Although there are hardly any cultures today that are solely concerned with hunting and gathering, this phase in human history was nevertheless a very long one. From the dawn of humanity, hunting and gathering was how our ancestors made their living.
The Neolithic Revolution
Hunting and gathering remained the only means of subsistence until the advent of the Neolithic Revolution, which saw the domestication of plants and animals, some 12,000 years ago, but even then hunting and especially gathering played an important role in the food supply. And for many peoples, until very recently, hunting and gathering was still their way of life, or at least partially so.
Diet
Hunters and gatherers usually consist of small groups of people, often several families in a group of 10 to 30 people. Sometimes these groups gather in a season, but even then groups are rarely larger than 250 people and often much smaller. The lifestyle of hunters and gatherers is often at least partly nomadic. An exception was northwestern North America, where groups settled permanently but still maintained a hunting and gathering lifestyle. They only make a minor impact on their immediate living environment, in contrast to agriculture, which uses the land intensively. They take advantage of circumstances as they arise, instead of bending circumstances to their will. Especially in tropical and temperate regions, the diet of hunters and gatherers is very diverse, about 75 to 80% of the diet here consists of plants and very diverse, meat and fish provide the balance. Here it would be better to speak of collectors and hunters. In general it can be said that it is usually the women who gather and the men who hunt. In colder areas, especially in the Arctic, hunting and also fishing are of great importance. Specialization usually does not go much further than the division between hunting and gathering, between men and women. And even this division is not complete, there are cultures where women also hunted and indications that this division was not present at all in earlier times, but an adjustment to make the food supply more efficient.
Egalitarian
These societies are often fairly egalitarian, there are hardly any classes. A single individual has more prestige, for example because of his qualities as a hunter or maker of utensils. Everyone carries out the same activities and shares the same norms and values. These are learned from an early age by every person in the group and symbolized in myths and legends. The social pressure is great, privacy is an unknown concept in this way of life. In addition, there is a lot of free time, modern groups that largely depend on hunting and gathering such as the !Kung in Botswana work only 14 hours a week, the same applies to other groups.
Birth rate
The birth rate among hunters and gatherers is surprisingly low and the population is very stable. The way of life also makes having multiple small children virtually impossible, but exactly how the birth rate is kept low is not entirely clear.
The rise of agriculture
What was the reason for the Neolithic Revolution? If hunting and gathering provided enough food with relatively little effort, why did people decide to live differently or was it not a decision but pure chance? The agricultural revolution took place at approximately the same time in at least seven places in the world: in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, in New Guinea, in the Yangzi Valley in China, in Mexico, the Andes Mountains, the Amazon region and in West Africa. Initially, farmers did not fare well compared to their predecessors: there were more diseases spread by their pets, and poorer general health due to less variety in the diet. Inequality also arose between people, one farmer did better than the other.
Population pressure
What was so attractive about agriculture? Some anthropologists see the answer in the amount of violence that occurred in hunter-gatherer cultures. Most of these societies were in a constant state of tribal ‘war’, war often meaning attacks on each other’s villages, often just a lot of shouting and threats, but with a high percentage of deaths, sometimes involving 25 to 30% of adults male population dies. This would be necessary due to population pressure, 1 person per square mile is the average support base for hunters and gatherers, agriculture provides a support base for 60 to 100 times more people.
Moreover, hunters and gatherers would not have handled their environment as well as was long thought. The large, relatively easy to hunt species were slowly exterminated by groups of men equipped with spears, forcing them to slowly but surely switch to hunting other animals. Population pressure increased at a faster rate than the reproductive cycle of prey. The transition from gathering produce to self-sowing plants was just a step brought about by the increasing pressure to earn a living.