Hunting


Hunting is the human practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, and killing wildlife or feral animals. The most common reasons for humans to hunt are to obtain the animal's body for meat and useful animal products, for recreation/taxidermy, although it may also be done for resourceful reasons such as removing predators dangerous to humans or domestic animals, to eliminate pests and nuisance animals that damage crops/livestock/poultry or spread diseases, for trade/tourism, or for ecological conservation against overpopulation and invasive species.
Recreationally hunted species are generally referred to as the game, and are usually mammals and birds. A person participating in a hunt is a hunter or huntsman; a natural area used for hunting is called a game reserve; and an experienced hunter who helps organise a hunt and/or manage the game reserve is also known as a gamekeeper.
Hunting activities by humans arose in Homo erectus or earlier, in the order of millions of years ago. Hunting has become deeply embedded in various human cultures and was once an important part of rural economies—classified by economists as part of primary production alongside forestry, agriculture, and fishery. Modern regulations distinguish lawful hunting activities from illegal poaching, which involves the unauthorised and unregulated killing, trapping, or capture of animals.
File:Bogenjäger auf der Lockjagd.jpg|thumb|Bowhunter with a compound bow using a call
Apart from food provision, hunting can be a means of population control. Hunting advocates state that regulated hunting can be a necessary component of modern wildlife management, for example to help maintain a healthy proportion of animal populations within an environment's ecological carrying capacity when natural checks such as natural predators are absent or insufficient, or to provide funding for breeding programs and maintenance of natural reserves and conservation parks. However, excessive hunting has also heavily contributed to the endangerment, extirpation and extinction of many animals. Some animal rights and anti-hunting activists regard hunting as a cruel, perverse and unnecessary blood sport. Certain hunting practices, such as canned hunts and ludicrously paid/bribed trophy tours, are considered unethical and exploitative even by some hunters.
File:Professional stalker standing next to red deer stag Ardnamurchan Estate Scotland darker 01.png|thumb|Professional deerstalker standing over a downed red stag in Scotland
Marine mammals such as whales and pinnipeds are also targets of hunting, both recreationally and commercially, often with heated controversies regarding the morality, ethics and legality of such practices. The pursuit, harvesting or catch and release of fish and aquatic cephalopods and crustaceans is called fishing, which however is widely accepted and not commonly categorised as a form of hunting. It is also not considered hunting to pursue animals without intent to kill them, as in wildlife photography, birdwatching, or scientific-research activities which involve tranquilizing or tagging of animals, although green hunting is still called so. The practices of netting or trapping insects and other arthropods for trophy collection, or the foraging or gathering of plants and mushrooms, are also not regarded as hunting.
File:Hunter carries a killed reindeer. Greenland, 2007.jpg|thumb|Hunter carrying a reindeer in Greenland
Skillful tracking and acquisition of an elusive target has caused the word hunt to be used in the vernacular as a metaphor for searching and obtaining something, as in "treasure hunting", "bargain hunting", "hunting for votes" and even "hunting down" corruption and waste.

Etymology

The word hunt serves as both a noun and a verb. The noun has been dated to the early 12th century, from the verb hunt. Old English had huntung, huntoþ. The meaning of "a body of persons associated for the purpose of hunting with a pack of hounds" is first recorded in the 1570s. "The act of searching for someone or something" is from about 1600.
The verb, Old English huntian "to chase game", perhaps developed from hunta "hunter," is related to hentan "to seize," from Proto-Germanic huntojan, which is of uncertain origin. The general sense of "search diligently" is first recorded c. 1200.

