Hunter-gatherer
A
hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary
subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, using
foraging and
hunting, without significant recourse to the
domestication of either. The demarcation between hunter-gatherers and other societies which rely more upon domestication (see
agriculture and
pastoralism) is not a clean one, as many contemporary societies use a combination of both strategies to obtain the
foodstuffs required to sustain themselves.
Hunting and gathering was the only economy employed by
human societies for more than a million years, until the end of the
Palaeolithic period. The transition into the subsequent
Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture
originated and spread in several different areas including the
Middle East,
Asia,
Mesoamerica, and the
Andes beginning as early as
12,000 years ago. Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have perpetually declined as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Areas which were formerly unrestricted to hunter-gatherers were encroached upon by the settlements of early agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas.
As the number and size of agricultural communities increased and expansion became necessary to sustain increasing populations,
genocide became an effective strategy for colonizers to gain possession of lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers and communities practicing
small scale agriculture (for examples, see
European Colonization of Africa,
European colonization of the Americas,
European Colonization of Australia). As a result of the now global reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary
cultures who practice hunting and gathering usually live in areas seen as undesirable for agricultural use.
Archaeological evidence must be used to learn about
prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and
ethnographic studies, as well as
historical information, provide information about living or historic hunter-gatherers. Interdisciplinary fields such as
ethnohistory,
ethnoarchaeology,
human behavioral ecology, and
paleoethnobotany have also arisen to provide more insight into the hunter-gatherer past.
Habitat and population
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile or "
nomadic", given their reliance upon the ability of a given
natural environment to provide sufficient
resources in order to sustain their population and the variable availability of these resources owing to local
climatic and
seasonal conditions. Their population densities tend to be lower than those of
agriculturalists, since cultivated land is capable of sustaining
population densities 60–100 times greater than land left uncultivated. Individual
bands tend to be small in number (10-30 individuals), but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group (100 or more) when resources are abundant. In a few places where the environment is especially productive, such as that of the
Pacific Northwest coast, hunter-gatherers are able to settle permanently.
Hunter-gatherer settlements may be either permanent, temporary, or some combination of the two, depending upon the mobility of the community. Mobile communities typically construct
shelters using impermanent
building materials, or they may use natural
rock shelters, where they are available,while more settled communities build more durable structures.
Social structure
Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have non-
hierarchical,
egalitarian social structures. However, this is usually only the case in the more mobile societies, which generally are not able to store surplus food. Thus, full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies. Others, such as the
Haida of present-day
British Columbia, lived in such a rich environment that they could remain sedentary, like many other
Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest coast. These groups demonstrate more
hierarchical social organization.
A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual
division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an extremely common phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide, but exceptional examples are known. It would, therefore, be an over-generalization to say that men always hunt and women always gather.
At the
1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that
egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to 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 living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as
Thomas Hobbes had put it in
1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more
leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a
Zen economy.
One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian 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 (Kelly
, 31). Some
Marxists have theorised that hunter-gatherers would have used
primitive communism and
anarcho-primitivists elaborate the mechanics further by asserting it would have been a
gift economy, although this would not have applied for all hunter-gatherer societies.
There is far too much variability among hunter-gatherer cultures across the world to be able to illustrate a "typical" society in anything but the broadest strokes. The "hunter-gatherer" category is nothing more than an economic one which roughly circumscribes an extremely diverse range of societies who happen to share certain traits. It is therefore important not to mistake common characteristics of hunter-gatherer societies for a universal description.
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 agriculturalits.
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. Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of
slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. These activities are on an entirely different scale than those associated with agriculture, but they are nevertheless domestication on some level. Today, almost all hunter-gatherers depend to some extent upon domesticated food sources either produced part-time or traded for products acquired in the wild.Some agriculturalists also regularly hunt and gather (e.g. farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter). Still others in developed countries go hunting, primarily for leisure.
In the early 1980s, a small but vocal segment of anthropologists and archaeologists attempted to demonstrate that contemporary groups usually identified as hunter-gatherers do not, in most cases, have a continuous history of hunting and gathering, and that in many cases their ancestors were agriculturalists and/or pastoralists who were pushed into marginal areas as a result of migrations, economic exploitation, and/or violent conflict. The result of their effort has been the general acknowledgement that there has been complex interaction between hunter-gatherers and non-hunter-gatherers for millennia.
Some of the theorists who advocate this "revisionist" critique, imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" disappeared not long after
colonial (or even agricultural) contact began, nothing meaningful can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly
, 24-29; see Wilmsen
); however, most specialists who study hunter-gatherer
ecology (see
Cultural ecology and
Human behavioral ecology) disagree with this conclusion.
There are contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples who, after contact with other societies, continue their ways of life with very little external influence. One such group are the Pila Nguru or the
Spinifex People of
Western Australia, whose habitat in the
Great Victoria Desert has proved unsuitable for European agriculture (and even pastoralism). Another are the
Sentinelese of the
Andaman Islands in the
Indian Ocean, who live on
North Sentinel Island and to date have maintained their independent existence, repelling attempts to engage with and contact them.
Social movements
There are some modern social movements related to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle:
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freeganism involves gathering of discarded food (and sometimes other materials) in the context of an urban or suburban environment
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gleaning involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields
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anarcho-primitivism, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild
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paleolithic diet, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.
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Batek*
Bushmen*
Nukak*
Pygmies*
Inuit*
Sentinelese*
Spinifex People*
Neolithic Revolution*
Indigenous peoples*
Human migration*
Prehistoric musicFurther reading
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African Pygmies Culture and photos of these African hunter-gatherers.
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Reconstructed bone flutes, sound sample and playing instructions.
