Short answers, pulled from the story.
Homo erectus began hunting and gathering approximately 1.8 million years ago. This subsistence strategy occupied at least 90 percent of human history, spanning from the emergence of early humans to the invention of agriculture.
Hunter-gatherer societies generally operated under an egalitarian social ethos that emphasized sharing and resisted hierarchy. Anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore noted that mobility required the minimization of material possessions, preventing any single member from accumulating surplus resources.
Women in many hunter-gatherer societies hunted small game and, in some cases, even participated in big-game hunting alongside men. A 2018 discovery of 9000-year-old remains of a female hunter at the Andean site of Wilamaya Patjxa in Peru suggests that female hunters may have comprised anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of big game hunters.
Adults in foraging and horticultural societies worked on average about 6.5 hours a day. Ross Sackett's meta-analyses found that people in agricultural and industrial societies worked on average 8.8 hours a day.
Evidence suggests that big-game hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into North America over a land bridge known as Beringia, which existed between 47,000 and 14,000 years ago. Around 18,500 to 15,500 years ago, these hunter-gatherers followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors.
Only a few contemporary societies of uncontacted people are still classified as hunter-gatherers, including the Pila Nguru of Western Australia, the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands, and the Savanna Pumé of Venezuela. These groups demonstrate that the transition to agriculture was not inevitable, and that some societies have managed to preserve aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the 21st century.