Hunting and Gathering

For the vast, overwhelming majority of time in which human beings have existed—97% to 99% of the period since the first hominids [Page 1490]appeared—they lived in a type of society commonly known as hunting and gathering. Many species of the genuses Australopithecus and Homo practiced this form of survival, which also typified the lifestyle, social organization, and culture of Homo sapiens until relatively recently—that is, until the emergence of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago. Thus, hunting and gathering is often equated with the Paleolithic, or “Old Stone Age,” which ended with the Neolithic, or “New Stone Age” (some include a Mesolithic as well), although these terms are not universally accepted. Moreover, the line between agricultural and hunting and gathering societies is not always clear, as many societies relied on both as necessary.

Prior to agriculture, humans obtained sustenance through several modalities, including fishing, the hunting of animals, and the gathering of a wide variety of foodstuffs. Reliant on the sources made possible by their immediate environment, small groups of people, often as few as a dozen and rarely more than 50, wandered nomadically, following the seasonal rhythms of plants and migratory cycles of animals. This constant movement has led some to call hunting and gathering a “permanent camping trip.” Hunting and gathering thus made human beings food collectors, not producers. Stone and bone tools such as knives, adzes, needles, and scraping implements were the norm in cultures that lacked metal. Typically, such small bands and tribes are characterized by a sexual division of labor, in which men and boys hunt—often unsuccessfully—and women gather, often with babies on their backs or small children nearby.

Although Paleolithic hunters could be very skilled, and may have played a critical role in the extinction of numerous Pleistocene megafauna, the actual slaughter of very large animals such as mammoths was typically rather rare; smaller game such as deer and rabbits were much more common food sources. Hunting with spears and arrows was the norm, with slings and knives used when possible. The domestication of the dog, perhaps as early as 50,000 BC, also played a role that enabled hunting. More important as a source of caloric intake was gathering, the work of women, which provided the vast bulk of nutrients in most hunting-and-gathering societies. Because humans are opportunistic, adaptable improvisers, gathering allowed an exceptionally diverse variety of foods to be collected, including roots, fruits, berries, tubers, insects, carrion, eggs, grubs, frogs, seeds, nuts, and slow animals such as snails or turtles. This form of resource exploitation thus depended on lightly using a wide variety of resources rather than intensively using a few. Because it does not generate large quantities of calories per unit area, population densities remained very low. Numerous variations in hunting and gathering existed in different local climates and ecologies.

Several innovations allowed hunter and gatherers to spread to almost every ecological niche in the world. The controlled use of fire, as well as the needle and thread, enabled people to move into northerly latitudes and withstand the harsh winters of Northern Eurasia, eventually migrating into North America via the Bering Straits. Fire played a key role in the Paleolithic modification of many habitats, especially the midlatitude grasslands and forests. Rather than passively respond to their environment, therefore, hunter-gatherers actively shaped it.

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