HISC-401.

ANCIENT SOCIETIES
UNIT- I HUNTER GATHERING SOCIETIES
A) SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND SUBSEQUENT TRENDS
Social evolution is a process of directional social change, and evolutionary theories attempt to
describe and explain this process. Theories of social evolution go back to the second half of the
nineteenth century to Spencer, Morgan, Tylor, and Marx and Engels. After a lapse, evolutionary
theorizing revived in the 1930s and 1940s with the work of Childe, White, and Steward, and
continued into the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Sahlins, Service, Carneiro, Lenski, and Harris.
Important typologies of stages of evolutionary development have been developed by most of these
thinkers. Although there is far from complete consensus regarding the most important dimensions
of social evolution, virtually everyone recognizes the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of civilization
and the state as two extremely important evolutionary transformations. The former began about
10,000 years ago, the latter around 5,000 years ago, and both occurred on an independent basis in
several regions of the world. The rise of the capitalist world economy in the sixteenth century is
regarded by many as the third and most recent great social transformation. Others regard the
Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century as the third great transformation.
Modern Homo sapiens first appeared about 200,000 years ago; however, socio-cultural evolution only
began about 10,000 years ago, when early hunter–gatherer societies began to change their simple
forms of segmentary social differentiation during the so-called Neolithic revolution, which was
mainly caused by the invention of agriculture and cattle breeding. In mathematical terms, one could
say that human biological evolution created an attractor: a stable state impervious to change. Various
mathematical models of biological evolution, namely the genetic algorithm (Holland, 1975), show
that the generation of such an attractor is the usual result of evolutionary processes (Klüver, 2000).
Nevertheless, socio-cultural evolution did not end biological evolution; in fact, for most of the time
that Homo sapiens has existed, socio-cultural evolution has been so slow that it could not have
affected biological evolution.
Sociocultural evolution(ism) is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social
evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time. Although such theories
typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure,
the values of a society, and how and why they change with time, they vary as to the extent to which
they describe specific mechanisms of variation and social change.

Most 19th century and some 20th century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of
humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development.
At present this thread is continued to some extent within the World System approach (especially
within its version produced by Andre Gunder Frank). Many of the more recent 20th-century
approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea of directional change,
or social progress. Most archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the framework of
modern theories of sociocultural evolution. Modern approaches to sociocultural evolution include
neoevolutionism, sociobiology, theory of modernization and theory of postindustrial society.
Early sociocultural evolution theories—the theories of August Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis
Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously but independently of Charles Darwin’s works and were
popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution
theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more 1riticize over
time, and equated the culture and technology of Western 1riticized1n with progress. Some forms of
early sociocultural evolution theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much 1riticized theories like
social Darwinism, and scientific racism, used in the past to justify existing policies of colonialism and
slavery, and to justify new policies such as eugenics.
Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress

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While sociocultural evolutionists agree that the evolution-like process leads to social progress,
classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal
evolution. Sociocultural evolutionism was the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology
and social commentary, and is associated with scholars like August Comte, Edward Burnett Tylor,
Lewis Henry Morgan, Benjamin Kidd, L.T. Hobhouse and Herbert Spencer. Sociocultural
evolutionism represented an attempt to formalise social thinking along scientific lines, later
influenced by the biological theory of evolution. If organisms could develop over time according to
discernable, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. They
developed analogies between human society and the biological organism and introduced into
sociological theory such biological concepts as variation, natural selection, and inheritance—
evolutionary factors resulting in the progress of societies through stages of savagery and barbarism
to civilisation, by virtue of the survival of the fittest. Together with the idea of progress there grew
the notion of fixed "stages" through which human societies progress, usually numbering three—
savagery, barbarism, and civilisation—but sometimes many more. The Marquis de Condorcet listed
10 stages, or "epochs", the final one having started with the French Revolution, which was destined,
in his eyes, to usher in the rights of man and the perfection of the human race. Some writers also
perceived in the growth stages of each individual a recapitulation of these stages of society. Strange
customs were thus accounted for on the assumption that they were throwbacks to earlier useful
practices. This also marked the beginning of anthropology as a scientific discipline and a departure
from traditional religious views of "primitive" cultures.

The term "Classical Social Evolutionism" is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings
of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase " survival of the fittest") and William
Graham Sumner. In many ways Spencer's theory of " cosmic evolution" has much more in common
with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and August Comte than with contemporary works of
Charles Darwin. Spencer also developed and published his theories several years earlier than Darwin.
In regard to social institutions, however, there is a good case that Spencer's writings might be
classified as 'Social Evolutionism'. Although he wrote that societies over time progressed, and that
progress was accomplished through competition, he stressed that the individual (rather than the
collectivity) is the unit of analysis that evolves, that evolution takes place through natural selection
and that it affects social as well as biological phenomenon. Nonetheless, the publication of Darwin's
works proved a boon to the proponents of sociocultural evolution. The world of social science took
the ideas of biological evolution as an attractive solution to similar questions regarding the origins
and development of social behaviour and the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a
biological analogy that is taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists even today.

Both Spencer and Comte view the society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—
from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from
flexibility to organisation. They agreed that the process of societies growth can be divided into certain
stages, have their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress—each
newer, more evolved society is better. Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying
the theory of sociocultural evolutionism.

August Comte, known as father of sociology, formulated the law of three stages: human
development progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and
man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings, through metaphysical
stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation
of natural phenomena from them until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure
forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship. This
progress is forced through the development of human mind, and increasing application of thought,
reasoning and logic to the understanding of the world.

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Herbert Spencer, who believed that society was evolving toward increasing freedom for individuals;
and so held that government intervention ought to be minimal in social and political life,
differentiated between two phases of development, focusing is on the type of internal regulation
within societies. Thus he differentiated between military and industrial societies. The earlier, more
primitive military society has a goal of conquest and defence, is centralised, economically self-
sufficient, collectivistic, puts the good of a group over the good of an individual, uses compulsion,
force and repression, rewards loyalty, obedience and discipline. The industrial society has a goal of
production and trade, is decentralised, interconnected with other societies via economic relations,
achieves its goals through voluntary cooperation and individual self-restraint, treats the good of
individual as the highest value, regulates the social life via voluntary relations, values initiative,
independence and innovation.

Regardless of how scholars of Spencer interpret his relation to Darwin, Spencer proved to be an
incredibly popular figure in the 1870s, particularly in the United States. Authors such as Edward
Youmans, William Graham Sumner, John Fiske, John W. Burgess, Lester Frank Ward, Lewis H.
Morgan and other thinkers of the gilded age all developed similar theories of social evolutionism as
a result of their exposure to Spencer as well as Darwin.

Lewis H. Morgan, an anthropologist whose ideas have had much impact on sociology, in his 1877
classic Ancient Societies differentiated between three eras: savagery, barbarism and civilisation,
which are divided by technological inventions, like fire, bow, pottery in savage era, domestication of
animals, agriculture, metalworking in barbarian era and alphabet and writing in civilisation era. Thus
Morgan introduced a link between the social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed
the technological progress as a force behind the social progress, and any social change—in social
institutions, organisations or ideologies have their beginning in the change of technology. Morgan's
theories were popularised by Friedrich Engels, who based his famous work The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State on it. For Engels and other Marxists, this theory was important as it
supported their conviction that materialistic factors—economical and technological—are decisive in
shaping the fate of humanity.

Emile Durkheim, another of the "fathers" of sociology, has developed a similar, dichotomal view of
social progress. His key concept was social solidarity, as he defined the social evolution in terms of
progressing from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people are self-
sufficient, there is little integration and thus there is the need for use of force and repression to keep
society together. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent and
specialisation and cooperation is extensive. Progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based
first on population growth and increasing population density, second on increasing "morality
density" (development of more complex social interactions) and thirdly, on the increasing
specialisation in workplace. To Durkheim, the most important factor in the social progress is the
division of labour.

Anthropologists Sir E.B. Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States worked
with data from indigenous people, whom they claimed represented earlier stages of cultural evolution
that gave insight into the process and progression of evolution of culture. Morgan would later have
a significant influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who developed a theory of sociocultural
evolution in which the internal contradictions in society created a series of escalating stages that
ended in a socialist society (see Marxism). Tylor and Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear
evolution, specifying criteria for categorising cultures according to their standing within a fixed
system of growth of humanity as a whole and examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth.
Theirs was often a concern with culture in general, not with individual cultures.

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Their analysis of cross-cultural data was based on three assumptions:

contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more "primitive" or more "civilised";
There are a determinate number of stages between "primitive" and "civilised" (e.g. band, tribe,
chiefdom, and state),
All societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates.
Theorists usually measured progression (that is, the difference between one stage and the next) in
terms of increasing social complexity (including class differentiation and a complex division of
labour), or an increase in intellectual, theological, and aesthetic sophistication. These 19th-century
ethnologists used these principles primarily to explain differences in religious beliefs and kinship
terminologies among various societies.

Lester Frank Ward developed Spencer's theory but unlike Spencer, who considered the evolution to
be general process applicable to the entire world, physical and sociological, Ward differentiated
sociological evolution from biological evolution. He stressed that humans create goals for themselves
and strive to realise them, whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-
human world, which develops more or less at random. He created a hierarchy of evolution processes.
First, there is cosmogenesis, creation and evolution of the world. Then, after life develops, there is
biogenesis. Development of humanity leads to anthropogenesis, which is influenced by the human
mind. Finally, when society develops, so does sociogenesis, which is the science of shaping the
society to fit with various political, cultural and ideological goals.

Edward Burnett Tylor, pioneer of anthropology, focused on the evolution of culture worldwide,
noting that culture is an important part of every society and that it is also subject to the process of
evolution. He believed that societies were at different stages of cultural development and that the
purpose of anthropology was to reconstruct the evolution of culture, from primitive beginnings to
the modern state.

Ferdinand Tönnies describes the evolution as the development from informal society, where people
have many liberties and there are few laws and obligations, to modern, formal rational society,
dominated by traditions and laws and are restricted from acting as they wish. He also notes that there
is a tendency of standardisation and unification, when all smaller societies are absorbed into the
single, large, modern society. Thus Tönnies can be said to describe part of the process known today
as the globalisation. Tönnies was also one of the first sociologists to claim that the evolution of
society is not necessarily going in the right direction, that the social progress is not perfect, and it
can even be called a regress as the newer, more evolved societies are obtained only after paying a
high cost, resulting in decreasing satisfaction of individuals making up that society. Tönnies' work
became the foundation of neoevolutionism.

Although not usually counted as a sociocultural evolutionist, Max Weber's theory of tripartite
classification of authority can be viewed as an evolutionary theory as well. Weber distinguishes three
ideal types of political leadership, domination and authority: charismatic domination (familial and
religious), traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism) and legal (rational)
domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy). He also notes that legal domination is the most
advanced, and that societies evolve from having mostly traditional and charismatic authorities to
mostly rational and legal ones.

Critique and impact on modern theories

The early 20th century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of the
sweeping generalisations of the unilineal theories of sociocultural evolution. Cultural anthropologists

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such as Franz Boas, and his students like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, typically regarded as
the leader of anthropology's rejection of classical social evolutionism, used sophisticated
ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's
theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Theories regarding
"stages" of evolution were especially criticised as illusions. Additionally, they rejected the distinction
between "primitive" and "civilised" (or "modern"), pointing out that so-called primitive
contemporary societies have just as much history, and were just as evolved, as so-called civilised
societies. They therefore argued that any attempt to use this theory to reconstruct the histories of
non-literate (i.e. leaving no historical documents) peoples is entirely speculative and unscientific.
They observed that the postulated progression, which typically ended with a stage of civilisation
identical to that of modern Europe, is ethnocentric. They also pointed out that the theory assumes
that societies are clearly bounded and distinct, when in fact cultural traits and forms often cross social
boundaries and diffuse among many different societies (and is thus an important mechanism of
change). Boas introduced the culture history approach, which concentrated on fieldwork among
native peoples to identify actual cultural and historical processes rather than speculative stages of
growth. This "culture history" approach dominated American anthropology for the first half of the
20th century and so influenced anthropology elsewhere that high-level generalisation and "systems
building" became far less common than in the past.

Later critics observed that this assumption of firmly bounded societies was proposed precisely at the
time when European powers were colonising non-Western societies, and was thus self-serving. Many
anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western
myth seldom based on solid empirical grounds. Critical theorists argue that notions of social
evolution are simply justifications for power by the elites of society. Finally, the devastating World
Wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 crippled Europe's self-confidence. After millions of
deaths, genocide, and the destruction of Europe's industrial infrastructure, the idea of progress
seemed dubious at best.

Thus modern sociocultural evolutionism rejects most of classical social evolutionism due to various
theoretical problems:

• The theory was deeply ethnocentric—it makes heavy value judgements on different societies;
with Western civilisation seen as the most valuable.
• It assumed all cultures follow the same path or progression and have the same goals.
• It equated civilisation with material culture (technology, cities, etc.)
• It equated evolution with progress or fitness, based on deep misunderstandings of
evolutionary theory.
• It is greatly contradicted by evidence. Many (but not all) supposedly primitive societies are
arguably more peaceful and equitable/democratic than many modern societies, and tend to
be healthier with regard to diet and ecology.
Because social evolution was posited as a scientific theory, it was often used to support unjust and
often racist social practices—particularly colonialism, slavery, and the unequal economic conditions
present within industrialised Europe. Social Darwinism is especially criticised, as it led to some
philosophies used by the Nazis.

Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism is the first theory of the series of modern multilineal evolution theories. It emerged
in 1930s and extensively developed in the period following the Second World War and was
incorporated into both anthropology and sociology in the 1960s. It bases its theories on the empirical
evidences from areas of archaeology, palaeontology and historiography and tries to eliminate any

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references to system of values, be it moral or cultural, instead trying to remain objective and simply
descriptive.

While 19th-century evolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its
evolutionary process, it was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th
century. It was the neoevolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed
it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.

The neoevolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social
progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories. Then neoevolutionism
discards the determinism argument and introduces probability, arguing that accidents and free will
have much impact on the process of social evolution. It also supports the counterfactual history—
asking "what if" and considering different possible path that social evolution may (or might have)
taken, and thus allows for the fact that various cultures may develop in different ways, some skipping
entire stages others have passed through. The neoevolutionism stresses the importance of empirical
evidence. While 19th-century evolutionism used value judgment and assumptions for interpreting
data, neoevolutionism relied on measurable information for analysing the process of sociocultural
evolution.

Leslie White, author of The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of
Rome (1959), attempted to create a theory explaining the entire history of humanity. The most
important factor in his theory is technology: Social systems are determined by technological systems,
wrote White in his book , echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan. As measure of society
advancement, he proposed the measure of a society's energy consumption. He differentiates between
five stages of human development. In first, people use energy of their own muscles. In second, they
use energy of domesticated animals. In third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to
agricultural revolution here). In fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil,
gas. In fifth, they harness the nuclear energy. White introduced a formulae, P=E*T, where E is a
measure of energy consumed, and T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the
energy. This theory is similar to Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev's later theory of the
Kardashev scale.

