hunter-gatherer

hunter-gatherer, any person who depends primarily on wild foods for subsistence. Until about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, when agriculture and animal domestication emerged in southwest Asia and in Mesoamerica, all peoples were hunter-gatherers. Their strategies have been very diverse, depending greatly upon the local environment; foraging strategies have included hunting or trapping big game, hunting or trapping smaller animals, fishing, gathering shellfish or insects, and gathering wild plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, tubers, seeds, and nuts. Most hunter-gatherers combine a variety of these strategies in order to ensure a balanced diet.

Many cultures have also combined foraging with agriculture or animal husbandry. In pre-Columbian North America, for instance, most Arctic, American Subarctic, Northwest Coast, and California Indians relied upon foraging alone, but nomadic Plains Indians supplemented their wild foods with corn (maize) obtained from Plains villagers who, like Northeast Indians, combined hunting, gathering, and agriculture. In contrast, the Southwest Indians and those of Mesoamerica were primarily agriculturists who supplemented their diet by foraging.

A foraging economy usually demands an extensive land area; it has been estimated that people who depend on such methods must have available 7 to 500 square miles (18 to 1,300 square km) of land per capita, depending upon local environmental conditions. Permanent villages or towns are generally possible only where food supplies are unusually abundant and reliable; the numerous rivers and streams of the Pacific Northwest, for instance, allowed Native Americans access to two unusually plentiful wild resources—acorns and fish, especially salmon—that supported the construction of large permanent villages and enabled the people to reach higher population densities than if they had relied upon terrestrial mammals for the bulk of their subsistence.

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Conditions of such abundance are rare, and most foraging groups must move whenever the local supply of food begins to be exhausted. In these cases possessions are limited to what can be carried from one camp to another. As housing must also be transported or made on the spot, it is usually simple, comprising huts, tents, or lean-tos made of plant materials or the skins of animals. Social groups are necessarily small, because only a limited number of people can congregate together without quickly exhausting the food resources of a locality. Such groups typically comprise either extended family units or a number of related families collected together in a band. An individual band is generally small in number, typically with no more than 30 individuals if moving on foot, or perhaps 100 in a group with horses or other means of transport. However, each band is known across a wide area because all residents of a given region are typically tied to one another through a large network of kinship and reciprocity; often these larger groups will congregate for a short period each year.

Where both hunting and gathering are practiced, adult men usually hunt larger game and women and their children and grandchildren collect stationary foods such as plants, shellfish, and insects; forager mothers generally wean their children at about three or four years of age, and young children possess neither the patience nor the silence required to stalk game. However, the capture of smaller game and fish can be accomplished by any relatively mobile individual, and techniques in which groups drive mammals, birds, and fish into long nets or enclosures are actually augmented by the noise and movement of children.

The proportion of cultures that rely solely upon hunting and gathering has diminished through time. By about 1500 ce, many Middle and South American cultures and most European, Asian, and African peoples relied upon domesticated food sources, although some isolated areas continued to support full-time foragers. In contrast, Australia and the Americas were supporting many hunting and gathering societies at that time. Although hunting and gathering practices have persisted in many societies—such as the Okiek of Kenya, some Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia, and many North American Arctic Inuit groups—by the early 21st century hunting and gathering as a way of life had largely disappeared.