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 procuring naturally occurring edible items from the local wildlife and vegetation via hunting, fishing and/or gathering fruits, seeds and other plant parts (collectively known as vegetables) as well as edible fungi such as mushrooms. This is the human equivalent of the predation and foraging behaviors seen in all omnivorous animals, and was a common practice among most prehistoric human societies, particularly before the rise of agriculture during the Neolithic period. Hunter-gatherer societies, usually a tribe of only a few dozen people, were and are typically fully or semi-nomadic, in contrast with the sedentary and more populous agricultural societies whose food security rely mainly on cultivating crops/produces and raising domesticated animals.
Hunting and gathering emerged with Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago and was humanity's original and most enduringly successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history.Richard B. Lee & Richard Daly, "Introduction: Foragers and others", in: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters & Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 1999), , pp. 1–20. Following the Neolithic Revolution, hunter-gatherer communities were outcompeted by the more productive agrarian/pastoralist communities and those that did not undergo lifestyle changes were displaced or conquered in most parts of the world, as the latter often have surplus food storages to support larger populations and a division of labor that promotes technological advancement in metallurgy, medicine, transportation and armaments. In Western Eurasia, the replacement of hunter-gatherers by farming societies happened more gradually, as dense forests remained their last refuge until Bronze and Iron Age societies fully overcame them eventually. Today, only a few contemporary societies of uncontacted peoples are still classified as hunter-gatherers, and many of them supplement their foraging activity with horticulture or pastoralism.
Socially, hunter-gatherers were generally egalitarian, emphasizing sharing and resisting hierarchy; though gender roles and some divisions of labor existed, hunter-gatherers are overall generalists and men and women often contributed to both hunting as well as gathering. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows wide variation depending on environment, from the mammoth steppe hunters in Siberia to the semi-sedentary Eskaleut fishermen/seal hunters of the Arctic. Their diets varied by climate, local florae and faunae, and access to aquatic resources, with fat as a critical nutrient, but generally is more balanced with higher roughage content and a more diverse range of food groups (e.g. the "bush tucker" diet of Aboriginal Australians), coupled with a more physically active lifestyle. 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 300 000 years ago by Homo sapiens. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers lived in groups that consisted of several families resulting in a size of a few dozens of people.
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 varies 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 (often larger) 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.Fagan, B. (1989). People of the Earth, pp. 169–81. Scott, Foresman.
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 (14–10.3 thousand years ago), 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.
Hunter-gatherers tends to have much greater home ranges than pre-industrial sedentary farmers. It has been estimated that pre-industrial English people living in small townships would have had a home range of 900 hectares (9 km2), close to that predicted for an omnivorous mammal of their same body mass. Meanwhile, the !Kung San hunter-gatherers have a home range of 10,000 hectares (100 km2), close to that predicted for a carnivorous mammal of their same body mass.
Social and economic structure Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos,Erdal, David; Whiten, Andrew; Boehm, Christopher; Knauft, Bruce (April 1994). "On Human Egalitarianism: An Evolutionary Product of Machiavellian Status Escalation?" (PDF ). Current Anthropology. 35 (2): 175–183. although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America and the Calusa in Florida) 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.Scott, John; Marshall, Gordon (2007). A Dictionary of Sociology. US: Oxford University Press. .
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.Erdal, D. and A. Whiten 1996. "Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human evolution". In, P. Mellars and K. Gibson (eds), Modelling the early human mind. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.Gintis, Herbert. 2013. "The Evolutionary Roots of Human Hyper-Cognition". Journal of Bioeconomics 15 (1): 83–89.Gintis, Herbert, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm. 2019. "Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Socio-Political Systems". Behavioural Processes, Behavioral Evolution, 161 (April): 17–30. .
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.Erdal, D. & Whiten, A. (1996) "Egalitarianism and Machiavellian Intelligence in Human Evolution" in Mellars, P. & Gibadfson, K. (eds) Modelling the Early Human Mind. Cambridge MacDonald Monograph Series.
Within a particular tribe or people, hunter-gatherers are connected by both kinship and band (residence/domestic group) 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.Knight, C. 2008. "Early human kinship was matrilineal". In N. J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar and W. James (eds.), Early Human Kinship. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 61–82.
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 could have been one of the organizational innovation that gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.