because it implies that Native Americans never stayed in one place long enough to affect the environment around them. However, many of the landscapes in the Americas today are due to the way the Natives of that area originally tended the land. Anderson specifically looks at California Natives and the practices they utilized to tame their land. Some of these practices included pruning, weeding, sowing, burning, and selective harvesting. These practices allowed them to take from the environment in a sustainable manner for centuries.
California Indians view the idea of wilderness in a negative light. They believe that wilderness is the result of humans losing their knowledge of the natural world and how to care for it. When the earth turns back to wilderness after the connection with humans is lost then the plants and animals will retreat and hide from the humans.
See also
![Negritos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Negritos.png)
*
Beachcombing
*
Nomads
A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the po ...
*
Cro-Magnon
*
Homo floresiensis
''Homo floresiensis'' also known as "Flores Man"; nicknamed "Hobbit") is an extinct species of small archaic human that inhabited the island of Flores, Indonesia, until the arrival of modern humans about 50,000 years ago.
The remains of an in ...
*
Human migration
Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location (geographic region). The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another (ex ...
*
Human history
Human history, also called world history, is the narrative of humanity's past. It is understood and studied through anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. Since the invention of writing, human history has been studied throug ...
*
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
*
Neanderthals
*
Neolithic Revolution
*
Origins of society The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates ...
*
Paleolithic
*
Prehistoric music
Prehistoric music (previously called primitive music) is a term in the history of music for all music produced in preliterate cultures (prehistory), beginning somewhere in very late geological history. Prehistoric music is followed by ancient mu ...
*
Primitive skills
Survivalism is a social movement of individuals or groups (called survivalists or preppers) who proactively prepare for emergency, emergencies, such as natural disasters, as well as other disasters causing disruption to social order (that is, c ...
*
Stateless society
A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority; most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power and are generally not permanently held ...
*
Tribe
The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in part due to confli ...
*
Clan
*
Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer
*
Pitted Ware culture
The Pitted Ware culture ( 3500 BC– 2300 BC) was a hunter-gatherer culture in southern Scandinavia, mainly along the coasts of Svealand, Götaland, Åland, north-eastern Denmark and southern Norway. Despite its Mesolithic economy, it i ...
Modern hunter-gatherer groups
*
Aeta people
The Aeta (Ayta ), Agta, or Dumagat, are collective terms for several Filipino indigenous peoples who live in various parts of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. They are considered to be part of the Negrito ethnic groups and share common ...
*
Aka people
Aka, AKA or a.k.a. may refer to:
* "Also known as", used to introduce an alternative name
Languages
* Aka language (Sudan)
* Aka language, in the Central African Republic
* Hruso language, in India, also referred to as Aka
* a prefix in the na ...
*
Andamanese people
The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. The Andamanese peoples are among the various groups ...
*
Angu people
The Angu or Änga people, also called Kukukuku (pronounced "cookah-cookah") are a small and previously violent and cannibal group speaking a number of related languagesEthnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth Edition, M. Paul Lewis, editor; ...
*
Awá-Guajá people
*
Batek people
*
Efé people
The Efé are a group of part-time hunter-gatherer people living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the depths of the forest they do not wear much clothing, using only leaf huts as shelter for their bodies in the inte ...
*
Fuegians
Fuegians are the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. In English, the term originally referred to the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego. In Spanish, the term ''fueguino'' can refer to any person from ...
*
Hadza people
The Hadza, or Hadzabe (''Wahadzabe'' in Swahili), are a Tanzanian indigenous ethnic group mostly based in southwest Karatu District of Arusha Region. They live around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau ...
*
Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast
*
Inuit
Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories ...
*
Iñupiat
The Iñupiat (or Inupiat, Iñupiaq or Inupiaq;) are a group of Alaska Natives, whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current ...
*
Jarawa people (Andaman Islands)
The Jarawas ( Jarawa: ''Aong'', ) are an indigenous people of the Andaman Islands in India. They live in parts of South Andaman and Middle Andaman Islands, and their present numbers are estimated at between 250–400 individuals. They have lar ...
*
Kawahiva people
The Kawahiva, formerly called the Rio Pardo Indians, are an uncontacted peoples, uncontacted indigenous peoples, indigenous tribe who live near the city of Colniza in Mato Grosso, close to the Pardo River (Mato Grosso), Rio Pardo in the north of ...
