Hunter-gatherer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hunter-gatherers have existed for at least 1.8 million years, which means farming, by comparison, is a very recent experiment. Homo erectus was already foraging and hunting long before Homo sapiens ever appeared. For more than 90 percent of all human prehistory, this was how people lived. Not as a primitive default waiting to be improved upon, but as a successful competitive adaptation in the natural world.

  When ancient North Eurasians pushed into the extreme cold of the mammoth steppes of Siberia, they were hunter-gatherers. When people first crossed a land bridge connecting Asia to North America, during the era Beringia existed, they were hunter-gatherers. When major waves of extinction swept through Australia and the Americas, coinciding with the spread of modern humans, those humans were hunter-gatherers.

  Yet for most of the time people have studied this way of life, they have misunderstood it. Thomas Hobbes described life before civilization as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" in 1651. By 1966, a group of anthropologists at a conference in Washington were ready to challenge that claim head-on. What they found forced a rethinking of what it means to be affluent, to be equal, and to be human.

  The questions this documentary sets out to answer are not simple ones. Were hunter-gatherers truly egalitarian? Did women hunt? Were they affluent or impoverished? And why, even after agriculture swept the globe, do some communities still choose to forage?

• 2. Origins and Spread

  ›

  Homo erectus, roughly 1.8 million years ago, began the long foraging career of the human lineage. Homo sapiens joined the record some 3,000 years ago and carried the practice into every corner of the world. During the 1970s, Lewis Binford proposed that early humans in the Lower Paleolithic were not hunters at all but scavengers, collecting carcasses from predators or natural deaths while living among forests and woodlands that supplied eggs, nuts, fruits, and seafood.

  The archaeological record grew more complicated between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago, when some bands began to specialize. Rather than sampling a wide range of resources, they concentrated on a narrower selection of often larger game. New tools came with that shift: fishing nets, bone harpoons, hooks. Specialization was not a retreat but an innovation.

  The Late Pleistocene brought dramatic change. Modern humans spread beyond Africa, and as they reached Australia, major extinctions began approximately 50,000 years ago. In the Americas, a similar wave struck around 15,000 years ago, coinciding with the arrival of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who had followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna through ice-free corridors between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. Some may have also traveled down the Pacific coast, by foot or by primitive boats, reaching as far south as Monte Verde in Chile.

  These early Paleo-Indian bands across the Americas shared a common style of stone tool production, with knapping techniques identifiable across the continent. Individual bands consisted of approximately 25 to 50 members of an extended family, highly mobile and widely dispersed across the Great Plains, east to the Gaspe Peninsula, and south through South America.

• 3. The Egalitarian Question

  ›

  At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore argued that egalitarianism was a central feature of nomadic hunter-gatherer life. Their reasoning was practical: mobility requires keeping possessions to a minimum, which means no single person can accumulate a surplus. Territorial boundaries and even the makeup of bands stayed fluid rather than fixed.

  At that same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper called "Notes on the Original Affluent Society." He challenged the Hobbesian picture directly, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours than members of industrial society and still ate well. Their affluence, Sahlins argued, came not from abundance but from modest desires. In 1996, Ross Sackett tested this claim with two meta-analyses: one drawing on 102 time-allocation studies, the other on 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies worked on average about 6.5 hours a day, while people in agricultural and industrial societies averaged 8.8 hours a day.

  Critics responded that Sahlins had counted only the time spent hunting and gathering, leaving out firewood collection, food preparation, and other labor. Others pointed to high infant mortality, frequent disease, and perennial warfare as evidence that life was far from easy.

  A 2010 paper tried to measure inequality directly. Researchers estimated that the average Gini coefficient among hunter-gatherers was 0.25, equivalent to Denmark's coefficient in 2007. Wealth also passed between generations: within their communities, wealthier hunter-gatherers were more likely to have children who were similarly wealthy. The researchers concluded that while hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than modern industrial societies, describing them as living in a state of egalitarian primitive communism was inaccurate. Karl Marx had used exactly that phrase to describe this way of life.

  The San people, or "Bushmen," of southern Africa demonstrate what egalitarianism looks like in practice. Their social customs strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and actively encourage sharing of food and material goods. The contrast with chimpanzees, one of humanity's two closest primate relatives, is stark. Chimpanzees form hierarchies dominated by alpha males, and paleoanthropologists have argued that resisting domination may have been a key driver in the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, and social organization.

• 4. Women Who Hunted

  ›

  In 2018, the remains of a female hunter were discovered at Wilamaya Patjxa, in the Puno District of Peru. She had been buried with a toolkit of projectile points and animal processing implements, and she was approximately 9,000 years old. The find prompted a 2020 study that examined 27 identified burials of hunter-gatherers of known sex who were buried with hunting tools. Eleven were female, sixteen were male. Accounting for uncertainties, the researchers estimated that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of big-game hunters may have been female.

