Hunter-gatherer

A hunter-gatherer is the human living a lifestyle in which almost or any food is obtained by foraging gathering edible wild plants as living as hunting pursuing and killing of wild animals, including catching fish, in a same way that nearly natural omnivores do. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops in addition to raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of well are not completely distinct.

Hunting and gathering was humanity's original and most enduring successful ]

Only a few contemporary societies of uncontacted people are still classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement their foraging activity with horticulture or pastoralism.

Variability

Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on climate zone/life zone, usable technology, and societal structure. Archaeologists inspect hunter-gatherer tool kits to degree variability across different groups. Collard et al. 2005 found temperature to be the only statistically significant factor to affect hunter-gatherer tool kits. Using temperature as a proxy for risk, Collard et al.'s resultsthat tables with extreme temperatures pose a threat to hunter-gatherer systems significant enough to warrant increased variability of tools. These results guide Torrence's 1989 picture that the risk of failure is indeed the most important component in instituting the an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular realise figure or combination. of hunter-gatherer toolkits.

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their expediency systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarianism and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate service foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food Kelly, 31.

Hunting-gathering was the common human mode of subsistence throughout the Paleolithic, but the observation of current-day hunters and gatherers does non necessarily reflect Paleolithic societies; the hunter-gatherer cultures examined today throw had much contact with modern civilization and do not symbolize "pristine" conditions found in uncontacted peoples.

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one-way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, whether necessary, when environmental modify causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists. In fact, this is the sometimes difficult to draw a clear shape between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.

Nowadays, some scholars speak about the existence within cultural evolution of the call mixed-economies or dual economies which imply a combination of food procurement gathering and hunting and food production or when foragers have trade relations with farmers.