Julian Steward, author of Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution
(1955, reprinted 1979), created the theory of "multilinear" evolution which examined the way in
which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than White's theory
of "unilinear evolution." Steward on the other hand rejected the 19th-century notion of progress,
and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had
to adapt to their environment in some way. He argued that different adaptations could be studied
through the examination of the specific resources a society exploited, the technology the society
relied on to exploit these resources, and the organisation of human labour. He further argued that
different environments and technologies would require different kinds of adaptations, and that as
the resource base or technology changed, so too would a culture. In other words, cultures do not
change according to some inner logic, but rather in terms of a changing relationship with a changing
environment. Cultures would therefore not pass through the same stages in the same order as they
changed—rather, they would change in varying ways and directions. He called his theory "multilineal
evolution". He questioned the possibility of creation of a social theory encompassing the entire
evolution of humanity; however, he argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of
specific existing cultures. He believed it is possible to create theories analysing typical common
culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the
development of given culture he pointed to technology and economics, and noted there are
secondary factors, like political system, ideologies and religion. All those factors push the evolution

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of given society in several directions at the same time; thus, this is the multilinearity of his theory of
evolution.

Marshall Sahlins, author of Evolution and Culture (1960), divided the evolution of societies into
'general' and 'specific'. General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in
complexity, organisation and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not
isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (like technological inventions). This
leads cultures to develop in different ways (specific evolution), as various elements are introduced to
them in different combinations and on different stages of evolution.

Gerhard Lenski in his Power and Prestige (1966) and Human Societies: An Introduction to
Macrosociology (1974) he expands on the works of Leslie White and Lewis Henry Morgan. He views
the technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures. Unlike
White, who defined technology as the ability to create and utilise energy, Lenski focuses on
information—its amount and uses. The more information and knowledge (especially allowing the
shaping of natural environment) a given society has, the more advanced it is. He distinguished four
stages of human development, based on the advances in the history of communication. In the first
stage, information is passed by genes. In the second, when humans gain sentience, they can learn
and pass information through by experience. In the third, the humans start using signs and develop
logic. In the fourth, they can create symbols, develop language and writing. Advancements in the
technology of communication translates into advancements in the economic system and political
system, distribution of goods, social inequality and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates
societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy: (1) hunters and gatherers,
(2) simple agricultural, (3) advanced agricultural, (4) industrial (5) special (like fishing societies).

Talcott Parsons, author of Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The
System of Modern Societies (1971) divided evolution into four subprocesses: (1) division, which
creates functional subsystems from the main system; (2) adaptation, where those systems evolve into
more efficient versions; (3) inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and
(4) generalisation of values, increasing the legitimisation of the ever more complex system. He shows
those processes on 3 stages of evolution: (1) primitive, (2) archaic and (3) modern. Archaic societies
have the knowledge of writing, while modern have the knowledge of law. Parsons viewed the
Western civilisation as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared
United States as the most dynamic developed.

SOCIAL EVOLUTIONISM
BASIC PREMISES
In the early years of anthropology, the prevailing view of anthropologists and other scholars was that
culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. The Evolutionists,
building upon the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but not drawing much inspiration from
his central contribution of the concept of natural selection, sought to track the development of
culture through time. Just as species were thought to evolve into increasing complex forms, so too
were cultures thought to progress from simple to complex states. Initially it was thought by many
scholars that most societies pass through the same or similar series of stages to arrive, ultimately, at
a common end. Change was thought to originate principally from within the culture, so development
was thought to be internally determined.

The evolutionary progression of societies had been accepted by some since the Enlightenment. Both
French and Scottish social and moral philosophers were using evolutionary schemes during the 18th
century. Among these was Montesquieu, who proposed an evolutionary scheme consisting of three
stages: hunting or savagery, herding or barbarism, and civilization. This tripartite division became

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very popular among the 19th century social theorists, with figures such as Tylor and Morgan
adopting one or another version of this scheme (Seymour-Smith 1986:105).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Europeans had successfully explored, conquered and
colonized many heretofore unknown (to them) parts of the globe. This global movement led to
novel products and peoples that lived quite different lifestyles than the Europeans proved politically
and scientifically problematic. The discipline of anthropology, beginning with these early social
theories arose largely in response to this encounter between the disparate cultures of quite different
societies (Winthrop 1991:109). Cultural evolution – anthropology’s first systematic ethnological
theory – was intended to help explain this diversity among the peoples of the world.

The notion of dividing the ethnological record into evolutionary stages ranging from primitive to
civilized was fundamental to the new ideas of the nineteenth century social evolutionists. Drawing
upon Enlightenment thought, Darwin’s work, and new cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological
evidence, a whole generation of social evolutionary theorists emerged such as Tylor and Morgan.
These theorists developed rival schemes of overall social and cultural progress, as well as the origins
of different institutions such as religion, marriage, and the family.

Edward B. Tylor disagreed with the contention of some early-nineteenth-century French and English
writers, led by Comte Joseph de Maistre, that groups such as the American Indians and other
indigenous peoples were examples of cultural degeneration. He believed that peoples in different
locations were equally capable of developing and progressing through the stages. Primitive groups
had “reached their position by learning and not by unlearning” (Tylor 2006:36). Tylor maintained
that culture evolved from the simple to the complex, and that all societies passed through the three
basic stages of development suggested by Montesquieu: from savagery through barbarism to
civilization. “Progress,” therefore, was possible for all.

To account for cultural variation, Tylor and other early evolutionists postulated that different
contemporary societies were at different stages of evolution. According to this view, the “simpler”
peoples of the day had not yet reached “higher” stages. Thus, simpler contemporary societies were
thought to resemble ancient societies. In more advanced societies one could see proof of cultural
evolution through the presence of what Tylor called survivals – traces of earlier customs that survive
in present-day cultures. The making of pottery is an example of a survival in the sense used by Tylor.
Earlier peoples made their cooking pots out of clay; today we generally make them out of metal
because it is more durable, but we still prefer dishes made of clay.

Tylor believed that there was a kind of psychic unity among all peoples that explained parallel
evolutionary sequences in different cultural traditions. In other words, because of the basic
similarities in the mental framework of all peoples, different societies often find the same solutions
to the same problems independently. But, Tylor also noted that cultural traits may spread from one
society to another by simple diffusion – the borrowing by one culture of a trait belonging to another
as the result of contact between the two.

Another nineteenth-century proponent of uniform and progressive cultural evolution was Lewis
Henry Morgan. A lawyer in upstate New York, Morgan became interested in the local Iroquois
Indians and defended their reservation in a land-grant case. In gratitude, the Iroquois adopted
Morgan, who regarded them as “noble savages.” In his best-known work, Ancient Society, Morgan
divided the evolution of human culture into the same three basic stages Tylor had suggested
(savagery, barbarism, and civilization). But he also subdivided savagery and barbarism into upper,
middle, and lower segments (Morgan 1877: 5-6), providing contemporary examples of each of these
three stages. Each stage was distinguished by a technological development and had a correlate in

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patterns of subsistence, marriage, family, and political organization. In Ancient Society, Morgan
commented, “As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery,
other portions in a state of barbarism, and still others in a state of civilization, it seems equally so
that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary
sequence of progress”(Morgan 1877:3). Morgan distinguished these stages of development in terms
of technological achievement, and thus each had its identifying benchmarks. Middle savagery was
marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire; upper savagery by the bow and
arrow; lower barbarism by pottery; middle barbarism by animal domestication and irrigated
agriculture; upper barbarism by the manufacture of iron; and civilization by the phonetic alphabet
(Morgan 1877: chapter 1). For Morgan, the cultural features distinguishing these various stages arose
from a “few primary germs of thought”- germs that had emerged while humans were still savages
and that later developed into the “principle institutions of mankind.”

Morgan postulated that the stages of technological development were associated with a sequence of
different cultural patterns. For example, he speculated that the family evolved through six stages.
Human society began as a “horde living in promiscuity,” with no sexual prohibitions and no real
family structure. In the next stage a group of brothers was married to a group of sisters and brother-
sister mating was permitted. In the third stage, group marriage was practiced, but brothers and sisters
were not allowed to mate. The fourth stage, which supposedly evolved during barbarism, was
characterized by a loosely paired male and female who lived with other people. In the next stage
husband-dominant families arose in which the husband could have more than one wife
simultaneously. Finally, the stage of civilization was distinguished by the monogamous family, with
just one wife and one husband who were relatively equal in status.
Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human
society developed. His postulated sequence for the evolution of the family, however, is not supported
by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example,
no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister
mating.

Although their works sought similar ends, the evolutionary theorists each had very different ideas
about and foci for their studies. Differing from Morgan, for example, Sir James Frazer focused on
the evolution of religion and viewed the progress of society or culture from the viewpoint of the
evolution of psychological or mental systems. Among the other evolutionary theorists who put forth
schemes of development of society including different religious, kinship, and legal institution were
Maine, McLellan, and Bachofen.

It is important to note that most of the early evolutionary schemes were unilineal. Unilineal evolution
refers to the idea that there is a set sequence of stages that all groups will pass through at some point,
although the pace of progress through these stages will vary greatly. Groups, both past and present,
that are at the same level or stage of development were considered nearly identical. Thus, a
contemporary “primitive” group could be taken as a representative of an earlier stage in the
development of more advanced types.

The evolutionist program can be summed up in this segment of Tylor’s Primitive Culture which
notes: “The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind…is a subject apt for the
study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely
pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes;
while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution,
each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the
future (Tylor 1871:1:1).”

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POINTS OF REACTION
One debate arising from the evolutionist perspective was whether civilization had evolved from a
state of savagery or had always coexisted with primitive groups. Also, the degeneration theory of
savagery (that primitives regressed from the civilized state and that primitivism indicated the fall
from grace) had to be fought vigorously before social anthropology could progress. Social
evolutionism, therefore, offered an alternative to the contemporary Christian/theological approach
to understanding cultural diversity. As a result 19th century social evolutionism encountered
considerable opposition in some quarters.. This new view proposed that evolution was a line of
progression in which the lower stages were prerequisite to the upper. This idea seemed to completely
contradict traditional ideas about the relationships between God and humankind and the very nature
of life and progress. Evolutionists criticized the Christian approach as requiring divine revelation to
explain civilization. In short, social evolutionism offered a naturalist approach to understanding
sociocultural variation within our species.

As already suggested social evolutionism was a school of thought that admitted much divergence of
opinion. Tthere were debates particularly concerning which sociocultural complex represented the
most primitive stages of society. For example, there were many arguments about the exact sequence
of emergence of patriarchy and matriarchy.

Karl Marx was struck by the parallels between Morgan’s evolutionism and his own theory of history.
Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, devised a theory in which the institutions of monogamy,
private property, and the state were assumed to be chiefly responsible for the exploitation of the
working classes in modern industrialized societies. Marx and Engels extended Morgan’s evolutionary
scheme to include a future stage of cultural evolution in which monogamy, private property, and the
state would cease to exist and the “communism” of primitive society would re-emerge albeit in a
transformed state.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought the end of evolutionism’s initial reign in cultural
anthropology. Its leading opponent was Franz Boas, whose main disagreement with the evolutionists
involved their assumption that universal laws governed all human culture. Boas argued that these
nineteenth-century individuals lacked sufficient data (as did Boas himself) to formulate many useful
generalizations. Thus, historicism and, later, functionalism were reactions to nineteenth century
social evolutionism. But a very different kind of anthropological evolutionism would make a
comeback in the late 20th century as some scholars began to apply notions of natural selection of
sociocultural phenomena.

LEADING FIGURES
Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887). Swiss lawyer and classicist who developed a theory of the
evolution of kinship systems. He postulated that primitive promiscuity was first characterized by
matriarchy and later by patrilineality. He linked the emergence of patrilineality to the development
of private property and the desire of men to pass property on to their children. Morgan (Seymour-
Smith 1986:21) concurred with Bachofen’s postulation that a patrilineal stage followed matrilineality.
Sir James George Frazer (1854 – 1873). Educated at Cambridge, he was the last of the great British
classical evolutionists. Frazer was an encyclopedic collector of data (although he never did any
fieldwork himself), publishing dozens of volumes including one of anthropology’s most popular
works, The Golden Bough. Frazer summed up this study of magic and religion by stating that “magic
came first in men’s minds, then religion, then science, each giving way slowly and incompletely to
the other” (Hays 1965:127). First published in two volumes and later expanded to twelve, Frazer’s
ideas from The Golden Bough were widely accepted. Frazer subsequently studied the value of
superstition in the evolution of culture arguing that it strengthened respect for private property and
for marriage, and contributed to the stricter observance of the rules of sexual morality.

10
Sir John Lubbock (1834-1914; Lord Avebury). A botanist and antiquarian who was a staunch pupil
of Darwin. He observed that there was a range of variation of stone implements from more to less
crude and that archaeological deposits that lay beneath upper deposits seemed older. He coined the
terms ‘Paleolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’. The title of Lubbock’s influential book, Prehistoric Times: As
Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Customs of Modern Savages, illustrates the evolutionists
analogies to “stone age contemporaries.” This work also countered the degenerationist views in
stating “It is common opinion that savages are, as a general rule, only miserable remnants of nations
once more civilized; but although there are some well-established cases of national decay, there is no
scientific evidence which would justify us in asserting that this is generally the case (Hays 1965:51-
52).” Lubbock also advanced a gradual scheme for the evolution of religion, summarized in terms
of five stages: atheism, nature worship (totemism), shamanism, idolatry, and monotheism.
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-1888). English jurist and social theorist who focused on the
development of legal systems as the key to social evolution. His scheme traces society from systems
based on kinship to those based on territoriality, from status to contract and from civil to criminal
law. Maine argued that the most primitive societies were patriarchal. This view contrasted with the
believers in the primacy of primitive promiscuity and matriarchy. Maine also contrasted with other
evolutionists in that he was not a proponent of unilinear evolution (Seymour-Smith 1986:175-176).
John F. McLellan (1827-1881). A Scottish lawyer who was inspired by ethnographic accounts of
bride capture. From this he constructed a theory of the evolution of marriage. Like others, including
Bachofen, McLellan postulated an original period of primitive promiscuity followed by matriarchy.
His argument began with primitive peoples practicing female infanticide because women did not
hunt to support the group. The shortage of women that followed was resolved by the practice of
bride capture and fraternal polyandry. These then gave rise to patrilineal descent. McLellan, in his
Primitive Marriage, coined the terms ‘exogamy’ and ‘endogamy’ (Seymour-Smith 1986:185-186).

