ATGE5054 The Engineer in Society Hunter-Gatherer Society.

A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either. Between 5-80% of the food is obtained by gathering. History The earliest humans probably lived primarily on scavenging, not actual hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in mixed habitats which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals themselves for meat, they used carcasses of large animals killed by other predators or carcasses from animals that died by natural causes. Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, and from its appearance some 0.2 million years ago by Homo sapiens. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago and after this was replaced only gradually with the spread of the Neolithic Revolution. Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers bands began to specialize - concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of (often larger than had previously been hunted) game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools like fishing nets and hooks and bone harpoons. Habitat and population Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile, given their reliance upon the ability of a given natural environment to provide sufficient resources in order to sustain their population and the variable availability of these resources owing to local climatic and seasonal conditions. Individual band societies tend to be small in number (10-30 individuals), but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group (100 or more) when resources are abundant. In a few places where the environment is especially productive, such as that of the Pacific Northwest coast or Jomon-era Japan, hunter-gatherers are able to settle permanently. Hunter-gatherer settlements may be permanent, temporary or some combination of the two, depending upon the mobility of the community. Mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available. Social and economic structure

Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures. This might have been more pronounced in the more mobile societies, which generally are not able to store surplus food. They never stayed in a place for more than a week. Thus, full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies. In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well. Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership. Violence in hunter-gatherer societies is usually caused by grudges and vendettas rather than for territory or economic benefit. A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an extremely common phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide, but there are a few documented exceptions to this general pattern. A study done on the Aeta people of the Philippines states: "About 85% of Philippine Aeta women hunt and they hunt the same quarry as men. Aeta women hunt in groups and with dogs, and have a 31% success rate as opposed to 17% for men. Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men: mixed hunting groups have a full 41% success rate among the Aeta." It was also found among the Ju hoansi people of Namibia that women helped the men during hunting by helping them track down quarry. Moreover, recent archaeological research done by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that the sexual division of labor did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic and developed relatively recently in human history. The sexual division of labor may have arisen to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently. It would, therefore, be an over-generalization to say that men always hunt and women always gather. At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven Devous suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition. Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies. From the above description of hunter-gatherer society, deduce a. b. the social characteristics of a typical hunter-gatherer society. the technologies that they possess and explain how this is tied to the characteristics of that society.

c.

suggest what technology they will have to acquire if they are to change certain undesired characteristics of their society.