Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hunting and gathering began with Homo erectus approximately 1.8 million years ago. Homo sapiens adopted the practice from around 3,000 years ago. This means foraging accounts for at least 90 percent of all human prehistory.
Hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than modern industrial societies, but not equally so. A 2010 study estimated the average Gini coefficient among hunter-gatherers at 0.25, equivalent to Denmark in 2007, and found that wealth passed between generations within these communities.
A 2023 study found that women hunted in 79 percent of hunter-gatherer societies examined across records from the 1800s to the present. A 2020 study of ancient burials estimated that 30 to 50 percent of big-game hunters were female, prompted by the 2018 discovery of a 9,000-year-old female hunter buried with projectile points at Wilamaya Patjxa in the Puno District of Peru.
Adults in foraging and horticultural societies worked on average about 6.5 hours a day, according to Ross Sackett's 1996 meta-analyses of 102 time-allocation studies and 207 energy-expenditure studies. People in agricultural and industrial societies averaged 8.8 hours a day.
Researchers Gurven and Kaplan estimated life expectancy at birth between 21 and 37 years. Around 57 percent of hunter-gatherers reached age 15, and of those, 64 percent lived to age 45 or beyond. About 70 percent of deaths came from disease.
The Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands, the Pila Nguru (Spinifex people) of Western Australia's Great Victoria Desert, and the Savanna Pume of Venezuela all continue aspects of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The San of southern Africa also maintain foraging traditions, though many supplement with other food sources.