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 – 1881). One of the most influential evolutionary theorists of the 19th
century, he has been called the father of American anthropology. An American lawyer whose interest
in Iroquois Indian affairs led him to study their customs and social system, giving rise to the first
modern ethnographic study of a Native American group, the League of the Iroquois in 1851. In this
work, he considered ceremonial, religious, and political aspects of Iroquoian social life. He also
initiated his study of kinship and marriage which he was later to develop into a classica comparative
theory in his work, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871). This latter work is widely
considered to be a milestone in the development of anthropology, establishing kinship and marriage
as central areas of anthropological inquiry and beginning an enduring preoccupation with kinship
terminologies as the key to the interpretation of kinship systems. His Ancient Society is the most
influential statement of the nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary position, to be developed by
many later evolutionists and employed by Marx and Engels in their theory of social evolution.
Adopting Montesquieu’s categories of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, Morgan subdivided the
first two categories into three sub-stages (lower, middle, and upper) and gave contemporary
ethnographic examples of each stage. Importantly, each stage was characterized by a technological
innovation that led to advances in subsistence patterns, family and marriage arrangements and
political organization (Seymour-Smith 1986:201).
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 – 1917). A British anthropologist, who put the science of
anthropology on a firm basis and discounted the degeneration theory. Tylor formulated a most
influential definition of culture: “Culture or civilization is that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as
a member of society.” He also elaborated the concept of cultural “survivals.” His major contributions
were in the field of religion and mythology, and he cited magic, astrology, and witchcraft as clues to
primitive religion. In Tylor’s best known work, Primitive Culture, he attempts to illuminate the
complicated aspects of religious and magical phenomena. It was an impressive and well-reasoned
analysis of primitive psychology and far more general in application than anything which had been

11
earlier suggested. Tylor correlates the three levels of social evolution to types of religion: savages
practicing animism, barbarians practicing polytheism, and civilized people practicing monotheism.
Another notable
accomplishment of Tylor was his exploration of the use of statistics in anthropological research.

KEY WORKS
Frazer, James George. 1890 [1959]. The New Golden Bough. 1 vol, abr.
Lubbock, John. 1872. Prehistoric Times: As Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and
Customs of Modern Savages. New York: Appleton.
Maine, Henry. 1861. Ancient Law.
McLellan, John. 1865. Primitive Marriage.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1876. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877. Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress rom
Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
Tylor, Edward B. 1871 [1958]. Primitive Culture. 2 vols. New York: Harper Torchbook.
PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS
These terms are added only as a supplement; more elaborate understandings can be discerned from
reading the above basic premises:
unilinear social evolution – the notion that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and
progressive manner. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages, to
arrive ultimately at a common end. The scheme originally included just three stages (savagery,
barbarism, and civilization), but was later subdivided in various manners to account for a greater
amount of sociocultural diversity.
psychic unity of mankind – the belief that the human mind was everywhere essentially similar. “Some
form of psychic unity is …implied whenever there is an emphasis on parallel evolution, for if the
different peoples of the world advanced through similar sequences, it must be assumed that they all
began with essentially similar psychological potentials” (Harris 1968:137).
survivals – traces of earlier customs that survive in present-day cultures. Tylor formulated the
doctrine of survivals in analyzing the symbolic meaning of certain social customs. “Meaningless
customs must be survivals. They had a practical or at least a ceremonial intention when and where
they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state in
society where the original sense has been discarded” (Hays 1965: 64).
primitive promiscuity – the theory that the original state of human society was characterized by the
lack of incest taboos and other rules regarding sexual relations or marriage. Early anthropologists
such as Morgan, McLellan, Bachofen and Frazer held this view. It was opposed by those scholars
who, like Freud, argued that the original form of society was the primal patriarchal horde or, like
Westermark and Maine, that it was the paternal monogamous family (Seymour-Smith 1986:234).
stages of development – favored by early theorists whoembraced a tripartite scheme of social
evolution from savagery to barbarianism to civilization. This scheme was originally proposed by
Montesquieu, and was further developed by the social evolutionists, most influentially by Tylor and
Morgan.
METHODOLOGIES
The Comparative Method Harris (1968:150-151) has an excellent discussion of this approach.
“…The main stimulus for [the comparative method] came out of biology where zoological and
botanical knowledge of extant organisms was routinely applied to the interpretation of the structure
and function of extinct fossil forms. No doubt, there were several late-nineteenth-century
anthropological applications of this principle which explicitly referred to biological precedent.In the
1860’s, however, it was the paleontology of Lyell, rather than of Darwin, that was involved. … John
Lubbock justified his attempt to “illustrate” the life of prehistoric times in terms of an explicit
analogy with geological practices:

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“… the archaeologist is free to follow the methods which have been so successfully pursued in
geology – the rude bone and stone implements of bygone ages being to the one what the remains of
extinct animals are to the other. The analogy may be pursued even further than this. Many mammalia
which are extinct in Europe have representatives still living in other countries. Our fossil
pachyderms, for instance, would be almost unintelligible but for the species which still inhabit some
parts of Asia and Africa; the secondary marsupials are illustrated by their existing representatives in
Australia and South America; and in the
same manner, if we wish clearly to understand the antiquities of Europe, we must compare them
with the rude implements and weapons still, or until lately, used by the savage races in other parts of
the world. In fact, Van Diemaner and South American are to the antiquary what the opossum and
the sloth are to the geologist (1865:416).”

All theorists of the latter half of the nineteenth century proposed to fill the gaps in the available
knowledge of universal history largely by means of a special and much-debated procedure known as
the “comparative method.” The basis for this method was the belief that sociocultural systems
observable in the present bear differential degrees of resemblance to extinct cultures. The life of
certain contemporary societies closely resembled what life must have been like during the Paleolithic,
Neolithic, or early state-organized societies. Morgan’s view of this prolongation of the past into the
present is characteristic:
“…the domestic institutions of the barbarous, and even of the savage ancestors of mankind, are still
exemplified in portions of the human family with such completeness that, with the exception of the
strictly primitive period, the several stages of this progress are tolerably well preserved.
They are seen in the organization of society upon the basis of sex, then upon the basis of kin, and
finally upon the basis of territory; through the successive forms of marriage and of the family, with
the systems of consanguinity thereby created; through house life and architecture; and through
progress in usages with respect to the ownership and inheritance of property.” (1870:7)
To apply the comparative method, the varieties of contemporary institutions are arranged in a
sequence of increasing antiquity. This is achieved through an essentially logical, deductive operation.
The implicit assumption is that the older forms are the simpler forms.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
The early evolutionists represented the first efforts to establish a scientific discipline of anthropology
(although this effort was greatly hampered by the climate of supernatural explanations, a paucity of
reliable empirical materials, and their engagement in “armchair speculation”). They aided in the
development of the foundations of an organized discipline where none had existed before. They left
us a legacy of at least three basic assumptions which have become an integral part of anthropological
thought and research methodology, as outlined by Kaplan (1972: 42-43):
the dictum that cultural phenomena are to be studied in naturalistic fashion
the premise of the “psychic unity of mankind,” i.e., that cultural differences between groups are not
due to differences in psychobiological equipment but to differences in sociocultural experience; and
the use of the comparative method as a surrogate for the experimental and laboratory techniques of
the physical sciences
CRITICISMS
Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human
society developed. However, his postulated sequence for the evolution of the family is not supported
by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example,
no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister
mating. In short, a most damning criticism of this early social evolutionary approach is that as more
data became available, the proposed sequences did not reflected the observations of professionally
trained fieldworkers.
A second criticism is for the use by Tylor, McLellan, and others of ‘recurrence’ – if a similar belief
or custom could be found in different cultures in many parts of the world, then it was considered to

13
be a valid clue for reconstructing the history of the development, spread, and contact among
different human societies. The great weakness of this method lay in the evaluation of evidence
plucked out of context, and in the fact that much of the material, at a time when there were almost
no trained field workers, came from amateur observers.
The evolutionism of Tylor, Morgan, and others of the nineteenth century is rejected today largely
because their theories cannot satisfactorily account for cultural variation. Why, for example, are some
societies today lodged in “upper savagery” and others in “civilization.” The “psychic unity of
mankind” or “germs of thought” that were postulated to account for parallel evolution cannot also
account for cultural differences. Another weakness in the early evolutionists’ theories is that they
cannot explain why some societies have regressed or even become extinct. Also, although other
societies may have progressed to “civilization,” some of them have not passed through all the stages.
Thus, early evolutionist theory cannot explain the details of cultural evolution and variation as
anthropology now knows them. Finally, one of the most common criticisms leveled at the nineteenth
century evolutionists is that they were highly ethnocentric – they assumed that Victorian England,
or its equivalent, represented the highest level of development for mankind.
“[The] unilineal evolutionary schemes [of these theorists] fell into disfavor in the 20th century, partly
as a result of the constant controversy between evolutionist and diffusionist theories and partly
because of the newly accumulating evidence about the diversity of specific sociocultural systems
which made it impossible to sustain the largely “armchair” speculations of these early theorists”
(Seymour-Smith 1986:106).
SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Barnard, Alan 2000 History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge.
2. Carneiro, Robert L. 2003 Evolutionism in Culture: A Critical History. Westview Press:
Boulder, CO.
3. Ellwood, Charles Abram 1927 Cultural Evolution: A Study of Scoial Origins and
Development. The Century Co.: New York.
4. Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward 1981 A History of Anthropological Thought. Basic Books, Inc.:
New York.
5. Feinman, Gary M. And Linda Manzanilla 2000 Cultural Evoltution: Contemporary
Viewpoints. Plenum Publishers: New York.
6. Frazer, James George 1920 The Golden Bough. MacMillan and Co.: London.
7. Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture.
Thomas Y. Crowell: New York.
8. Hatch, Elvin 1973 Theories of Man and Culture. Columbia University Press, New York.
9. Hays, H. R. 1965 From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology. Alfred
A. Knopf, New York.
10. Kaplan, David and Robert A. Manners 1972 Culture Theory. Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect
Heights, Illinois.
11. Kuklick, Henrika 1991 The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology,
1885-1945. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
12. Lubbock, John 1868 On the Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man.
13. Maine, Henry Sumner 1861 Ancient Law. The Crayon, 8:77-80.
14. McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms 1996 Anthropological Thought: An Introductory
History. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Pub. Co.
15. Moore, Jerry D. 2008 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and
Theorists. AltaMira Press.
16. Ogburn, William F. And Dorothy Thomas 1922 Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social
Evolution. Political Science Quarterly, 37:83-98.
17. Ritchie, David G. 1896 Social Evolution. International Journal of Ethics, 6:165-181.

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 18. Tylor, Edward B. 1874 Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Customs. Holt: New York
19. Tylor, Edward B. 2006 The Science of Culture. In Readings for a History of Anthropological
Theory. Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, eds. Pp. 29-41. Canada: Broadview Press.
20. Seymour-Smith, Charlotte 1986 Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology. Macmillan, New
York.
21. Stocking Jr., George W. 1968 Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology. The Free Press, New York.
22. Stocking Jr., George W. 1995 After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951. The
University of Wisconsin Press.
23. Winthrop, Robert H. 1991 Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. Greenwood
Press, New York.

The fundamental presumption of evolutionary theory, which has dominated social thought in the last half of the
nineteenth century, is the notion that civilization has progressed by a series of stages from a backward to an advanced
state. The characteristics of the stages differ from theorist to theorist—Comte, Maine, Bachofen, etc.—but the central
idea of progress informs them all. To distill out the essential themes of this approach, I sketch the line of argument
taken up in Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society ([1877] 1963).

The subtitle of Ancient Society reveals its essence: Researches in Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through
Barbarism to Civilization . Morgan, like other evolutionists, regarded human history as advancing through several
stages. These stages constitute "a natural as well as a necessary sequence of progress" ([1877] 1963, 3). The main
defining characteristic of each stage is the type of inventions that society used to gain its subsistence. Thus, the lower
stage of savagery extends from the beginnings of the human race to the time that people began to rely on fish for
subsistence; the middle stage of savagery began with fish subsistence and the use of fire and moved into the upper status
of savagery with the invention of the bow and arrow. The analysis continues in a similar fashion through three stages
of barbarism to the state of civilization, which began with the use of a written alphabet. In addition to technology, other
institutions also developed by stages. In the period of savagery government was organized into gentes, or clans, and
"followed down, through the advancing forms of this institution, to the establishment of political society" ([1877] 1963,
5). And a parallel story of progress is to be found in religion, architecture, property, kinship, and other institutions.

B) LIVELIHOOD ACTIVITIES OF HUNTER GATHERS

What did hunter gatherers do?
Hunter-gatherer culture is a type of subsistence lifestyle that relies on hunting and fishing animals
(fishes were also hunted) and foraging for wild vegetation and other nutrients like honey, for food.
Until approximately 12,000 years ago, all humans practiced hunting-gathering.
What was the hunter gatherer way of life?
A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging
(collecting wild plants and pursuing wild animals). Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to
agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species.
What are some characteristics of a hunter-gatherer society?
Obtain food through hunting /fishing and gathering for survival, small groups; less than 50 people,
and they travel frequently.
What do you mean by hunter gatherers?
Definition of hunter-gatherer. : a member of a culture in which food is obtained by hunting, fishing,
and foraging rather than by agriculture or animal husbandry.
Hunter-gatherer culture was the way of life for early humans until around 11 to 12,000 years
ago. The lifestyle of hunter-gatherers was based on hunting animals and foraging for food.

Hunter-gatherers were prehistoric nomadic groups that harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate
knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread

15
from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond. From African hominins of 2 million years ago to modern-
day Homo sapiens, the evolution of humans can be traced through what the hunter-gatherers left
behind—tools and settlements that teach us about the hunter-gatherer diet and way of life of early
humans. Although hunting and gathering societies largely died out with the onset of the Neolithic
Revolution, hunter-gatherer communities still endure in a few parts of the world.

▪ Who Were the Hunter-Gatherers?

Hunter-gatherer culture developed among the early hominins of Africa, with evidence of their
activities dating as far back as 2 million years ago. Among their distinguishing characteristics, the
hunter-gatherers actively killed animals for food instead of scavenging meat left behind by other
predators and devised ways of setting aside vegetation for consumption at a later date.
The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger
brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat. Additionally, these
were the first hominins built for long-distance walking, pushing nomadic tribes into Asia and Europe.

Hunting and gathering remained a way of life for Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 to 200,000 years
ago), the first humans to adapt to colder climates and routinely hunt large animals, through the
Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.
It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern
humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000
B.C.

▪ Hunter-Gatherer Tools and Technology

The early hunter-gatherers used simple tools. During the Stone Age, sharpened stones were used for
cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6
million years ago.

Controlled use of fire for cooking and warding off predators marked a crucial turning point in the
early history of these groups, though debate remains as to when this was accomplished. Use of
hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far
back as 1 million years ago.

Evidence of fire exists at early Homo erectus sites, including 1.5 million-year-old Koobi Fora in
Kenya, though these may be the remains of wildfires. Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in
colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods
like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.

After Homo heidelbergensis, who developed wooden and then stone-tipped spears for hunting,
Neanderthals introduced refined stone technology and the first bone tools. Early Homo sapiens
continued to develop more specialized hunting techniques by inventing fishhooks, the bow and
arrow, harpoons and more domestic tools like bone and ivory needles. These more specialized tools
enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about
in search of food.

▪ Hunter-Gatherer Diet
From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and
nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through
scavenging.

