Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer, or forager, is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most vertebrates that are omnivores. Hunter-gatherer groups, usually a few dozen people, were and are nomadic or semi-nomadic. Hunter-gatherer societies are contrasted with more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production.
Hunting and gathering emerged with Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago and was humanity's original and most enduring successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. In Western Eurasia, farming and metallurgical societies gradually replaced hunter-gatherers, but dense forests remained their last refuge until Bronze and Iron Age societies fully overcame them.
Socially, they were generally egalitarian, emphasizing sharing and resisting hierarchy; though inequalities and divisions of labor existed, women often contributed to hunting as well as gathering. Only a few contemporary societies of uncontacted people are still classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their foraging activity with horticulture or pastoralism.
Archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows wide variation depending on environment, from mammoth steppe hunters in Siberia to semi-sedentary fishers. Their diets varied by climate, balancing plant foods, game, and aquatic resources, with fat as a critical nutrient. Over time, many bands specialized in particular resources and tools, and some transitioned into agriculture, which led to permanent settlements, governments, and social stratification. While most hunter-gatherers eventually adopted farming or were displaced, some groups—such as the San, Pumé, and Sentinelese—continue aspects of this lifestyle today.
Archaeological evidence
Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence 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. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived in groups that consisted of several families resulting in a size of a few dozen people.File:Mammoth House.JPG|thumb|The Mal'ta-Buret' people in the Baikal region of Siberia lived in dwellings built of mammoth bones, similar to those found in Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasia.
The Late Pleistocene witnessed the spread of modern humans outside of Africa as well as the extinction of all other human species. Humans spread to the Australian continent and the Americas for the first time, coincident with the extinction of numerous predominantly megafaunal species. Major extinctions were incurred in Australia beginning approximately 50,000 years ago and in the Americas about 15,000 years ago. Ancient North Eurasians lived in extreme conditions of the mammoth steppes of Siberia and survived by hunting mammoths, bison and woolly rhinoceroses. The settlement of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entered North America from the North Asian mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge.
During the 1970s, Lewis Binford suggested that early humans obtained food via scavenging, not hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in forests and woodlands, 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 or that had died of natural causes. Scientists have demonstrated that the evidence for early human behaviors for hunting versus carcass scavenging vary based on the ecology, including the types of predators that existed and the environment.
Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherer bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools such as fishing nets, hooks, and bone harpoons.
File:Arri Raats, Kalahari Khomani San Bushman, Boesmansrus camp, Northern Cape, South Africa.jpg|thumb|A San man in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Many San still live as hunter-gatherers.Archaeologists can use evidence such as stone tool use to track hunter-gatherer activities, including mobility.
Common characteristics
Habitat and population
Some hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the 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, 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, 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 social ethos, although settled hunter-gatherers are an exception to this rule. For example, the San people 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 defined this socio-economic system as primitive communism.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. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by paleoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.
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 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.
The conventional assumption has been that women did most of the gathering, while men concentrated on big game hunting. In recent years, however, this assumption has been challenged by new research findings. Women in many hunter-gatherer societies hunted small game and, in some cases, even participated in big-game hunting. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele's study of the southern African Ju/'hoan, 'Women Like Meat'. A 2006 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.
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. In 2018, 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. A 2020 study inspired by this discovery found that of 27 identified burials with hunter gatherers of a known sex who were also buried with hunting tools, 11 were female hunter gatherers, while 16 were male hunter gatherers. Combined with uncertainties, these findings suggest that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of big game hunters were female. A 2023 study that looked at studies of contemporary hunter gatherer societies from the 1800s to the present day found that women hunted in 79 percent of hunter gatherer societies. However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".
File:Native Encampment by Skinner Prout, from Australia.jpg|thumb|upright=1.15|A 19th-century engraving of an Indigenous Australian encampment.
At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay 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, 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 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 were satisfied with very little in the material sense. 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. Sahlins' theory has been criticized for only including time spent hunting and gathering while omitting time spent on collecting firewood, food preparation, etc. Other scholars also assert that hunter-gatherer societies were not "affluent" but suffered from extremely high infant mortality, frequent disease, and perennial warfare.
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 are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies. Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a "gift economy".
File:AinuBearSacrificeCirca1870.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.15|The Ainu Iomante ceremony. Japanese scroll painting,
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.
This study, however, exclusively examined modern hunter-gatherer communities, offering limited insight into the exact nature of social structures that existed prior to the Neolithic Revolution. Alain Testart and others have said that anthropologists should be careful when using research on current hunter-gatherer societies to determine the structure of societies in the paleolithic era, emphasising cross-cultural influences, progress and development that such societies have undergone in the past 10,000 years.