Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer society is in anthropological terms one whose predominant method of subsistence involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild (or "foraging"), without significant recourse to the domestication of either. The demarcation between hunter-gatherers and other societies which rely on more managed techniques such as agriculturalism and pastoralism is not a clean one, as many societies typically utilise a range of strategies to obtain the foodstuffs required to sustain their community.

Historical context
The hunter-gatherer technique is the original method employed by all human societies up towards the end of the Palaeolithic period, where the transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the development of nascent agricultural practices. The initial spread of agriculture developed at different rates and periods in several different areas, starting from approximately 12,000 years ago. As certain centers began to adopt agriculture and other resource-management strategies, the hunter-gatherer way of life continued amongst other populations with the same effiency as before, although the numbers of these societies would progressively dwindle. In many instances territories which were formerly the preserve of hunter-gatherers were encroached upon by the settlements and farms of early agrarian communities. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices, relocated to other areas, or were even to be extinguished altogether. The few contemporary hunter-gatherer groups which persist today do so largely in areas which have proved unsuitable or inaccessible to agricultural use.

Habitat and population
Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile, given their reliance upon the ability of a given natural environment to provide sufficient resources in order to sustain their population, and the variable availability of these resources owing to local climatic and seasonal conditions. Their population densities tend be lower than those of agriculturalists, since cultivated land is capable of sustaining population densities 60–100 times greater than land left uncultivated. Individual bands tend to be small in number, but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group.

Hunter-gatherer settlements may be either permanently or temporarily based, or some combination of the two, depending in part upon the range of territory the community needs to cover. Shelter constructions typically use impermanent building materials, particularly when the community leads a nomadic existence. Natural rock shelters may also be used, where they are available.

Methods of Study
Archaeological 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. When possible, archaeology and ethnography have been combined, since the 1960s, under the name ethnoarchaeology, to provide more insight into the hunter-gatherer past. The new sciences of evolutionary biology and paleoethnobotany are also providing insights.

Generalizing About Hunter-Gatherers
Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have non-hierarchical social structures, but this is not always the case. Some are more nomadic or mobile (usually in environments with fewer resources), and they generally are not able to store surplus food. Thus, full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies. Others, such as the Haida of present-day British Columbia, lived in such a rich environment that they could remain sedentary, and other groups that live in the North American northwest coast can similarly remain sedentary for a majority of the year. These groups demonstrate more hierarchical social organization.

Typically, men hunt and women gather, but this is not a given.

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers (egalitarian) and "delayed return" (nonegalitarian). Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food.

At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard B. 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, there was no surplus of resources to 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 living lives "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 are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.

Problems With Generalizing
The line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies is not clear cut. Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesireable plants while encouraging desireable ones. Agriculturalists also hunt and gather (e.g. farming during the growing season and hunting during the winter). Still today many in developed countries will go hunting for food and for leisure.

Hunter-gatherer cultural forms
Writing was not used by ancient hunter-gatherers, but they would have been keenly aware of the natural tracks left by animals. Their mimicing and slight modification of such tracks developed into a simple communicative sign-system using mark-making - anticipating the development millenia later of written alphabets. Nearly all such marks would have been made in mud, on trees, on bones and other organic matter that has since decayed. Examples of the very few ancient hunter-gatherer sign-making systems that have survived are: ochre remains, used for mark-making; Mousterian paired markings; the hand prints and stencils of Arnhem Land, and the markings of Koonalda Cave in Australia, among others. These surviving markings appear to be from the ritualistic end of the communicative spectrum, and existed alongside the figurative cave painting tradition. We have little idea of what the more fleeting symbols used in communicating across a hunting territory looked like, although the 8,000-to-6,500 year old European Vinca script may give us a tantalising glipse of what such marks could have looked like before farming arrived in Europe.

The archeological evidence for multi-hole flutes dating from up to 36,000 years ago suggests that knowledge of music and musical systems cannot have been unknown among many ancient hunter-gatherers.

Body decoration, singing and storytelling are also candidates for likely basic ancient hunter-gatherer cultural forms. There is some archeological evidence for complex forms of clothes-making using pattern-cutting and sewing, as well as strong archeological evidence for stone carving and etchings on bone. It is perfectly possible that certain ancient cultural forms may be now entirely lost and unknown to us; such as wrestling or mask-making.

Various of these cultural skills may have been used to enhance the performance of rituals.

Hunter-Gatherers in the Modern World
It has recently been claimed that, in most cases, these groups do not have a continuous history of hunting and gathering, and that in many cases their ancestors were agriculturalists who were pushed into marginal areas as a result of migrations and wars. These theories imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" "disappeared" not long after colonial contact began (see European Colonization of Africa, European colonization of the Americas, European Colonization of Australia), nothing can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly, 24-29). However, specialists who study hunter-gatherer ecology (see Cultural ecology) vehemently disagree. One hunter-gatherer people whose ancestors cannot have been agriculturalists are the Spinifex People of Western Australia; they can have had no contact with agriculturalists until the late 19th century, and the arid ecology of Western Australia makes agriculture impossible.

Social Movements
There are some modern social movements related to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle:
 * freeganism involves gathering of discarded food in the context of an urban environment
 * gleaning involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields
 * sport hunting and sport fishing are recreational activities practiced by people in developed countries who get the majority of their food through the industrial system (see also: fox hunt, safari)
 * anarcho-primitivism, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild
 * paleolithic diet, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.