As their brains evolved, hominids developed more intricate knowledge of edible plant life and growth
cycles. Examination of the Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov site in Israel, which housed a thriving community

16
almost 800,000 years ago, revealed the remains of 55 different food plants, along with evidence of
fish consumption.

With the introduction of spears at least 500,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers became capable of
tracking larger prey to feed their groups. Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years
ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to
haul in larger aquatic life.

▪ Hunting and Gathering Society

Studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers offer a glimpse into the lifestyle of small, nomadic tribes
dating back almost 2 million years ago.

With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive
and fashioning basic shelter for all. Division of labor by gender became more pronounced with the
advancement of hunting techniques, particularly for larger game.

Along with cooking, controlled use of fire fostered societal growth through communal time around
the hearth. Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent
ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as
burying their dead and creating ornamental objects. Homo sapiens continued fostering more
complex societies. By 130,000 years ago, they were interacting with other groups based nearly 200
miles away.

▪ Where Did The Hunter-Gatherers Live?

Early hunter-gatherers moved as nature dictated, adjusting to proliferation of vegetation, the
presence of predators or deadly storms. Basic, impermanent shelters were established in caves and
other areas with protective rock formations, as well as in open-air settlements where possible.

Hand-built shelters likely date back to the time of Homo erectus, though one of the earliest known
constructed settlements, from 400,000 years ago in Terra Amata, France, is attributed to Homo
heidelbergensis.

By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common, fueling
a shift to semi-permanent residencies in areas with abundant resources. The remains of man’s first
known year-round shelters, discovered at the Ohalo II site in Israel, date back at least 23,000 years.

▪ Neolithic Revolution to Modern Day

With favorable conditions supporting permanent communities in areas such as the Middle East’s
Fertile Crescent and the domestication of animals and plants, the agriculture-based Neolithic
Revolution began approximately 12,000 years ago.

The full-time transition from hunting and gathering wasn’t immediate, as humans needed time to
develop proper agricultural methods and the means for combating diseases encountered through
close proximity to livestock. Success in that area fueled the growth of early civilizations in
Mesopotamia, China and India, and by 1500 A.D., most populations were relying on domesticated
food sources.

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Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous
groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa, and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands
in the Bay of Bengal, known to fiercely resist all contact with the outside world.
If there is one thing that palaeoanthropologists understand, it is the continuum between species,
genera, and all forms of life. Human beings are defined by their relationships with (and divergence
from) other primates, living and historical, and primates by their relationship with other mammals,
and so on. Therefore, when considering who are hunter-gatherers and then who are the first of these
hunter-gatherers, palaeoanthropologists are one of the few types of archaeologist whose job is not
to think immediately of Homo sapiens communities, but of creatures who are positively not Homo
sapiens. It is tempting to think of hunter-gatherer behaviour as the first version of human food-
getting strategy: that ‘the first hunter-gatherers’ is the same as ‘the first eaters’. If this were true then,
given the unbroken continuum of the evolution of humans from primate ancestors, it would be
impossible to identify the first creature to get its own food: any species that you picked out as a
possible ‘first’ would itself have an ancestor. Moreover, once we get back further than hominins,
archaeologists and anthropologists tend to lose interest.

However, we do not need to stretch our brains back to the primordial soup. The first hunter-
gatherers are not the same as the first eaters. For one thing, it appears reasonably certain that the
earliest hominins were vegetarians, with hunting coming on board much later, having gone through
a stage of scavenging before hunting. We might characterize the development of human subsistence
as: gathering, then scavenger-gathering, then hunter-scavenger-gathering with scavenging probably
reducing in importance as hunting increased. Having said that, whether you then characterize very
early vegetarian ancestors as ‘gatherers’ depends very much on the definition you use. Does ‘gatherer’
equal ‘plant eater’ (and thus include a huge range of living herbivores, frugivores, and folivores—or
prey, as they are otherwise known)? Or does it imply a certain level of sociology: division of labour,
planning, mapping, or sharing? How would these aspects be evidenced in the fossil record? More
pragmatically, is there a physical and cognitive difference between gathering (collecting, carrying,
hoarding, delayed consumption) and simply grazing as you go? If so, we exclude most non-human
animals—and quite a few hominins—who eat plants from the term ‘gatherer’, yet it would be difficult
to exclude carnivores such as raptors and cats from the term ‘hunter’. A question about who the first
hunter was would surely involve an (p. 178) animal predator. And, humans are not the only
omnivore: a significant minority of living non-human animals, including our closest relative the
chimpanzee, our best friend the dog, and our usual taphonomic body double, the pig, are also
omnivores.

Disentangling the non-human animals from those human ancestors is difficult simply because
subsistence behaviour is a fundamentally natural, animalistic behaviour. Hunter-gathererism might
be considered a human behaviour now, but it is not unique. It did not appear at the same time as
hominins appeared, it did not appear as a package deal, and however culturally complex it might be
today, it is derived from the need to eat, which is common to all life. This chapter goes on to examine
the emergence of the component parts of hunting and gathering as a human behaviour, having noted
its relationship to the subsistence behaviours of other animals.

This semantic nit-picking might be annoying, but it is necessary if we are to answer any questions
regarding ‘firsts’ in human behaviour. If hunting and gathering is defined in terms of a modern
human behaviour then this can only extend to Homo sapiens, and this chapter should be written
about the first examples of this species, occurring in Africa at sites like Omo (Butzer 1969;
McDougall et al. 2005), Blombos Cave (Grine et al. 2000, Jacobs et al. 2006), Herto (White et al.
2003), and Klasies River Mouth (Churchill et al. 1996; Rightmire and Deacon 1991; 2001) around
200–100 kya (thousand years ago), and in the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe from 40 kya (Lartet 1868;
Trinkaus et al. 2003; Wild et al. 2005). There is even disagreement over which fossil should be called

18
the earliest example of Homo sapiens, because it is not clear how far we should allow anatomical
variation to be tolerated within one species. Modern humans are extremely uniform in their
appearance and genetic codes, but there may have been more variability in the deep past, as there is
more variability in other modern animal species.

If we are extending our interest in the history of human behaviour to ancestral hominins then we
can certainly talk about the food-getting behaviour of Neanderthals. As the most recent non-sapiens
hominin, we have a relative wealth of archaeological record from them, and it seems certain that they
were collecting, storing, and cooking plant foods (Henry et al. 2011) as well as hunting and
butchering large game (Richards and Trinkaus 2009).

We have enough evidence to at least debate the subsistence strategy of Homo erectus and possibly
some transitional Homo, and to a certain extent of Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Evidence
for the diets of these hominins exists archaeologically (as stuff, primarily stone tools and animal bone
debris), chemically (the analysis of isotopic signatures in tooth enamel and bone), and anatomically
(as skeletal form indicating function, and microscopically, as wear patterns on teeth). In some cases
there is evidence for butchery sites, ‘home-base’ sites where food was brought for eating and sharing,
and fire and/or cooking traces on animal bones. However, our evidence is always sparse even
compared to the evidential luxuries available to archaeologies of later, much shorter periods, let alone
in proportion to the time period covered. This makes this chapter largely a biological or subsistence
one: readers should note that there is little scope for discussing how subsistence was culturally
regarded by early hominins.

Who, When, and Where? A Potted Guide

Some context of when and who we are talking about is necessary, but this chapter is not intended to
be a thorough guide to the many species that populate our lineage prior to Homo (p. 179) sapiens.
Not only would this information fill whole books (great examples of which are Aiello and Dean
(2002), Bilsborough (1992), and Foley and Lewin (2003)), but any account would be out of date by
the time you read this. New discoveries are being announced all the time, scholars differ in how
many species they accept as biological likelihoods, and, with such a tiny assemblage, a small amount
of new information can change the whole picture.

Instead, this part offers a rough guide to hominins, sensu Wood and Lonergan (2008), who offer a
superb guide to the names and types of hominins currently known, as well as an explanation of why
there is disagreement about the number of species, and which is strongly recommended to the reader.
They talk of grades of hominins; groups of species grouped together by major characteristics, which
is easier (and shorter) than trying to list every species.

The earliest grade defined by Wood and Lonergan (2008) is that of possible or probable hominins,
which includes two genera that are doubtful, and one which is a likely candidate for hominin-ship.
The fragmentary nature of the evidence and similarity of appearance of other primate groups means
that, at the time of writing, some fossils cannot be established as those of upright walking hominins.
The broad dates for the very early, unlikely candidates is 5.7–7 mya (million years ago), while the
probable candidate, genus Ardipithecus, dates to 5.8–4.3 mya. These fossils are all from East Africa:
Chad, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

The second grade is archaic hominins, and this includes well-known as well as newly recognized
species of the genus Australopithecus (referred to in lay terms as australopithecines), a genus defined
by Dart (1925), plus the one known member of a recently established additional genus,
Kenyanthropus (Leakey et al. 2001). This group dates 4.5–2.4 mya and represents creatures that were

19
definitely bipedal but with relatively small bodies and brains. Some members show signs of remaining
comfortable in tree environments as well as being bipeds on the ground. In this grade,
Australopithecus is known from both South African and East African locales whilst the aptly named
Kenyanthropus is currently known only from Kenya.

The third grade, megadont archaic hominins, includes those species who exhibit significant
specialization in their dentition and masticatory anatomy (and presumably in their diets, of which
more below). These species were initially categorized as Australopithecus, but most workers now
use a different genus name, Paranthropus, to distinguish them, although most people agree that
Paranthropus is likely to be ancestrally derived from Australopithecus. These hominins had bodies
and brains almost as small as the previous group, but bigger faces and teeth, and date 2.5–1.4 mya.
Again, species from both East and South African locales are recognized.

Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Kenyanthropus are genus names, on an equivalent level with
Homo. The beginnings of Homo are characterized by Wood and Lonergan (2008) first as transitional
hominins, a grade containing long-established but scantily evidenced species from East Africa that
may or may not be reclassified when more evidence is uncovered, dating around 2.4–1.6 mya.
Following the transitional homins are pre-modern Homo, a large grade containing the famous faces
of our more recent ancestry, some thoroughly well known and established such as Homo erectus
and Homo neanderthalensis, and other newer ones such as Homo floresiensis. The timeline here is
1.9 mya to 28 kya. This grade is first seen in East Africa (H. ergaster: there are some South African
fossils assigned to early Homo but not currently classifiable beyond that), then develops into H.
erectus which later moves into Asia and Europe, giving rise to the Neanderthals in Europe (and
some transitional (p. 180) forms) but keeping the classic H. erectus form in the Far East. Finally—
for now—comes the grade ‘anatomically modern humans’, which contains only one species, Homo
sapiens (sensu stricto) from about 200 kya onwards.

Note that the time zones overlap for most grades, and that these broad dates are judged on the fossil
finds that we have. Since it is unlikely that our fossil collections contain the very first and very last
member of any species or genus, we can assume that each time zone is a minimum, and the overlap
was probably more extensive. The fact that for the majority of hominin history it has been the norm
for several species and/or genera to be sharing resources and landscape, including Homo sapiens
for the majority of its tenure, is at odds with our experience of the world, but of course has strong
implications for the evolution of diet and subsistence strategy.

The sections below outline the evidence, circumstantial (i.e. anatomical) and direct (chemical or
archaeological), for the development of the various components of the human diet. Each section is
formatted in accordance with the history of investigation: for earlier hominins, anatomy first and
direct evidence later, as the latter relies heavily on recent scientific techniques. For Homo,
archaeological investigations came first, largely because there just is more archaeology available for
them, and anatomical modelling came later.

Plant-Based Subsistence: Archaic Hominins (5.8–1.4 mya)

Circumstantial Evidence: Form Indicates Function

Information about the diet of very early hominins is based on fragmentary skeletal evidence which
has been examined on the basis that form indicates function. Where the function is not obvious,
analogies are drawn from closely related living animals, or from animals with analogous diets (e.g.
Constantino et al. 2011) where we can see what something is for. It is a case of examining the fossil
remains of hominin teeth and bodies and reverse-engineering their diets and behaviours from the
physical adaptations made to them. As we are dealing with biological function there is little concern

20
in the literature with the philosophical rightness of using this kind of analogy. It is well understood
that analogy generates assumptions, not facts, which are often broader than we would like—but, for
some small scraps of hominins, that is all we can get.

For example, when Ardipithecus was first announced in 1994, its thin tooth enamel (thin compared
to that of Australopithecus) was cited as evidence for fruit adaptation. Chimpanzees (Pan
troglodytes) have especially thin enamel on the occlusal (biting) surface of their incisors which is
considered an adaptation to a heavy reliance on ripe fruits (Suwa et al. 2009), and so the same was
applied to Ardipithecus. However, the more recent publications have argued that the enamel on
Ardipthecus teeth is not as thin as in chimps, just thinner than in Australopithecus, so is not
necessarily indicative of reliance on ripe fruit (or sharing special traits with Pan), but of generalized
woodland plant eating (Suwa et al. 2009; White et al. 1994), reminding us to avoid relying too heavily
on analogy.

(p. 181) Another example of form indicating function is in one of the best-established
Australopithecus species, Au. afarensis. This hominin dates between 3 and 2 million years, and
includes the famous specimen ‘Lucy’ or AL-288-1 (Johanson and Maitland 1981), a 40 per cent
complete skeleton. This hominin’s teeth are indicative of generalized vegetarianism (Bilsborough
1992), with neither molars nor incisors dominating. Coupled with recent evidence that the East
African landscape in which it lived was more heavily forested than originally thought, it is likely that
this species was a fruit and plant eater, taking advantage of all and any plant foodstuffs without
specialization. Au. afarensis was a biped but was probably also comfortable climbing trees, with
mobile shoulder joints and long, curved fingers. A life spent in forested environments would be
consistent with a vegetarian diet emphasizing fruit, and chimes well with research on possible home-
base sites (see below). In contrast, the paranthropines (the megadont grade) show strong
specialization in their reduced anterior dentition and expanded, powerful molars—indeed, the first
specimen of the East African megadonts was nicknamed ‘Nutcracker Man’ (Leakey 1959; Lee-Thorp
2011). This level of dental specialization indicates a dietary specialization, unlike the generalized Au.
afarensis, and investigations into this specialization have resulted in lines of direct evidence.

Direct Evidence for Plant-Based Foods

Megadont archaic hominins, or paranthropines if one prefers, are the robust-faced group comprised
of the species P. robustus from South Africa, and P. boisei and (much earlier and probably ancestral)
P. aethiopicus from East Africa. These hominins exhibit a markedly specialized dentition of large
square molars of the crushing-grinding type seen in herbivorous chewers like sheep and horses, with
very small, flat incisors. The enamel on their teeth was very thick, in contrast to Ardipithecus.
Combined with this are faces that are wide and flat, small braincases, flared cheekbones
accommodating very large chewing muscles, and in some cases (probably males, according to living
ape analogies) a sagittal crest. The whole skull is heavy, buttressed, flattened, and strong, which looks
very aggressive but probably indicates reinforcement against powerful chewing rather than fast sharp
snapping of jaws. As noted above, this anatomy was initially taken to indicate the need for powerful
crushing of hard-cased food items such as nuts or seeds.

