Popular concepts of hunter/gatherers, especially prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have us believe that they all lived a meagre hand-to-mouth existence, clad in sketchy skins, living in caves, pulling women around by the hair, and grunting to communicate. That’s a caricature to be sure. Hunter/gatherers are defined as groups that got their food from nature. They did not farm or cultivate foods or raise animals for food. They certainly had hard times on occasion, but most “simple” hunter/gatherers only spent 2-5 hours a day getting and preparing food. They spent the rest of their time sleeping, lounging, socializing, gambling, and preparing rituals. They didn’t have many luxuries, but then, they didn’t have many needs either. Their language and social relations were just as complex as yours, if not more so. They did tend to move their camps around a lot due to the limited food that they could find in any one area. And because the moves were generally on foot, they had to carry everything that they needed with them: clothing, water, food, spears, digging sticks, personal things, stones for tools, babies, fire, and carrying bags.
Shelters got made in new locations by the 30 to 50 people who constituted a band, or a community, maybe 6-10 families. It was a small, intimate world in which everyone shared food, tools and possessions. It was about as egalitarian as people get between families. Most Australian Aboriginal communities where I worked were like this, as were native groups in the Tierra del Fuego, the Kalahari Desert, the North American subarctic, and the Great Basin.
While this simple type of society was probably the exclusive kind of society that existed for the first 2,000,000 years plus of human existence, a ground shift occurred sometime in the last two percent of our time on earth. Prehistorians argue about when this occurred, but I am convinced that the first full expression of these groups as “complex hunter/gatherers” occurred about 40,000-10,000 years ago in Ice Age Europe, a time called the “Upper Paleolithic” or “Later Old Stone Age.” What happened? People still lived by hunting and gathering and fishing, but they lived in semi-permanent villages with hundreds or over a thousand people. They owned private property and had wealth. There were poor and rich, powerful and weak–some groups even had slaves. They competed for wealth and status and sometimes warred. Historically, they were the people of the Northwest Coast, of the keys in Florida, the Ainu of Japan, and a few others. Why all this changed among complex hunter/gatherers will be a topic for another time.