*
Maniq people
The Maniq or Mani are an ethnic group of Thailand. They are more widely known in Thailand as the ''Sakai'' ( th, ซาไก), a controversial derogatory term meaning'barbarism'. They are the only Negrito group in Thailand and speak a variety of ...
*
Mbuti people
The Mbuti people, or Bambuti, are one of several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo region of Africa. Their languages are Central Sudanic languages and Bantu languages.
Subgroups
Bambuti are pygmy hunter-gatherers, and are one of the oldes ...
*
Mlabri people
The Mlabri ( Thai: มลาบรี) or Mrabri are an ethnic group of Thailand and Laos, and have been called "the most interesting and least understood people in Southeast Asia". Only about 400 or fewer Mlabris remain in the world today, with s ...
*
Moriori people
The Moriori are the native Polynesian people of the Chatham Islands (''Rēkohu'' in Moriori; ' in Māori), New Zealand. Moriori originated from Māori settlers from the New Zealand mainland around 1500 CE. This was near the time of th ...
*
Nukak people
*
Onge people
The Onge (also Önge, Ongee, and Öñge) are an Andamanese ethnic group, indigenous to the Andaman Islands in Southeast Asia at the Bay of Bengal, currently administered by India. They are traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers, but al ...
*
Penan people
The Penan are a nomadic indigenous people living in Sarawak and Brunei, although there is only one small community in Brunei; among those in Brunei half have been converted to Islam, even if only superficially. Penan are one of the last such pe ...
*
Pirahã people
The Pirahã (pronounced ) are an indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people, and are hunter-gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré i ...
*
Raute people
Raute are a nomadic traveling ethnic group officially recognized by the Government of Nepal. They are known for subsistence hunting of langur and macaque monkeys. They gather wild forest tubers, fruits, and greens on a regular basis. To obtai ...
*
San people
The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia ...
*
Semang people
The Semang are an ethnic-minority group of the Malay Peninsula. They live in mountainous and isolated forest regions of Perak, Pahang, Kelantan and Kedah of Malaysia and the southern provinces of Thailand. The Semang are among the different e ...
*
Sentinelese people
The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern Indian Ocean. Designated a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group ...
*
Tjimba people
The Cimba , also spelled Tjimba, are a remote, Herero-speaking hunter-gatherer people of the Kaokoveld desert in northwest Namibia and southwest Angola
, national_anthem = " Angola Avante"()
, image_map =
, map_cap ...
*
Yaruro (Pumé) people
*
Ye'kuana people
The Ye'kuana, also called Ye'kwana, Ye'Kuana, Yekuana, Yequana, Yecuana, Dekuana, Maquiritare, Makiritare, So'to or Maiongong, are a Cariban-speaking tropical rain-forest tribe who live in the Caura River and Orinoco River regions of Venezuel ...
*
Yupik people
The Yupik (plural: Yupiit) (; russian: Юпикские народы) are a group of indigenous or aboriginal peoples of western, southwestern, and southcentral Alaska and the Russian Far East. They are related to the Inuit and Iñupiat. Yu ...
Social movements
*
Anarcho-primitivism
Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of civilization (anti-civ) that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organ ...
, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild.
*
Freeganism
Freeganism is an ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food. The word "freegan" is a portmanteau of "free" and "vegan". While vegans ...
involves gathering of food (and sometimes other materials) in the context of an urban or suburban environment.
*
Gleaning
Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. It is a practice described in the Hebrew Bible that became a legall ...
involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields.
*
Paleolithic diet
The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or stone-age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought by its proponents to mirror those eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era.
The diet avoids processed food and typically incl ...
, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.
References
Further reading
;Books
*
*
* (Reviewed in
The Montreal Review')
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
;Articles
*
*
*
External links
International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research (ISHGR)History of the Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS)The Association of Foragers: An international association for teachers of hunter-gatherer skills.A wiki dedicated to the scientific study of the diversity of foraging societies without recreating myths*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hunter-Gatherer
Anthropological categories of peoples
Nomads
Stone Age
Human evolution
Economic systems
Foraging