Although this seems a simple case of form indicating function (Rak 1983), recent attempts to
determine the hardness of the food items eaten by these creatures from scratches and striations on
their teeth demonstrate how advances in scientific technique can overturn these assumptions. Using
high-resolution microwear analysis, Ungar et al. (2008) showed that in seven P. boisei specimens
there was no evidence, from tooth wear at least, that the individual had eaten anything especially
hard in the few days prior to death. These authors posited that paranthropines had the ability to eat
rock-hard seeds and tough plants when necessary, but that it was an emergency fallback ability rather
than a usual choice. This is an example of Liem’s paradox, which states that very derived (specialized)

21
adaptations do not necessarily indicate the preferred day-to-day habits of a creature, but its last
resorts (Liem 1990). Therefore paranthropines may have been eating a much softer diet than has
been traditionally considered, while preserving the ability to eat very hard foods in times of crisis. A
special edition of American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2009) devoted to fallback foods and
their importance in primate and hominin evolution highlights the increasing interest in this topic as
a key force in evolutionary change.

(p. 182) Isotopic analysis by Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp (2006) on P. robustus specimens supports
the idea that paranthropines were not limited to crunching tough food items, or perhaps not
crunching them at all. This study indicated that the diet of these hominins was more variable than
had been previously thought. The isotopic evidence from this study indicated a high level of grasses
or sedges in the diet, but the authors also noted that this could have occurred not only by P. robustus
eating grasses, but also from P. robustus preying on animals that ate grasses, although there is no
other evidence for meat eating at this time.

This study was superseded (Cerling et al. 2011) by further investigations into the carbon isotope
ratios of both P. robustus and P. boisei. Here, dental enamel samples of both species were analysed,
and revealed that P. boisei was eating a diet almost entirely composed of C3 plant stuffs (grasses and
sedges) with little input from C4 plants (nuts, seeds, berries, fruits), and moreover, that the very high
levels of C3 could only come from a diet directly reliant on eating grasses—eating animals that ate
grasses could not produce high enough levels. This means that the species formerly known as
‘Nutcracker Man’ should really be nicknamed ‘Grass-grazer Man’! In contrast, P. robustus showed a
more varied diet including C3 and C4 foods.

Of interest here is the fact that the facial and dental anatomy of the two species is very similar, but
they occupy different territories (P. boisei known from East Africa, P. robustus from South Africa).
If we take the assumption that form indicates function then these two similar forms should be eating
a similar diet, but evidently the East African group went down the route of a dietary specialism to
the exclusion of other foods whilst the South African group retained a generalized vegetarian diet
common to many primates in similar environments. Here we can see that whilst form = function
works broadly (we can see that neither of these two were snapping carnivores) it should not be
assumed that it works down to the detail of being able to distinguish between two different, equally
viable, African vegetarian diets.

The Invention of Meat Eating: Pre-Modern Homo (1.9 mya–28 kya)

In hindsight, it seems that the inception of meat eating amongst hominins ought to be a big fanfare,
a marked leap in human evolution. After all, most other animals are strongly specialized to either
carnivory or herbivory, and changing from the primate norm of vegetarian food to a mixed diet, and
the behavioural changes that must go alongside, could rightly be described as a big deal. In terms of
the bodily changes that seem to go with meat eating (see below), changes are quite impressive, but
of course we are viewing the effect in a very few fossilized individuals. The archaeological record
shows changes coming in slowly, with meat eating creeping in as an extension of gathering behaviour
at first.

Direct Evidence for Animal-Based Foods: Small Animal Protein

The classic archaic hominins, then, have been characterized as devoted vegetarians of various types.
It is tempting to link the appearance of animal protein in the diet with the (p. 183) appearance of
Homo as either a cause or a symptom. However, this is not strictly true: there is direct evidence that
Au. africanus was eating at least a little animal protein and, given the immense time depth and

22
archaeological paucity of this period, we might assume that which we have evidence for is only a
small part of hominins’ repertoire.

Au. africanus is the South African australopithecine (2.8 mya), a small-brained, small-statured biped
who was probably prey more often than predator (Brain 1981). This species has slightly smaller front
teeth than Au. afarensis, but there is nothing particularly indicative or specialized about its dentition
and it was assumed to be a general vegetarian primate whose diet was governed by what was available
in its dry, grassy Transvaal landscape. However, modern investigations have shown that long thin
slivers of animal bone found on Au. africanus sites bear the microscopic marks of termite bites
(Backwell and d’Errico 2001). This might be a mystery if it were not for the analogy of chimps: the
Gombe chimpanzee group were famously witnessed ‘fishing’ for termites by probing specially
prepared long slim sticks into termite mounds, causing the termites to clamp their jaws onto the
stick, and then pulling out the stick and eating the termites (Goodall 1986). From this analogy it
seems perfectly likely that Au. africanus was at least partially insectivorous, was deliberately
modifying items in order to get termites, and was probably learning and passing on this behaviour
through observation of each other. The fact that Au. africanus was ingesting termite protein has
been corroborated by studies of stable isotope in the tooth enamel which shows that animal protein
contributed a portion of their diet (Lee-Thorp and Sponheimer 2006). Au. africanus is, then, the first
hominin for whom we have evidence that animal protein was being eaten. Whether fishing for
termites counts as hunting, or fishing, or gathering remains debatable.

Large Animal Protein

During the 1980s the idea that scavenging, not hunting, had been the first mode of meat eating in
human ancestors became popular, although it had first been voiced by Leakey in 1967 (Blumenschine
1987). Cut marks on bones at Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora (Bunn 1981; Potts and Shipman 1981)
were matched with Acheulian hand axes: symmetrical, uniform, teardrop-shaped tools flaked on
both sides, sharp and heavy, probably for hand-held work such as butchering and smashing, rather
than throwing. These hand axes are strongly associated with H. erectus, meaning that this hominin
was pronounced to be eating meat taken from carcasses after a carnivore had eaten from it. However,
it is hard to say that H. erectus is the first and only toolmaker or butcher: at Olduvai it is unclear
whether P. boisei, H. habilis, or H. erectus is the maker of the Oldowan industry, and there is
association at Olduvai of P. boisei fossils with animal bones.

An important example here is the hippopotamus butchery site at Koobi Fora, documented by Glynn
Isaac (1978a) which shows that more than diet can be inferred from this type of archaeology. Here,
Isaac demonstrated that 119 stone flakes associated with a hippo carcass (presumed to have died
naturally) were transported from at least three kilometres away and knapped at the site (Isaac 1978a).
The transport of materials in this manner is perhaps the first archaeological evidence of this extent
of planning depth in relation to food.

Isaac (1971; 1978a; 1978b) developed models of landscape use by hominins who were transporting
food and stone around the landscape: to butchery sites, and to notional (p. 184) home-base sites:
specified areas where hominins returned repeatedly, bringing food back either to share and/or to
defend it from other predators, in the case of meat. These sites were typically around streams and so
would have had vegetation and perhaps shady trees. This has implications for our concept of plant-
food gathering (as opposed to grazing) as well as meat eating: Isaac postulated that carrying food,
saving it for later, bringing it back to a home, to a group, was a meaningful development that marked
out hominin behaviour as different from other animals. He envisioned dragging carcasses back, but
also discussed the issue of carrying plant foods such as berries and shoots in two hands, and
suggested that non-fossilizing items such as a simple tray of bark could have been used to make this
possible. He further suggested that the division of labour originated here, with females too

23
encumbered with young to range far from the home-base (but able to carry a bark tray) and males
transporting meat from the wider landscape back to the home-base to provision females and young.
Notably, Isaac did not pinpoint the origin of meat eating, home-basing, or provisioning to any
specific hominin, but the temporal range of his sites made P. boisei and H. erectus likely candidates.

Isaac’s work was reviewed by Rose and Marshall (1996), whose research in primatology was brought
to bear on the issues Isaac had suggested were unique to humans. Their paper combined several
fields of research and is worth seeking out for the bibliography alone. They refuted the division of
labour idea and of defensible homesteads, but supported the idea of home-base sites generally. They
agreed that transport of resources and delayed consumption were only seen amongst humans.
Amongst both positive and negative respondents were Fruth and McGrew, who suggested that the
assemblages of stone and bones on the ground near watercourses were not evidence of hominins
living on the ground under trees, but perhaps building platforms in the trees, as chimps do, as this
would form a much better protection against most carnivores if meat was indeed being brought back
to the home-base. In this scenario, the archaeological debris would have dropped onto the ground
as the platform disintegrated, not been originally laid there. Fruth and McGrew also provided
examples of bonobos transporting fruit for several hundred metres by walking either bipedally or
tripedally to free one or more front limbs for carrying, and outlined more extensive examples of
food sharing in chimps, but agreed that delayed consumption had no parallel in the non-human
world (Fruth and McGrew 1996). Other respondents included Bunn, who noted that local plant
resources would rapidly become depleted in any scenario where hominins were staying close to one
spot.

Circumstantial Evidence: Anatomy and Dentition

The advent of meat eating is supported by changes in the hominin skeleton around the time of
Isaac’s butchery sites and the appearance of the Acheulian. In many ways H. ergaster, the early
African version of Homo erectus dating from 1.9 mya, and H. erectus from 1.6 mya, mark a new
era: the first time we have a well-established, predictable anatomy, strongly associated with a stone-
tool industry which is uniform and symmetrical in manufacture, and with a much larger brain than
has been seen before.

The anatomy of H. ergaster/erectus supports the advent of meat eating in several ways and is best
explained by Aiello and Wheeler’s ‘expensive tissue hypothesis’ (1995, and reviewed and revised in
Isler and van Schaik, 2009; Barrickman and Lin 2010; and Ruxton and (p. 185) Wilkinson 2011).
This theory draws on: the large increase in brain size compared to earlier hominins; changes in body
height and build; the taller, flatter, more slender and human-like torso shape; and dentition. Readers
should note that the two species are somewhat conflated in this hypothesis: the real brain increase is
seen in H. erectus not in H. ergaster, but what we know of the postcranial (neck down) anatomy of
these two species is mostly down to the almost complete skeleton of a young male, WT-15000, from
Nariokotome (Walker and Leakey 1993), described on its discovery as H. erectus (Brown et al. 1985)
but following development of our understanding of these species, now classified as H. ergaster
(Wood and Lonergan 2008).

Homo erectus had a brain of 900–1,000 cm3, much bigger than australopithecines and
paranthropines (500–600 cm3), transitional early Homo (500–775 cm3) and H. ergaster at 760 cm3,
although not as large as ours (around 1,450 cm3). The brain is a highly expensive organ to maintain
in terms of energy consumed for its size, so larger brained creatures need to consume more calories
than small brained ones. If a species has a larger brain than its ancestors, it must be getting more
calories: either there are increased calories in the diet, or some other organ is reducing to free up
extra calories for the brain. Aiello and Wheeler argued that in H. erectus we see both.

24
The ribcage shape of H. ergaster in WT-15000 provides evidence for the reduction of another organ
to pay for the expansion of the brain. In earlier hominins such as Au. afarensis (see AL-288) and in
modern apes, the ribcage is narrow at the shoulder but splayed out wide at the base, making a cone
shape that results in the familiar pot-bellied torso shape of the non-human great apes. The narrow
top facilitates shoulder and arm flexibility for tree swinging while the wide base houses a very long
gut. This long gut is necessary because these animals (and by extension, hominins, which share the
pot-belly ribcage shape such as Au. afarensis) eat material that takes a long time to process: heavy
vegetation, fruit rinds, and waxy leaves that would be indigestible to modern humans with their short
gut. Only by spending a long time inside the gut being processed can these plant materials be broken
down into a form that can be absorbed as animal energy. What is more, the amount of calories
yielded by a waxy leaf, once you have accounted for the calories expended in the long processing of
it, are quite low. In a modern human, though, that leaf would be out the other end virtually intact
before it had a chance to start breaking down, thus yielding no calories to the human, and costing a
few in pushing it along.

Modern humans have a flat, rectangular ribcage and abdominal region, housing a shorter gut, which
can be seen in those people without excess fat. In H. ergaster we see something halfway—the ribcage
shape is not as flat and square as ours, but it is less cone shaped than that of earlier hominins,
resembling a bell (Aiello and Wheeler 1995). So we can deduce that H. ergaster’s gut was shorter
than that of its predecessors but not as short as ours. This means that the gut tissue itself, which is
metabolically the second most expensive after the brain, would be reduced, freeing up extra calories
for use by the brain. But what about the loss of gut length? Would this not mean a loss of calories
from less processing, thus outweighing any calorific increase gained by reducing the gut length? Yes,
it would—if H. ergaster was eating the same diet as the longer-gutted archaic hominins, this would
mean a net reduction in calorific yield, not the net increase required for a bigger brain. The only way
for a large brain as seen in H. ergaster and then the increase in brain size we see in H. erectus to
combine a brain increase with small gut is to consume a diet that yields more calories in a shorter
processing time: i.e. that is more easily and quickly digestible.

(p. 186) Animal muscle, or meat, is a food that fits the bill. Hominins are already made of meat and
their bodies require animal energy to run. Transforming animal muscle into animal energy is a lot
less hassle than transforming leaves and shoots into animal energy. Meat contains a lot more calories
than vegetable matter because it is already a concentrated form of animal energy, plus, less of our
own processing energy is used to digest it. (This is an oversimplification of course; meat requires
extra biochemical kit to process it, and this must have evolved alongside behaviour. For example,
Pfefferle et al. (2011) showed that human brains have more phosphocreatine circuit proteins—for
getting energy out of meat—than do chimps, meaning that our brains can leach more energy out of
the same piece of meat than chimps’ brains can, although skeletal muscle gets the same amount in
both species. This is a genetically embedded specialism of our brains, which indicates selection for
meat eating specifically related to the brain’s energy requirements.)

Other elements of the anatomy and archaeology of H. ergaster and H. erectus support the idea that
they were adapted to eating meat. The dentition has molars and incisors in similar proportion to each
other, in terms of size, as they are in modern humans, reflecting a more omnivorous diet (of course,
these hominins would still have eaten a large proportion of vegetable matter in addition to meat, just
as humans do today to varying degrees). The teeth are still larger overall than those of later H. sapiens
but significantly smaller than australopithecines, and essentially, the human shape and format of the
teeth, set in a parabolic (horseshoe shaped) arc, rather than a long rectangular palate as in archaic
hominins and other apes, is recognizable in H. ergaster and H. erectus.

25
A well-known individual that may be evidence of the personal consequences of meat eating is the
partial female skeleton KNM-ER 1808. This specimen’s femur shows thickened cortical bone
consistent with Vitamin A poisoning (Walker et al. 1982). This condition, which leads to a slow and
painful death, arises from eating carnivore liver, which is far too high in this vitamin to be consumed
by humans (every schoolchild knows that polar bear liver is poisonous, but so is the liver of other
carnivores including lion and leopard). KNM-ER 1808 lived for several weeks after consuming an
overdose of Vitamin A (long enough for it to modify her bones before death) in a debilitated state,
possibly indicating that she was to some extent cared for by other members of her group, although
this must remain speculative. It seems that in the earliest stages of meat eating, hominins had not,
quite understandably, established sufficient knowledge of what kinds of meat were not all right to
eat.

