HUNTING AND GATHERING SOCIETY

any human society that depends on hunting, fishing, or the gathering of wild plants for subsistence. Until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. There have been many differences between them: some specialized in hunting big game, in trapping smaller animals, in fishing along coasts or in lakes or rivers, or in shellfish gathering; while others depended mostly on gathering wild vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and berries. Many peoples practiced hunting or gathering in some combination with agriculture or animal husbandry. In pre-Columbian North America, for instance, the Indians of the Great Plains were pure hunters and food gatherers, those of eastern North America were hunter-gatherers who secondarily practiced agriculture, and those of the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America were agriculturists who supplemented their diet by hunting and gathering. In the Old World at the same date, pure hunters and gatherers dominated only Australia and a few isolated areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. The hunting and gathering economy demands an extensive land area; it has been estimated that people who depend on such methods must have available from 18 to 1,300 square km (7 to 500 square miles) of land per capita, according to the local environmental conditions. Permanent villages or towns are rarely possible, because the group is forced to move whenever the local supply of food begins to be exhausted. Possessions are limited to what can be carried from one camp to another, and housing usually consists of simple huts, tents, or lean-tos made of plant materials or the skins of animals. Social groups themselves must necessarily be small, since only a limited number of people can congregate together without quickly exhausting the food resources of the locality; such groups are typically either individual family units or a number of related families collected together in a band. Where both hunting and gathering are practiced, the men usually hunt while the women gather plants and do most domestic chores. A sedentary life-style is possible for hunter-gatherers, however, where food supplies are unusually abundant and reliable and can be stored; the Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast, for instance, relied on flour made from acorns and on smoke-dried salmon for food, and achieved both permanent villages and high population densities. The beginning of the Holocene Epoch about 8000 BC was marked by the emergence of settled agriculture and (subsequently) of animal domestication in southwest Asia and Meso-America. Hunter-gatherer societies persisted in other inhabited areas of the world but gradually declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or converted them. This process continued into modern times, and the encroachment of civilization into remote areas has increasingly restricted the territory of the few remaining hunting and gathering peoples.