  This challenged a long-standing assumption in anthropology: that women gathered while men hunted. A 1986 study had found that most hunter-gatherer societies had a symbolically structured sexual division of labor. But a 2023 study, reviewing research on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies stretching from the 1800s to the present, found that women hunted in 79 percent of those societies. An attempted verification of this study found methodological problems that the researchers said biased the results, arguing that the analysis did not contradict the established body of evidence for gendered divisions of labor.

  The picture that emerges is varied rather than uniform. Among the Ju'/hoansi people of Namibia, women help men track quarry. Among the Australian Martu, both men and women hunt, but differently. Men pursue larger animals like kangaroo, in part for political reasons, as a form of what the source calls "competitive magnanimity." Women target smaller game such as lizards, prioritizing a steady food supply for children and building cooperative relationships with other women.

  Megan Biesele's study of the southern African Ju/'hoan, published as "Women Like Meat," documented women's participation in hunting life in detail. A 2006 study suggested that this kind of sexual division of labor may have been one of the organizational innovations that gave Homo sapiens an advantage over the Neanderthals, enabling the spread out of Africa.

• 5. Food, Fat, and Survival

  ›

  Fat was not an indulgence for hunter-gatherers but a necessity. Lean meat presented a genuine health risk. Consuming too much of it could cause protein poisoning, and in extreme cases, death. A diet high in protein and low in other macronutrients forces the body to use protein as energy, potentially resulting in protein deficiency. This danger intensified when animals entered lean seasons and burned through their own fat reserves.

  As distance from the equator increased, plant foods became less important in the diet and aquatic resources grew more critical. In cold, heavily forested environments, both edible plants and large game were scarce, and hunter-gatherers turned to fish and marine life. But aquatic resources came with costs of their own: boats and fishing technology were required, and this may have slowed their intensive use in prehistory. Marine food probably did not become prominent in the diet until the Late Stone Age in southern Africa and the Upper Paleolithic in Europe.

  Where plant and fish resources were both scarce, hunter-gatherers traded. Tropical foragers who had protein surpluses but lacked carbohydrates exchanged meat with horticulturalists who had the opposite problem. Trading could be the most cost-effective way to balance nutritional needs.

  One group, the Chumash, achieved what the source records as the highest population density of any known hunter-gatherer society, with an estimated 21.6 persons per square mile. The reason was environmental richness. The Osipovka culture, which existed between 14,000 and 10,300 years ago, settled permanently in a fish-rich environment, making them among the earliest known examples of a sedentary hunter-gatherer community. Life expectancy in these societies, according to estimates by researchers Gurven and Kaplan, fell between 21 and 37 years. Around 57 percent of hunter-gatherers reached the age of 15, and of those, 64 percent went on to reach 45. About 70 percent of deaths came from disease, 20 percent from violence or accidents, and 10 percent from degenerative conditions.

• 6. Persistence and Displacement

  ›

  Agriculture did not eliminate hunter-gatherers all at once. In Western Eurasia, farming and metallurgical societies gradually displaced them, but dense forests served as a refuge until Bronze and Iron Age societies fully overcame them. In many other parts of the world, farming groups or pastoralists displaced or conquered foragers who did not adopt cultivation.

  Yet the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was never a one-way process. Scholars have argued that foraging remained an adaptive strategy, one that agriculturalists could return to when environmental stress made farming unviable. The line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies has always been blurrier than it appears, especially in the 10,000 years since farming spread widely.

  Some groups held on not through resistance alone but through geography. The Pila Nguru, or Spinifex people, of Western Australia occupy land in the Great Victoria Desert that proved unsuitable for European agriculture and even pastoralism. The Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean have repelled all attempts at contact and maintained independent existence into the present. The Savanna Pume of Venezuela live in a region inhospitable to large-scale economic development; they hunt and gather, and supplement their diet with a modest amount of manioc horticulture that does not replace foraging but supports it.

  Scholar Kat Anderson has pointed out that the term "hunter-gatherer" is reductive when applied to Native Americans, because it implies they made no lasting mark on the landscapes they inhabited. California Natives, whom Anderson examines specifically, practiced pruning, weeding, sowing, burning, and selective harvesting. These were not passive interactions with nature. California Indians, as the source notes, view wilderness in a negative light, seeing it as what happens when humans lose their knowledge of how to care for the natural world, and the plants and animals retreat from human connection. The San, the Pume, and the Sentinelese continue aspects of this way of life today, each shaped by millennia of specific, local knowledge that no outside account has fully captured.