Although there is no evidence directly to suggest whether the unfortunate 1808 ate from livers that
had been scavenged or hunted, it is unlikely that hominins would go out to hunt lions. Therefore the
balance of likelihood is that this liver was from an animal that had died by other means and H.
ergaster or H. erectus had made use of the carcass. (However, while lions, as group hunters, are a
very unlikely target, Tunnell (1996) reports an instance of a mob of baboons attacking a leopard—
so perhaps it is not an impossible idea to suggest a carnivore may occasionally have been killed by a
group of hominins.)

The origins of deliberate, organized hunting remain archaeologically unknown. H. erectus was the
first species to move outside of Africa, populating south-east Europe, where it evolved into a series
of transitional forms, one of which presumably became the Neanderthals, and China and Indonesia,
where it established itself as H. erectus. (Again this is a very simplified account of a hotly debated
issue.) The Neanderthals are demonstrably big-game hunters, but these are the first hominins for
whom that can be said. It is entirely likely that earlier Homo meat eaters, scavenging large game and
collecting small animals, (p. 187) would have hunted larger animals opportunely, becoming more
adept and confident over time, but this sadly must remain speculation.

The Uniqueness of Human Hunter-Gathering

The Other Hunter-Gatherers

Finally, a bold statement was made above that human hunter-gathering is not unique. A reviewer of
this chapter asked that the aspects that separate humans from other animals be stressed, but it turns
out to be hard to find such aspects for most of the history of hominins. Although the level of
technological achievement and organized big-game hunting of the Neanderthals and later humans
certainly differs from any other primate’s strategy, these come in relatively late, and for the majority
of the timeline of hominins, our ancestors were behaving in a fairly generalized primate fashion.
Even when meat eating creeps in, it is through behaviours that have either identical (termite fishing)
or strongly correlative counterparts in chimpanzee life.

Although, as noted, humans are certainly not unique in being omnivores, we cannot really term pigs
or dogs hunter-gatherers: both are foragers and opportunists for the most part. However,
chimpanzees may quite genuinely be termed hunter-gatherers. Isaac (1978a) highlighted the example
of chimps, but claimed that taking food back to a recognized home-base to eat later, and sharing,
were two behaviours that marked a difference between chimps and early Homo. However, since
then several studies have observed chimps behaving in ways that undermine some of Isaac’s tenets
of humanness. Chimps cooperate in running down prey and have a pecking order in terms of sharing
the meat from the kill, including a preference for certain parts of the prey (Boesch and Boesch 1989).
Meat may be used socially as a manipulation/reward: some workers have claimed that female chimps
swap sex for meat from males (Gilby 2006; Gomes and Boesch 2009). Chimps also have a complex

26
gathering and sharing behaviour when it comes to plant foods (Bethell et al. 2000; Slocombe and
Newton-Fisher 2005). Chimps not only modify twigs to fish for termites (Goodall 1986) but have a
wide range of tool-using behaviours that vary in the number and degree of their expression from
group to group—i.e. there are differences in material culture signatures between groups (McGrew
1977; Whiten et al. 1999). At the time of writing, the storing of food for lean times, and food
processing (cooking, combining, drying) appear the only parts of human subsistence behaviour that
chimps do not do. However, there are animal homologues—plenty of other animals such as pikas
and ground squirrels gather and store dry food for winter either in caches they return to (pikas) or
burrows they live in (squirrels) (Hickman and Roberts 1995), while others such as bears stockpile
calories as body fat; Japanese snow macaques learned to wash potatoes in saltwater to season the
flavour, which may tenuously count as food preparation (Kawamura 1959; Kawai 1965); and the
history of this area of research shows that the surest way to ensure that chimps are spotted doing
something is to publish a paper claiming that they do not do it.

Given that chimpanzees in the wild spontaneously exhibit these behaviours it is difficult to claim
that hunter-gatherer behaviour belongs only to humans, or that it defines humans. (p. 188) Chimps
are modern living animals so they are not, of course, ancestral to us or ‘the first hunter-gatherers’—
indeed, what we really lack is any archaeological or fossil record for chimpanzees: it would be very
interesting to know whether it was Homo or Pan who were first with various aspects of hunter-
gathering. It seems likely that the two strategies developed independently, one as a savannah-based
strategy and the other (the Pan version) as an arboreal strategy, and this may in fact be the difference
between the two.

In sum, this chapter has reviewed what we know of hunter-gathering, or its antecedents, in our
ancestors and in our close relatives. These ancestors date from at least five million years ago and we
have seen how meat eating develops in later stages from a default setting of primate vegetarianism
and how the dentition, anatomy, and archaeology of hominins demonstrate this.

Hunter-gatherer, also called forager, 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.
Hunter-gatherer societies are – true to their astoundingly descriptive name – cultures in which human
beings obtain their food by hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering wild plants and other edibles.
Although there are still groups of hunter-gatherers in our modern world, we will here focus on the
prehistoric societies that relied on the bounty of nature, before the transition to agriculture began
around 12,000 years ago.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers often lived in groups of a few dozens of people, consisting of several
family units. They developed tools to help them survive and were dependent on the abundance of
food in the area, which if an area was not plentiful enough required them to move to greener forests

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(pastures were not around yet). It is probable that generally, the men hunted while the women
foraged.
The first hunter-gatherers
Our genus of Homo first developed within the massive space that is Africa, and it is there
that hunter-gatherers first appeared. There are a few hotspots where the land clearly
provided decently lush living opportunities and where the remains of often several different
groups of humans living there at various times have been found. In southern Africa sites
such as Swartkrans Cave and Sterkfontein show more than one occupation, although they
are a lot younger than sites in eastern Africa, where in or near Ethiopia the earliest known
stone tools made by humans – dated to c. 2,6 million years ago – have been found. One of
the oldest sites is Lake Turkana in Kenya: it was already home to our presumed ancestors
the Australopithecines, to which the famous Lucy belongs, and it continued to be a popular
spot for a very long time indeed.

Dependency on the environment

From humans’ early start in Africa to spilling out across Eurasia and later the rest of the world, all this exploration
across vastly different terrains was done while living off the land by hunting and gathering what it had to offer. The
amount of food, looking at both flora and fauna, directly impacted the amount of people an environment could feasibly
support. If food was abundant, resident groups of hunter-gatherers were more likely to stay in the same place, find ways
to effectively store their food, and protect their territory against competing groups. Alternatively, if there was not enough
food in a group’s direct vicinity, it meant they had to move around and lead more nomadic lifestyles in order to sustain
themselves. If this sounds like too much of a piece of cake, imagine that the environment with both its terrain and its
weather (think of droughts or huge storms) regularly tried to kill these early humans, with the assistance of animals
that had bigger teeth and claws than they did. Luckily, prehistoric societies were made up of groups or bands of a few
dozens of people, usually representing several families, that helped each other survive mother nature.

EARLY BANDS OF HOMO ERECTUS WERE LIKELY THE FIRST TO VENTURE OUT
INTO NEW WORLDS, NEARLY 2 MILLION YEARS AGO, SPREADING OUT ALL THE
WAY TO EURASIA, CHINA, & INDONESIA.
The geographical spread of early man was so vast it is useful to elaborate on this a little. A huge continent such as
Africa in itself already hosts all sorts of different landscapes, although in general, some degree of sun and heat would
have been part of the deal, but once man spread beyond its borders, a whole new kind of adaptability would have been
necessary. Early bands of Homo erectus were likely among the first to venture out into new worlds, nearly 2 million
years ago, spreading out all the way to Eurasia, China, and Indonesia by c. 1,7 - c. 1,6 million years ago, although
a few older finds - tools made by unknown species - spanning between roughly 2,6-2 million years from those regions
are also known. These help illustrate how complex the history of early human migration must have been. Europe was
most likely not explored until much later; although the Mediterranean shows some tentative human activity before 1
million years ago, the major mountain ranges were not braved by daring travellers (usually thought to have been Homo
heidelbergensis) until around 700,000 years ago. Once they had crossed, they flourished. Neanderthals later evolved
from this population and themselves ended up expanding beyond their initial European homes into both the Near
East and parts of Central Asia, up to the Altai region in Siberia where the remains of a sister-species of theirs, the
Denisovans, were also found. By the end of the Middle Palaeolithic, almost the entirety of the Old World had been
reached by some group of humans. Insular Asia, Australia and the New World would also all be conquered by
humans by the end of the Pleistocene. With our planet covered, there was no environment to which we did not eventually
learn to adapt.

Genetic studies are doing their best to come closer to a coherent picture of just how quiet or busy the world must have
generally been during the Pleistocene. None has emerged just yet, but a non-genetic estimate of around 500,000
individuals is in agreement with a lot of the recent genetic results. In general, areas would not have been very densely
populated. One might wonder what prehistoric man or woman would have to say about our present-day self-proclaimed
modernity, which has spawned many massively polluted cities.

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Shelters
Mostly, these prehistoric hunter-gatherers would have used natural shelters as living space; overhanging cliffs would
have provided a place to nestle into to escape the wind and rain, and caves were highly popular as comfortable living
spaces could be created within, mostly near the entrance to stay in range of the daylight. However, open sites, more
exposed to the elements, have also been found.

The living spaces of the earliest hunter-gatherers were basic and not clearly structured. Throughout the Middle
Palaeolithic, however, designated areas for certain activities slowly become apparent, especially towards the late Middle
Palaeolithic. As man harnessed the use of fire, the controlled and habitual use of which dates back to at least around
400,000 years ago, hearths also began to appear within settlements. Some of these sites even show the beginnings of
long-distance transport, as certain raw materials can only have ended up there if they were transported from 100 or
more kilometres away. Middle Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers moreover relied almost entirely on natural shelters, too; the
evidence for manmade shelters is still extremely rare.
In the Upper Palaeolithic, humans became ever more inventive and organised, as manmade structures were now created
to a much higher degree than before. They offered an alternative to the still very popular cave life, but caves, of course,
were not available everywhere, and they were so popular among cave bears and cave lions that it gave them their names.
Thus, some societies built huts or tents with wooden supports, or even with mammoth bones forming the structure,
which were also illuminated by the light of hearths and had clear architectural features that organised the spaces into
designated areas. Materials and tools were moreover much more commonly transported over long distances than they
were in the Middle Palaeolithic. However, it is in the persistently useful caves that one of the greatest developments of
the Upper Palaeolithic is visible: brilliant cave paintings, such as those at Chauvet Cave or the famous Lascaux Cave,
both in present-day France, provide some stunning examples of hunter-gatherer art. Often connected with symbolic
thought, it is this that greatly sets these later hunter-gatherers apart and forms part of why they are generally considered
to be full-fledged modern humans.

All in all, as their technologies developed and they became more versatile, humans were able to master all kinds of
challenging environments, from scorching deserts to dense forests and frigid tundras.
Food
The exact types of food hunter-gatherers consumed obviously varied depending on the landscape and its resident flora
and fauna. Whereas some might specialise in hunting the impressive prehistoric megafauna such as the megaloceros or
giant elk, woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, others might focus on trapping small game or on fishing. Although
their name implies an active stance, hunter-gatherers most likely scavenged to some degree too.

The earliest humans in Africa were still quite far removed from woolly mammoth-hunting, however, and not just
because the time and geographical location do not quite match. They had no sophisticated hunting tools or strategies
capable of bringing down quite such enormous prey as of yet, but they did eat meat. After these people had obtained
their food, however, they still had to process it. For this, either powerful teeth – for grinding down tough plants with
strong molars or biting into non-butchered flesh - or tools that did that for them were needed. Early humans, in general,
went down the path towards smaller teeth. Already in species such as Homo rudolfensis the molars were not as large
as their ancestors’, and later species such as Homo habilis and Erectus continued this trend. Teeth size declined, while
at the same time brain size grew. They made up for their smaller teeth by developing a stone tool culture, which allowed
them to more efficiently exploit their environment than ever before. As such, these humans became more omnivorous -
and thus, more versatile and adaptable - by adding more meat to their previously pretty green diet.

Because plant remains do not stand the test of time as well as butchered animal bones do, it is generally hard to
determine exactly what our ancestors’ veggie habits were like. However, a recent 2016 study gives us a rare glimpse
into the plant diet of the people living at Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov, Israel, some 780,000 years ago. A stunning 55
kinds of food plants were found there that include seeds, fruits, nuts, vegetables, and roots or tubers. The diversity shows
these people had a good knowledge of which edible things could be found in their environment, and in which season,
and reflects a varied plant diet. Besides the greens, the diet of this particular hunter-gatherer society also included both

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meat and fish. Moreover, fire was visibly used in food processing by this group, while cooking and the habitual use of
fire seem not to have been widespread until around 500,000 - 400,000 years ago (see below). Whether this site just
housed a group of prodigies or whether more general conclusions can be drawn from this is hard to say – it must at the
very least be viewed in its geographical and chronological framework.

A bit further along the timescale, Middle Palaeolithic sites show more evidence of local traditions and variation being
present. As humans were now well-established both inside and outside of Africa, and had spanned out far north as
well as east, population density increased, and that had an effect on the available food. Under the yoke of increased
competition, hunters came up with new tactics and began picking targets across a wider range than before. When they
were available, however, the prized large- or medium-sized deer, horses, and bovids like bison and gazelle presented too
good of an opportunity to pass up. These were definitely the top picks on the hunter-gatherer menu.

‘The bigger the animal, the better’ is a philosophy that definitely holds up when one is concerned with feeding a whole
band of hungry humans leading active lives. For living that dream, the time to be alive was the Late Pleistocene (c.
120,000 - 10,000 years ago), specifically in the main part of Eurasia and stretching all the way into eastern Siberia.
There, humans would have found an astonishingly high concentration of megafauna such as mammoths, woolly
rhinoceros, Lena horse, and bison, in what has been called the ‘Mammoth complex’. Neanderthals, for instance, surely
took advantage of this: they are known to have eaten a fair amount of mammoth and rhino meat, besides other meat
from mammals such as bison, wild cattle, reindeer, deer, ibex and wild boar. Otherwise, various legumes and grasses,
fruits, seeds and nuts generally made up a substantial part of their diet, like it must have done for most hunter-gatherer
societies throughout time. The idea that they were mostly meat-eaters (apart from their early beginnings) has long since
been overthrown. Recently, an interesting window into the past opened up at a site called Shubayqa 1 in northeastern
Jordan. Archaeologists that were excavating a hearth lined with stones found fragments of an ancient unleavened type
of bread there, made by a human culture living at the site around 14,400 years ago - a staggering 4000 years before
agriculture cropped up in this region.

Tools
First of all, it must be explained that the categories we have come up with to classify ancient tools are only broad, rough
indicators encompassing certain sets of characteristics that we ourselves have gathered together. Tools had to be functional
in their direct environment and were made with products coming from that environment, rather than adhering to some
sort of 'unspoken' trend that telepathically entered the minds of all early human toolmakers.