Types

Lower to Middle Paleolithic

Hunting has a long history. It predates the emergence of Homo sapiens and may even predate the genus Homo.
The oldest undisputed evidence for hunting dates to the Early Pleistocene, consistent with the emergence and early dispersal of Homo erectus about 1.7 million years ago.
While it is undisputed that Homo erectus were hunters, the importance of this for the emergence of Homo erectus from its australopithecine ancestors, including the production of stone tools and eventually the control of fire, is emphasised in the so-called "hunting hypothesis" and de-emphasised in scenarios that stress omnivory and social interaction.
There is no direct evidence for hunting predating Homo erectus, in either Homo habilis or in Australopithecus.
The early hominid ancestors of humans were probably frugivores or omnivores, with a partially carnivorous diet from scavenging rather than hunting.
Evidence for australopithecine meat consumption was presented in the 1990s.
It has nevertheless often been assumed that at least occasional hunting behaviour may have been present well before the emergence of Homo.This can be argued on the basis of comparison with chimpanzees, the closest extant relatives of humans, who also engage in hunting, indicating that the behavioural trait may have been present in the Chimpanzee–human last common ancestor as early as 5 million years ago. The common chimpanzee regularly engages in troop predation behaviour, where bands of beta males are led by an alpha male. Bonobos have also been observed to occasionally engage in group hunting, although more rarely than Pan troglodytes, mainly subsisting on a frugivorous diet.
Indirect evidence for Oldowan era hunting, by early Homo or late Australopithecus, has been presented in a 2009 study based on
an Oldowan site in southwestern Kenya.
Louis Binford criticised the idea that early hominids and early humans were hunters. On the basis of the analysis of the skeletal remains of the consumed animals, he concluded that hominids and early humans were mostly scavengers, not hunters,
Blumenschine proposed the idea of confrontational scavenging, which involves challenging and scaring off other predators they have made a kill, which he suggests could have been the leading method of obtaining protein-rich meat by early humans.
Stone spearheads dated as early as 500,000 years ago were found in South Africa. Wood does not preserve well, however, and Craig Stanford, a primatologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, has suggested that the discovery of spear use by chimpanzees probably means that early humans used wooden spears as well, perhaps, five million years ago.
The earliest dated find of surviving wooden hunting spears dates to the very end of the Lower Paleolithic, about 300,000 years ago. The Schöningen spears, found in 1976 in Germany, are associated with Homo heidelbergensis.
The hunting hypothesis sees the emergence of behavioral modernity in the Middle Paleolithic as directly related to hunting, including mating behaviour, the establishment of language, culture, and religion, mythology and animal sacrifice. Sociologist David Nibert of Wittenberg University argues that the emergence of the organized hunting of animals undermined the communal, egalitarian nature of early human societies, with the status of women and less powerful males declining as the status of men quickly became associated with their success at hunting, which also increased human violence within these societies. However, 9000-year-old remains of a female hunter along with a toolkit of projectile points and animal processing implements were discovered at the Andean site of Wilamaya Patjxa, Puno District in Peru.
Early humans progressively invented tools and techniques for trapping animals. The earliest spears were crafted from wood, with tips toughened by burning. By 15,000 BC, hunters employed wooden and bone spear-launchers to enhance force and distance. These devices were frequently adorned with carvings of creatures.

Upper Paleolithic to Mesolithic

Evidence exists that hunting may have been one of the multiple, or possibly main, environmental factors leading to the Holocene extinction of megafauna and their replacement by smaller herbivores.
Humans are thought to have played a very significant role in the extinction of the Australian megafauna that was widespread prior to human occupation.
Hunting was a crucial component of hunter-gatherer societies before the domestication of livestock and the dawn of agriculture, beginning about 11,000 years ago in some parts of the world. In addition to the spear, hunting weapons developed during the Upper Paleolithic include the atlatl and the bow. By the Mesolithic, hunting strategies had diversified with the development of these more far-reaching weapons and the domestication of the dog about 15,000 years ago. Evidence puts the earliest known mammoth hunting in Asia with spears to approximately 16,200 years ago.
File:Kærvspids, Bjerlev Hede.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Sharp flint piece from Bjerlev Hede in central Jutland. Dated around 12,500 BC and considered the oldest hunting tool from Denmark.
Many species of animals have been hunted throughout history. One theory is that in North America and Eurasia, caribou and wild reindeer "may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting", although the varying importance of different species depended on the geographic location.
File:Black Figured Olpe depicting the return of a hunter and his dog.jpg|thumb|Ancient Greek black-figure pottery depicting the return of a hunter and his dog; made in Athens c. 540 BC, found in Rhodes
Mesolithic hunter-gathering lifestyles remained prevalent in some parts of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Siberia, as well as all of Australia, until the European Age of Discovery. They still persist in some tribal societies, albeit in rapid decline. Peoples that preserved Paleolithic hunting-gathering until the recent past include some indigenous peoples of the Amazonas, some Central and Southern African, some peoples of New Guinea, the Mlabri of Thailand and Laos, the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, and a handful of uncontacted peoples. In Africa, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes are the Hadza of Tanzania.