Hunter-gatherer

Examples of Hunter-gatherer in the following topics:

• The Four Social Revolutions

  • The hunter-gatherer way of life is based on the consumption of wild plants and wild animals.
  • Consequently, hunter-gatherers are often mobile, and groups of hunter-gatherers tend to have fluid boundaries and compositions.
  • Typically, in hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt wild animals while women gather fruits, nuts, roots, and other vegetation.
  • The majority of hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic.
  • Given that hunter-gatherers tend to be nomadic, they generally cannot store surplus food.

• Preindustrial Societies: The Birth of Inequality

  • Two specific forms of pre-industrial society are hunter-gatherer societies and feudal societies.
  • A hunter-gatherer society is one in which most or all food is obtained by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species.
  • Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be very mobile, following their food sources.
  • Hunter-gatherer group membership is often based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.
  • Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their foraging activity with farming or raising domesticated animals.

• Archaic Hunters and Gatherers

  • While Archaic hunters and gatherers were still highly mobile, individual groups started to focus on resources available locally.
  • The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers, but now individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally.
  • These regional adaptations would become the norm, with people relying less on hunting and gathering and more on a mixed economy of small game, fish, seasonal wild vegetables, and harvested plant foods.
  • Many groups continued as big-game hunters, but their hunting traditions became more varied and meat procurement methods more sophisticated.
  • Simple map of subsistence methods in the Americas at 1000 BCE.Key:[Yellow] Mesolithic; hunter-gatherers [Green] Neolithic; simple farming societies[Orange] Tribal chiefdoms or civilizations; complex farming societies

• Lenski's Synthesis

  • Human groups begin as hunter-gatherers, move toward pastoralism and/or horticulturalism, develop toward an agrarian society, and ultimately end up industrializing (with the potential to develop a service industry following industrialization).
  • The origins of inequality can be found in the transition from hunter/gatherer societies to horticultural/pastoralist societies.
  • In hunter/gather societies (around 50,000 B.C.), small groups of people gathered what they could find, hunted, and fished.
  • Food gathering and food production were the focus of work.
  • Nearly all societies have become industrialized to varying extents, but a few continue to function based on hunting and gathering.

• Societal Development

  • The hunter-gatherer way of life is based on the exploitation of wild plants and animals.
  • Consequently, hunter-gatherers are relatively mobile, and groups of hunter-gatherers have fluid boundaries and composition.
  • The majority of hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic.
  • Examples of hunter-gatherer groups still in existence include:
  • The line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies is not clear cut.

• Bronze Age Rock Carvings

  • The majority of rock carvings were produced in caves or canyons by hunter-gatherer peoples who inhabited the area, and typically depicted animals, humans as well as some narrative scenes .
  • The majority of rock carvings were produced in caves or canyons by hunter-gatherer peoples who inhabited the area, and typically depicted animals, humans and some narrative scenes, such as the ones shown here.

• Paleolithic Architecture

  • Due to a lack of written records from this time period, nearly all of our knowledge of Paleolithic human culture and way of life comes from archaeologic and ethnographic comparisons to modern hunter-gatherer cultures.
  • A typical Paleolithic society followed a hunter-gatherer economy.
  • Humans hunted wild animals for meat and gathered food, firewood, and materials for their tools, clothes, or shelters.
  • Instead, they likely became places for early people to gather for ritual and religious purposes.
  • At Terra Amata, these hunter-gatherers built a long and narrow house.

• The Neolithic Revolution

  • During this time, humans lived in small groups as hunter-gatherers, with clear gender divisions for labor.
  • The men hunted animals while the women gathered food, such as fruit, nuts and berries, from the local area.
  • This transition everywhere is associated with the change from a largely nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a more settled, agrarian-based one, due to the inception of the domestication of various plant and animal species—depending on the species locally available, and probably also influenced by local culture.
  • The Demographic theories proposed by Carl Sauer and adapted by Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery posit that an increasingly sedentary population outgrew the resources in the local environment and required more food than could be gathered.
  • Neolithic populations generally had poorer nutrition, shorter life expectancies, and a more labor-intensive lifestyle than hunter-gatherers.

• Early Lifestyles

  • Paleo-Indians subsisted as small, mobile groups of big game hunters, traveling light and frequently to find new sources of food.
  • Small bands utilized hunting and gathering during the spring and summer months, then broke into smaller direct family groups for the fall and winter.
  • These groups were efficient hunters and carried a variety of tools, which included highly efficient fluted style spear points, as well as microblades used for butchering and hide processing.
  • The Lithic peoples, or Paleo-Indians, were nomadic hunter-gatherers and are the earliest known humans of the Americas.

• Proactive Representatives

  • Hunters are in it for the kill; they always smell fresh prey.
  • They are always on the hunt, the scent of their next prey always present; if the hunter finds fresh tracks (leads) you can be sure the Hunter will be after it.
  • The good hunters will close well and take care of the customer, but most hunters are not very good at follow-through.
  • Hunters don't stay in one place too long, either.
  • The Hunter has many customers and not all of them are high quality.