Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either. Hunter-gatherers obtain most from gathering rather than hunting; up to 80% of the food is obtained by gathering. The demarcation between hunter-gatherers and other societies which rely more upon domestication (see agriculture and pastoralism and neolithic revolution) is not a clear-cut one, as many contemporary societies use a combination of both strategies to obtain the foodstuffs required to sustain themselves.

History

Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence strategy employed by human societies for more than two million years, until the end of the Mesolithic period. The first hunter-gatherers may have lived in mixed habitats which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits and scavenge the occasional dead animal and in this sense were more meat scavengers than actual hunters. Rather than killing large animals themselves for meat, they used carcasses of large animals killed by other predators or carcasses from animals that died by natural causes. 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 10,000 years ago.

Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have perpetually declined partly as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in arid regions and tropical forests in the developing world. Areas which formerly were available to hunter-gatherers were -and continue to be- encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition, Jared Diamond has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods, particularly animal resources. In North and South America, for example, most large mammal species had gone extinct by the end of the Pleistocene, according to Diamond, because of overexploitation by humans, although the overkill hypothesis he advocates is strongly contested.

As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. This process of agriculture-driven expansion led to the development of complex forms of government in agricultural centers such as the Fertile Crescent, Ancient India, Ancient China, Olmec, and Norte Chico.

As a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures usually live in areas seen as undesirable for agricultural use.

Methods of study

Archaeological and paleontological 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, paleoanthropology and paleoethnobotany have also arisen in the search for insight into the hunter-gatherer past.

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