The tools used by hunter-gatherers to make their lifestyle possible had their humble beginnings, so far traced back to
around 2,6 million years ago, in the Oldowan technology (lasting until c. one million years ago). Simple stone cores
were used as choppers, hammerstones, and retouched flake scrapers, in order to both cut the meat off of animals and
get to the nutritious marrow inside, or process plants and seeds. This technology was brought out of Africa towards
Asia by early waves of Homo erectus that went adventuring.

In Africa, in the meantime, what we call the Acheulean (c. 1,7 million years ago to c. 250,000 years ago) had begun
to evolve, which came to Eurasia a bit later on. It saw the development of tools into large bifaces like hand axes, picks
and cleavers, enabling Homo erectus, and later on Homo heidelbergensis, to literally get a better grip on the processing
of their kills. Although wood of such age generally does not survive, a site in Northern Europe suggests that wooden
tools may well have been a part of the daily life of early hunter-gatherers too, presumably stretching all the way into the
Middle Palaeolithic.

The above mentioned Homo heidelbergensis, who was very widespread indeed, deserves some special attention. They
appeared around 700,000 years ago in Africa, are most commonly seen as descendants from Homo erectus (although
this linear view is being increasingly challenged), and seemingly spread into Europe as far as present-day England by
around 500,000 years ago. At a site in Schöningen, Germany, dated to at least 300,000 years old, Heidelbergensis
astounded researchers: eight carefully crafted wooden spears were found, alongside flint tools and chips. These weapons
represent the earliest indication for active hunting behaviour, and, interestingly, their targets were also present: the bones

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of numerous horses showing cut marks were found at the site, too. The systematic hunting of large animals is no mean
feat, as it is hard to envision hunters being successful in this way without cooperating with one another to a decent
degree. Indeed, researchers suggest that Homo heidelbergensis was already capable of making quite sophisticated tools
and hunting not only large but also dangerous animals, which, they say, may indicate that they engaged in cooperative
social activities.
Tool use was by now decently established, and the following Middle Palaeolithic saw a fine-tuning; retouched flake
tools, such as scrapers, points, and backed knives were made by early precursors to Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and
the earliest anatomically modern humans. A huge proliferation then occurred in the Late Palaeolithic, where blade
tools were created alongside bone, antler and ivory artefacts, and even such technological feats as spear throwers and
bows and arrows began to appear. All in all, around the world, as time went on more and more variability appeared
in the stone industries we are uncovering, which not only suggests increasing innovation over time, but also the presence
of stronger regional (material) cultures.

Fire as a catalyst
Besides the development of tools, another huge change that had an incredible effect on our species is the harnessing of
fire. In short, the use of fire meant our ancestors could huddle around it for protection (wild animals in general are not
very keen on fire) and warmth, and it allowed them to cook their food - which has an amazing array of benefits. Fire
thus plays a central role in human survival and in catalysing the processes of becoming ‘human’ as we define it.

THE EARLIEST EVIDENCE WE HAVE FOUND SO FAR FOR THE USE OF HOMININ
FIRE DATES BACK TO OVER A MILLION YEARS AGO.
The earliest evidence we have found so far for the use of hominin fire dates back to over a million years ago. Around
Lake Turkana fire is indicated from around 1,8 million years ago onwards; sites show reddened patches and, for
instance, stones altered by heat, but the early African sites show no certain signs of hearths. Indeed, throughout this
early stage traces of fire remain very rare on African open sites. Here, fire use may have been more connected to taking
advantage of natural fires, such as forest fires or the after-effects of a particularly violent lightning strike, rather than
actively creating and maintaining it personally.

It is hard to accurately trace the way in which the use of fire gradually developed throughout time, after its first
beginnings. However, by at least 400,000 years ago it is clear that the human bands roving around and setting
themselves up in caves not just in Africa, but also the Middle East and Europe, knew and used fire; clear evidence of
hearths has been found in Acheulean levels. These people were clearly skilled at maintaining and using fire. Over the
next 100,000 years, the habitual and very deliberate use of fire becomes very apparent, like for instance in the Middle
East and even at open sites in southern France. It thus became a central part of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Fire had important benefits. Apart from protection and warmth, which would have helped even the earliest, basic fire
users to survive, a major advantage that came when the deliberate use of fire began to become more widespread is the
ability to cook. Until around 500,000 years ago, cooking seems to have been a rare sight within hunter-gatherers
societies. What happened when humans did convert to sizzling their bison steaks and the likes is as follows. Firstly,
cooking softens the food, making it easier to chew and digest, which meant people could develop smaller teeth and less
long digestive systems, and spend less of their time digesting their food. The traditional hunter-gatherer diet is moreover
so hard to ingest and digest in its raw form that cooking, in addition to the calorific benefits, really represented a big
change. It also left these early humans’ brains free to grow to a larger size than previously possible; large brains are
more complex but also more expensive and require high-quality foods. Of course, having larger and more complex
brains meant that humans could come up with better ways to maintain and use fire, develop better hunting strategies,
and so forth. Thus, the cycle continued.

Fire in general also had an impact on the social side of these hunter-gatherer groups. Fire, with the light it provided,
enabled hunter-gatherers to stay active even after sundown, extending their days and leaving more time for social
bonding, which is very important especially in larger groups. Modern humans are awake for nearly twice as long as
many of their primate cousins.

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The social side
This prehistoric lifestyle, with groups sharing and organising a living space, and working towards keeping everyone
alive, clearly had some sort of social side to it. Research suggests that a kind of social network structure could well have
appeared quite early on in human history, with connections stretching not just to family members but also to non-kin,
and that this social aspect may have helped spark (increasingly intensive) cooperation. The hunters at Schöningen, for
instance, that are discussed above and belong to a group of Homo heidelbergensis, or at comparable sites such as
Boxgrove and Arago, were seemingly so successful they may have been able to get their hands on large amounts of meat.
If this was indeed the case, they may have shared or exchanged food with other groups in their neighbourhood, maybe
even at established meeting places.

Another huge benchmark is the use of language, the origin of which is much discussed and very hard to place on a
timeline. From some sort of communication to primitive language-like systems somewhere among the earlier forms of
humans, to a full-fledged language the way we use it today, it all developed somewhere in these hunter-gatherer societies.
Besides the organisation of life within a group, being able to discuss your hunting strategies in detail, pinpoint the
location of a nearby predator, or give a poetic description of a newly found nearby blueberry bush made a bit of a
difference.
The sheer amount of different Homo species that passes the revue in the space above should already be an indicator of
just how diverse hunter-gatherers were: each species had different strengths and weaknesses, and differently structured
societies, although with time almost all of these humans walked the road that eventually led to agriculture. The
exceptions? Some hunter-gatherer societies persist to this day.

• Early Hunter-Gatherer Modifications of Environment for Food

Hunting and gathering activities were the primary way for humans to feed themselves from their
natural environments during over 90% of human history. Gathering plant products, such as seeds,
nuts, and leaves, is considered to have been the primary activity in these early human-natural food
systems, with hunting mostly secondary. The mix of hunting-gathering activities and the tools used
varied according to the environment. Among many hunter-gatherers’ groups worldwide fire was one
of the most important tools and was used widely. Fire was used by these human social systems to
transform natural systems in habitats ranging from grasslands and open forests, such as those of
Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, to those of denser forests that included the Amazon rain
forest of South America. One importance of fire was that it helped enable hunter-gatherers to
“domesticate the landscape” so that it yielded more of the desired plants through gathering and the
sought-after animals through hunting.

Fire also was and is crucial in enabling humans to cook food. Cooking rendered animals and many
plants into forms that humans were significantly more able to digest. The capacity to cook foods
through the use of fire----which was obtained through gathering and hunting---may have arisen as
long ago as 1.8 – 1.9 million years ago at about the same general time as the emergence of our
ancestral species Homo erectus on the continent of Africa. (Homo erectus subsequently evolved to
Homo sapiens, our own species, about 200,000 years ago). These early humans were able to extract
significantly more energy from food as the result of cooking. In short, cooking enabled through the
use of fire, produced chemical compounds in food that were more digestible and energy-dense.
While the changes and challenges of human diets and nutrition continued to evolve---they are a focus
of Module 3 —this early shift to cooking through the use of fire was one of the most influential in
our history.

Hunter-gatherer peoples are assumed to have used thousands of different types of plant species and,
at the least, hundreds of different animal species. In many cases, the impact on the environment or
natural systems was only slight or moderate, since population densities were low and their use of the
environment was dispersed. Populations were relatively small and technology was fairly rudimentary.

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In a few cases, environmental impacts were significant, such as the use of fire as discussed above.
Hunting pressure also could have led to significant environmental impacts. It is hypothesized that
hunting by groups in North America contributed to the extinction of approximately two-thirds of
large mammal species at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000-12,000 years ago. The human role
in this extinction episode, referred to as the Pleistocene Overkill Hypothesis, was combined with the
effects of other changes. Climate and vegetation changes in particular also impacted the populations
of these large mammals and made them more vulnerable to hunting pressure.

We know less about the societies and social structure (human systems) of these groups. However,
work with recent and present-day hunter-gatherers suggests they had high levels of egalitarianism
since livelihood responsibilities are widely shared and not easily controlled by single individuals or
small groups within these groups. One thing we do now know is that hunter-gatherers have been
related to agricultural peoples in a number of ways. A first and obvious way is that in the history of
human groups and food systems, "we" were all hunter-gatherers once, and across a wide range of
environments agriculturalists emerged from hunting and gathering in their origin. Another is that
hunter-gatherers sometimes coexist with agriculturalists and may even have conducted rudimentary
trade. Last, there are even cases of hunting and gathering emerging from agricultural groups. In
Africa and South America, for example, the Bantu or Bushmen (in southern Africa) and the Gi (in
present-day Brazil) are thought to have been agriculturalists prior to assuming hunter-gatherer
lifestyles. These changes presumably owed to lessening population densities and the opportunity for
more feasible livelihoods through hunting and gathering given the circumstances these peoples
faced. This re-emergence of hunting and gathering is an excellent example of the sort of human
natural-coupling we consider in this module and apply to the history of food systems: the social
factor of lessening population densities, and perhaps something the re-emergence of more wild
ecosystems in natural landscapes, allowed these agriculturalists to re-adopt hunting and gathering,
with consequent changes in the natural systems.

C) TERRITORIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Introduction: The relationship between prehistoric people and the territory in which they live is
not straightforward. Everyone has a perception of the environment, but this does not imply that “all
human societies have notions of property in land”(Peterson, 1975). Territory is an abstract, culturally
encoded, notion that can take different form in sedentary and nomadic populations. In the case of
prehistoric societies, archaeologists use to define a territory from material data according to models
such as “site catchment analysis”or “site exploitation territories”(Bailey and Davidson, 1983), but
these materialist definitions do not give rise to the mechanisms by which individuals are tied to a
given area and this does not imply that the notion of “territory” was meaningful for them. If our
goal is to studythe social relationships between human groups, the concept of social geography seems
more useful because it considers an open, virtually unlimited, space (Conkey,1984). However, the
task seems unsurmountable, particularly in the case of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer whose social
organization is practically unknown In addition, we should be very careful whenusing the world
“territory”because it entails a risk of anachronismand ethnocentrism. The concept of “symbolic
territory”is still more problematic because this implies that we are able to establish a correlation
between a human group, a geographic area and a series of cultural markers specifically limited to this
space, which seems impossiblein most cases due to the phenomena of diffusion and borrowing that
confuse the issue. This is why I propose to address the questionof territory from another point of
view.It is clear that any hunter-gatherer group occupies, at any givenmoment, a geographic area from
which it draws its subsistence andits essential resources (often called “supply territory”). There
couldbe an agreement on this minimal definition. Taking into accountthe mobility of hunter-
gatherers, this “supply territory”, not con-nected with a notion of property or appropriation, changes

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overtime. On the other hand, any hunter-gatherer group has tocommunicate with its neighbors with
whom it maintains relationsof exchange and shares not only material resources but also
culturalgoods. What makes sense for every individual is his/her belongingto a cluster of human
groups more or less distant from each other,in what we call an exchange network or social network
(Knappett,2013). The functioning of an exchange network is based on conventions regulating the
exchanges of goods, know-how andinformation between neighboring groups. The number of con-
cerned groups may vary in the course of time and therefore anexchange network does not possess
geographical boundaries. It canbe seen as a series of nodes (sites) with links (pathways) betweenthem.
The notion of exchange network is more flexible than that ofterritory and better suited for the study
of the social and culturalrelationships between prehistoric human groups. At the archaeo-logical
scale, exchange networks are fluctuating, but at the humanscale, they appear quite stable and
constitute an element of stabilitymuch more important than the place where the group is living one
day and that will change the next.It is worth noting that the concept of exchange network shares
many features with that of “interaction sphere”used to describe the exchanges in the Hopewell
culture (Caldwell, 1964). Both models acknowledge the fact that distinct groups can maintain their
identity while sharing various cultural traits and participating incommon practices. This duality will
allow us to study the mechanisms of exchanges at various scales much better than the notion
ofterritory.In his work on intersite and inter-regional links, Paul Bahn(1982) already insisted on the
fact that to be member of an ex-change network is a vital necessity for hunter-gatherers, because itis
a means to increase the pool of potential partners, to allowsharing and mutual assistance in case of
shortage and to provideaccess to strategic information. Besides, such a networkstrengthens solidarity
and may help to avoid conflicts.In this article, I intend to consider Paleolithic hunter-gatherersas
being an example among the hunter-gatherers known fromethnographic studies. For that purpose,
numerous examples will betaken from the symbolic productions (rock art, portable art,adornments)
of Paleolithic societies in order to illustrate the dy-namics of cooperation among groups belonging
to exchangenetworks.2. Models of hunter-gatherer organizationThe American anthropologist James
Woodburn (1982) proposedto distinguish two types of hunter-gatherers: those who consumefrom
day to day the resources taken from their environments (whatWoodburn calls immediate return) and
those who set up practicesto postpone the use of these resources to distribute them betterover time
(delayed return). The first groups are mostly egalitarianand the second ones, not egalitarian. In both
cases, relationships tothe territory will obviously be very different. This scheme is veryclose to Alain
Testart's proposal (Testart, 2012). Although real casesdo not enter readily into this dichotomy, the
model offers never-theless a useful approach to the variability of hunter-gatherersocieties.In the first
case, resources are shared by the members of thegroup and are in relatively free access to persons
outside of thegroup. This type of behavior is common amongst the Inuit fromNorthern Canada and
Greenland and the San from Southern Africa,which shows that the model can work in totally
different ecologicaland climatic conditions.In the second case, a much more sedentary way of life is
the rule.Storage can lead to a series of consequences: the accumulation ofwealth, the appropriation
of the territory, the appearance of in-equalities and social hierarchy. Exploitation of the territory
isreserved to some individuals or clans. This type of social structure,rather unusual, has been
described among the Indians of theNorthwest coast of America (Canada and Alaska).The existence
of inequalities during the Upper Paleolithic hasbeen discussed by Vanhaeren and D'Errico (2001,
2003) in the caseof the burials of La Madeleine (Dordogne) and St-Germain-la-Rivi ere (Gironde).
The magnificence of the adornments, constitutedby thousands of shells and pierced teeth, suggests
that the child ofLa Madeleine and the young woman of St-Germain, as well as thechildren from
Sungir (Russia) or those from Grimaldi (Italy) (White,1999; Malerba and Giacobini, 2014) belonged
to lineages thatbenefited from an exceptional status. This shows that humans arenot treated equally
in death but does not allow us to deduce theexistence of social inequalities, though an evolution of
theMagdalenian social organization toward an institutionalized hier-archy has been claimed
(Schwendler, 2012).Lewis Binford (1982) has developed a model for the uses andoccupation of land
by hunter-gatherers based on his study of theNunamiut, an Inuit group (Fig. 1). The model deserves

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attentionbecause it could be applied to some extent to the Upper Paleolithic(Audouze, 2006).
Around a residential camp, there are a number ofresource areas that could be covered in a single
day. These areascalled foraging zones provide the daily supply. A much wider areaincludes places
where it is possible to find other hunting andfishing products and raw materials. This zone is called
the logisticalzone because expeditions in this zone take several days or severalweeks and therefore a
logistical preparation and anticipation of theneeds is required.Around the logistical zone exists
another area called extendedzone in which the hunters “attempt to keep informed with respect
toresource distributions and changes in production, although they maynot be exploiting the area at
the time of observation”(Binford, 1982:8).Finally, and it is very important for our topic, there is,
stillbeyond, a peripheral zone, which Binford calls the visiting zone,occupied by other groups with
which the group maintains more orless regular relations (relatives and/or partners for marriage in-
terchanges and exchanges of goods). This is the first criterion of anexchange network. As shown by
Polly Wiessner, intergroup in-teractions may play also an important role in conditioning thehunter-
gatherer spatial organization (Wiessner, 1982).The intensive exploitation of the resources in the zone
of im-mediate supply (foraging zone) will lead to exhaustion and obligesthe group to move the camp.
In a leapfrog model (Binford, 1982: 9),commonly observed in high-biomass environments, the
logisticalzone around the new camp presents generally an overlapping areawith the precedent area
and interestingly, these moves often returnto the same places according to a seasonal or annual
rhythm. Weknow that during most of the Paleolithic, the known archaeologicalsites were only
frequented during a part of the year, which is inkeeping with Binford's model, by adding a notion of
cyclicity togroup movements.B eatrice Collignon (1996) has made a detailed study of the hu-man
geography of the Canadian Inuit in which she representsschematically the mental cartography of one
of these groups (Fig. 2).The knowledge they have of their environment may be representedby a series
of places linked by pathways. It does not matter if all theplaces are known personally by everybody,
or only by narratives,real or mythical. Every individual, according to his/her age group,experience
and social status, builds his/her own mental cartog-raphy, but the scheme is shared by every member
of the group,creating an inter-subjectivity that becomes an integral part of thelifeworld of everyone
(Lebenswelt according to Husserl's phenom-enology; see Zelic, 2008). It is worth noting that other
groups cantemporarily occupy some of these places. Thus, these virtual mapsreveal an exchange
network.The pattern of nodes and links is also reminiscent of the“songlines”or dreaming-tracks of
the Australian aborigines, whichrelate myths with paths and constitute virtual maps
connectingdistant groups over immense spaces. The whole community sharesthe same principle, but
each group holds only a part of the story which is another way to connect them.The necessity of
exchanges among hunter-gatherers is welldocumented by American anthropologists who show the
inter-weaving of networks at different scales (Fitzhugh et al., 2011)(Fig. 3). At the local scale, a
network brings together a small numberof residential bands that are strongly connected, most often
bykinship relations. At this level, the flow of information is intenseand the individuals are directly
involved with each other. At theregional scale, connections between groups are much looser andthe
flow of information is largely reduced. At this level, groups areinvolved as such and it is no longer
primarily individual-to-individual. Periodic gatherings allow people to share not only resources and
technical innovations, but also symbols and artisticpractices. These gatherings contribute to
strengthening the feelingsof membership in a community.Finally, there is a third level, supra-
regional, with still looser ormore fluid connections. These exchanges at great distance shouldbe very
rare, but they are essential to maintaining a flow of infor-mation between distant groups, particularly
when the environ-ment is hostile and resources are unpredictable.We should keep in mind that the
size of the networks is a crucialparameter for the development of hunter-gatherer societies. If theyare
too small, many innovations will not be passed on and can belost. Consequently, all the factors that
can influence this size willhave immediate consequences.We will see that these three types of
exchange networks alreadyexisted in the Upper Paleolithic using data and information fromthe
manifestations of varied images and artistic practices.3. Upper Paleolithic exchange networks in
western EuropeLocal network. Let us start with an example of a network oflimited extent. We find

35
in two sites of the early Middle Magdale-nian, barely 35 km from each other (Angles-sur-l’Anglin
and LaMarche, Vienne, France), a very original graphic motif on a specifictype of object. These are
horse incisors on which was engraved atriangle filled with a lattice so that the set could remind one
of apubic triangle (Mazi ere and Buret, 2010). Sometimes what could betaken as a pudendal cleft is
indicated. It is characteristic of a verylocalized area because more than one hundred objects with
thisdesign have been found in these two sites and only two exampleshave been found elsewhere:
one at Montgaudier (Charente) andone at Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne), both within 150 km (Fig.
4).However, this limited distribution around a local area does notmean that these people lived in
isolation and had no relations withtheir neighbors. On the contrary, the sites of the Vienne
departmentshow affinities, at the same period, with other sites in southwestFrance up to 200 km
away (departments of the Charente, Dordogneand even Quercy). Thus, the sites of the Vienne
department and thepeople who occupied them were integrated, at least during theMiddle
Magdalenian, into a much vaster exchange network. Thisdemonstrates an important point: every
group receives contribu-tions from the community to which it belongs, which constitutesthe core
part of its cultural universe, but it must be recognizablewithin this community, and to this end, each
group developsidentity markers. These latter are not objects of exchange duringmeetings and this is
why they do not readily spread.Regional network. A second graphic example shows the exis-tence
of an exchange network at the scale of a region. This is a veryelaborate sign, made by two partially
stacked diamonds, sur-rounded by angular signs at the ends and two longitudinal lines.This sign is
too complex to think that it occurs from independent orfortuitous convergences. We are indubitably
faced with a phe-nomenon of spreading in a circle about 250 km in diameter,including at least seven
sites in the P erigord (La Madeleine), Quercy(Le Courbet), Languedoc (Bize) and the Pyrenees
(Lespugue, Lortet,Gourdan, Mas d’Azil) (Fig. 4). However, may we use this sign todraw the
geographical limits of a “symbolic territory”? Certainlynot, because other signs would show different
areas of distribution,which would overlap with this one or would include it totally andwould blur the
idea of a fixed territory (see examples below).Supra-regional network: “symbolic territories”…with
noterritorial meaning. Finally, there is a third type of exchangenetwork, the extension of which is so
vast that it is no longerpossible to speak of territories about them, because the size of theconcerned
areas widely exceeds what a human group can claim as“territory of supply”. The notion of exchange
network is particularlyuseful in this case because it overcomes the difficulties linked withthe
geographical limits of a “territory”.In most cases, a graphic design that occurs within a specific
andsomewhat delimited region, may be considered as being originallygenerated in that region as its
source region because of its abun-dance in the area. The discovery of a few “copies”located out of
thisspace is often considered as anecdotal and not archaeologicallyrelevant or to be simplyattributed
to formal convergence. However,there are so many examples of widespread distributions of
graphicimages at this supra-territorial scale that the hypothesis ofconvergence becomes untenable.
For instance, the accumulation ofparietal and portable artworks typical of the Pyrenees found
alongthe Cantabrian coast demonstrates that we are not dealing withexceptional events, but with a
set of cumulative data, enough toinvalidate the hypothesis of fortuitous convergences (Sauvet,
2014).These pseudo-convergences are better explained by the existenceof extended networks having
exercised a long-range cultural in-fluence during the Magdalenian.The multiplicity of cases showing
the cultural connections be-tween the southwest of France and the Cantabrian Region duringthe
Middle Magdalenian period (18,800e16,500 cal BP; Barshay-Szmidt et al., 2016) raises an
anthropological question that de-mands to be interpreted in terms of human geography.
Another example shows that the notion of “symbolic territory”has no geographical meaning contrary
to what the word “territory”implies. The domain of a motif that we think to have been confinedin a
restricted geographical area can be suddenly extended by anunexpected discovery. A dramatic
example was supplied recentlyby the decoration of “clovers”or “crow's feet”symmetrically ar-ranged
along the edges of half-round rods. This motif, because ofthe large number of known occurrences,
is considered to be typicalof the Middle Magdalenian in the Pyrenees . Again, a few cases are known
in Asturias,Spain (Cueto de la Mina, Las Caldas), but the discovery in 2012 of ahalf-round rod

36
presenting a strangely similar motif from the site of Valdavara (Galicia) more than 750 km from the
site of Mas d’Azil inthe Pyrenean region changes considerably the extent of the “territory” that was
previously assigned to the motif!
Hunter-gatherer groups occupy at any given moment a geographical space from which they draw
their subsistence, but they do not live in isolation: human beings need to communicate for material
and intellectual contingencies. Culture is a good to share, or at least to participate in, hence the
importance of exchange networks. The fundamental unit is the residential band, which occupiesmore
or less temporarily a supply territory. Every band assures the transmission and the apprenticeship of
the cultural, religious and artistic knowledge and develops its own group identifiers (identity
markers). On the scale of a small region, every band belongs to amore or less fluctuating network of
“neighborhoods”. At this level,other distinctive features are expected to appear, for instance regional
styles. On a larger regional scale, episodic meetings offer the possibilityof transfers and selective
borrowing. We have good reasons for considering these borrowings as selective, because cultural
filtersare active, such that some influences spread easily and some not so;for example, the negative
hand prints are largely spread in Franceand the Iberian Peninsula during the Gravettian period
(RipollL opez et al., 1999), whereas the feminine statuettes, also Gravet-tian, spread in Europe up
to the foothills of the Pyrenees, but aretotally absent in Spain.Finally on a supra-regional scale,
extensive phenomena of cul-tural unification can sometimes be observed, but they are
onlyperceptible by archaeologists, because they go far beyond the life-world experienced by the
actors.This way of examining human relations of the Upper Paleolithicin terms of exchange
networks rather than in terms of territorieshas an undeniable heuristic power, because it allows us to
explainthe diffusion and distribution of symbolic motifs at various scales.In particular, the exchange
networks account for the existentialcontradiction that humans have to solve permanently in their re-
lations with their fellow people. On one hand, individuals mustinvent means to identify themselves
in order to express their dif-ference with respect to the neighbors. These distinctive traits canbe
individual marks such as tattoos, scars and corporal paintings orcollective marks such as emblems
or blazons used to differentiatethe whole group. This explains why many signs may be regarded
asidentity markers or “ethnic”markers (Leroi-Gourhan, 1981),sometimes improperly considered as
“territorial”markers.Conversely, prehistoric humans do extend outwards from theirface-face group
(Gamble, 1998, 2013) to meet their fellow people onmany occasions and to communicate and
exchange with them for practical reasons linked to the acquisition of certain resources orbecause of
societal rules such as exogamy. Once suitably identifiedt hanks to their identity markers, humans are
able to share not only techniques and know-how, but ideas, values and symbols. Thus theexchange
networks become the founding structure of a common culture. As any human institution, the
exchange networks arefluctuating and the situation during the Upper Paleolithic seems tohave
evolved between periods of withdrawal sometimes close toautarky and phases of expansion up to
embracing the whole Eu-ropean space.
The behavioural implications of this basic hunter-gatherer economic system were simple but important:

1. If hunter-gatherers do move around a lot to get food, the amount of personal property has to be kept low,
and this constraint on property ownership also keeps wealth differentials low, ensuring an egalitarian social
order.

2. The nature of the food supply keeps hunter-gatherer groups small in size—normally under 50 persons—
as larger concentrations rapidly exhaust local resources and cause members to disperse into smaller foraging
units.

3. Hunter-gatherer groups do not maintain exclusive rights to resources: fluid and flexible situations are the
norm due to the waxing and waning of inter-group obligations, and widespread visiting and guesting. This
ensures reciprocal access to food resources, with this open-access system underpinned by inter-group marriage.

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 4. Production of food surpluses is not common. Everybody knows where food resources are located and so the
environment itself is the store house. Also, each person can monitor the movement of others, so there is no fear
that these resources will be secretly appropriated.

5. Frequent visiting prevents particular groups from becoming too attached to specific territories, and a lack
of personal and collective property means that mobility is not impeded. Conflict is easily resolved by group
fissioning and reformation into new social units.
Man the hunter was also important on another level because it started to overturn lingering
assumptions that all foragers were typically people clinging on the brink of starvation, with an
inadequate and unreliable food supply forcing them to move around frequently to find scarce
resources. The earlier consensus propagated by many nineteenth-century social evolutionary
thinkers was that the hunting and gathering lifestyle was, by its very essence, dictated by the
economics of scarcity.

A debate concerns how much human foragers have affected the environment in which they
lived. For a long time it was assumed that humans had little effect on the rest of nature
until they developed agriculture.
Since the 1960s, scientists have questioned this assumption. They have pointed to two
indications that foragers did make a significant impact. For one thing, archaeologists have
found evidence that foragers set fire to large areas of land. Presumably they did this to
drive animals out for killing and to promote the growth of fresh plants that would attract
animals and would provide food for gathering. Australian Aboriginal use of this practice
was given the name “firestick farming.” These fires turned scrubland into grassland and
suppressed some species, altering the environment.
In addition, whenever humans migrated into new parts of the world, a wave of extinctions
of other large animals occurred. In North and South America about 75 percent of the
animals weighing more than 100 pounds went extinct within a couple of thousand years
after humans arrived. These animals included mastodons, camels, horses, and saber-
toothed tigers. In Australia, where humans are thought to have arrived about 40–60,000
years ago, similar extinctions occurred roughly 30,000 years ago. The rate of extinction
was about 85 percent and included giant kangaroos and marsupial lions. In Eurasia the
extinctions occurred more gradually and included mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and
giant elk. While debate continues, it may be that a combination of changing climate,
human hunting, and other changes brought about by humans may have done these large
animals in.
Traditionally, archaeologists and anthropologists have thought that men did the hunting in foraging societies, while
women did the gathering. However, recent studies have challenged this view. People studying apes often point out that
primate females can provide for themselves and their offspring, without male assistance. Among many current foraging
societies, men and women are flexible about who hunts small birds and animals, and, in some cultures, the hunting
and gathering roles are exchanged. The current view holds that past foragers had flexible gender roles, depending on
individual skills, knowledge, and the local environment.

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