0 Hunting and Gathering in himalayas

Hunting and Gathering

Anthropologists think that at the start of the last Ice Age, the human population of Earth was less than a million people. Their existence revolved around a style of living which still exists today, although it is gradually disappearing everywhere, by a combination of acculturation, economic, political and social pressures.

One should note that hunter-gatherers are so limited, in their way of life, by several factors. It may be only lack of knowhow or freedom and safety in settling or a need to maintain environmental sustainability. People who practice this way of life are defined as hunter-gatherers and it is often a transitory state in a society evolution due the its precarity.

Hunter-gatherers do not grow plants or raise animals for food. Instead, they practice a lifestyle in which the men go out to hunt wild animals every few days, while the women gather wild but edible plants and useful medicinal plants every few days. In any case animal domestication should not be excluded from the definition of a hunter-gatherer societies, but not as a very complex methodology in animals husbandry, even if they could also see those animals as a food resource. Dogs for instance seem to have been domesticated more than 18,000 years ago. Note that we are defining a frame of Neolithic Age societies (10,200 BC to 4,500 or 2,000 BC) not those that we may still define as hunter-gatherers today. By the end of the Neolithic, larger human societies had emerged.

In hunter-gatherer cultures; There is usually a very strong division of labor between the sexes though men may gather some plants, and women may do some hunting, the expectation is usually strong that women will stay close to a family's camp while the men go far afield in search of food.

Every few months, as these resources become scarce in one region, the people pack up their few belongings and move to a new location within their territory. Each family may have a territory of hundreds of square miles over which they may range quite broadly in the course of a year, living off of what the land produces. A hunter-gatherer family might have a dozen favorite campsites, with one on the seashore, one by a lake, one in the hills and one in the woods. Fish and shellfish form their seashore diet while they make baskets from marsh reeds; by the lake they may eat deer and make arrows and spears from nearby trees; in the hills they eat mountain goats and make stone tools from a deposit of obsidian; in the forest they eat birds and fill their baskets with nuts and fruits for the winter.

Hunter-gathering is a remarkably simple life, and it is the way of life practiced by humans and hominids since back into the Paleolithic age's earliest years, as near as modern scientists can agree. People tend to have very few possessions, because they are very mobile, and they have no animals to help them carry their gear from one place to another. A tent may be the most elaborate piece of equipment the whole family owns. Modern hunter-gatherer clans tend to have fairly long life expectancies, usually around 70 years of age; some modern developing societies do not have such long life spans as hunter-gatherers do.

Today we can only guess at the lifestyles of ancient hunter-gatherers, based on modern examples. Most hunter-gatherers live and travel in extended families of at least three generations -- grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, as well as children. Older children take care of the youngest and the oldest. The family has to take care of all the needs of all its members, because there is no larger society to take on the work of caring for the elderly or educating the littlest ones. Aunts help mothers watch the youngest children, and collect the necessary plants to keep the family fed and healthy; uncles help train young boys to hunt smaller animals, and to help on the hunts for larger game. The same was probably true of ancient hunter-gatherers, as well.

Additionally, anthropologists and historians speculate that hunter-gatherer families 20,000 years ago belonged to larger groups called tribes. Tribes are clusters of families bound together by common taboos and beliefs for social advantage. While families lived on their own most of the time, such an existence in an otherwise empty landscape would have been difficult, especially if every other family was potentially an enemy. Thus, some families that spoke the same or similar languages would form alliances with one another, by marrying their children into one another's bloodlines, and by trading luxury goods, and feasting together. As families became too large to live together, they would bud off into new extended families that remained attached to the old relationships with other families. Strangers who proved their usefulness and loyalty could also marry into these arrangements, giving them both protection and responsibility.

In this way, different families and peoples experimented with the most useful prohibitions, prescriptions and modalities for living in a complex world. The tribes formed a social network which made it possible for individuals to travel great distances in relative safety. However, tribes may have also led to conflict, as different tribes began competing for water, food and other resources. Tribes may have also become so large that they subdivided, with clans existing as groups of families within the larger tribes.

Clans and tribes also offered opportunities for leadership.It is believed that leadership of these tribes was reserved for men, especially due to inter-tribal violence for the preservation of territory. Within an extended family, the oldest adult usually has tremendous influence and receives the respect of his or her descendants, for living so long and the experience he has. Keeping in mind that in the Neolithic the medium life expectancy is 20 years. The eldest man ruled until his death. However, within a tribe issues other than age may be a factor in choosing a leader. Some tribes may have chosen the biggest and bravest as their leaders, while others may have chosen the wisest or the most clever. Many modern hunter-gatherer tribes, and presumably ancient tribes as well, gradually developed four types of leader: the big man, who was usually the most important hunter; the chief, who was usually an older man or woman who was respected because of years of experience; the medicine man or woman, or shaman, who worked with plants and minerals to cure the illnesses and injuries of the tribe; and the artisan, who was particularly skilled at manufacturing goods necessary to the tribe's survival such as spears, baskets or clothing.

The beginning of the Ice Age must have startled and surprised these leaders and their dependents and followers a great deal. Colder temperatures and ice probably killed some tribes completely. Others moved toward the equator, seeking warmer temperatures and easier living conditions. Some must have stayed near the ice and weathered the cold, changing their habits and patterns of living to accommodate the change in environment.

However, the end of the most recent Ice Age around 12,000 years ago, put even greater pressures on the tribes that survived than the beginning had. As temperatures and sea levels rose, the Earth experienced a substantial die-off of plant and animal types. Some historians blame this pattern of extinction on our earliest ancestors; others attribute it to rapid climate change unrelated to human activity. Neither side has a total lock on the truth at this point. There is no solid evidence to prove the debate either way.

What is true is that many tribes, particularly in areas that received little rainfall or where few animals lived to begin with, needed to find new food and medicine sources. Part of the reason for the search for new foods may have been not simply that old foods were running out, but that our post-Ice Age ancestors had developed a taste for new things, and had invented a custom called feasting.

Feasting[edit]

Imagine that it is a major festival at your house. All your relatives and some of your family's friends are coming over for dinner. Your parents have gone shopping for food several times over the last few days, and everyone is bringing a favorite dish to eat. Some of the foods that will be served are traditional; you have the same things every year at this time. Other foods are novelties -- no one except the person who brought it has ever tried it before, and you are all either eager, or nervous (or both!) to try it. If the new food is good, everyone wants to have seconds, there is none left over, and all the guests want the recipe. The guest who served the dish can be sure of a repeat invitation. A disgusting dish will still be there at the end of the night, and no one wants to keep the leftovers.

Prehistoric feasting was probably quite similar. Within a small family, the question of who was the leader was probably not disputed often: the kids were kids, the adults were adults, and the adults tended to listen to one person's opinion of what everyone should do. However, tribes were more capable of being influenced by outside factors. A good meal, with decorations and entertainment, was likely to sway an important decision one way or the other. The hosts of a good meal could show that their way of thinking was superior, because it allowed them to have access to extra food that fed and brought happiness to more people.

Where did all the extra food come from? Remember that, unlike your family, there is no market or grocery store for finding the ingredients of these celebrations. Every other day or so, the men and women of the tribe have to go out into wild countryside to find food, water, and medicines. How did they find enough time to find enough food to feed all those people, when they were already working hard to find enough food for the immediate family?

Anthropologists think that at the start of the last Ice Age, the human population of Earth was less than a million people. Their existence revolved around a style of living which still exists today, although it is gradually disappearing everywhere, by a combination of acculturation, economic, political and social pressures.

One should note that hunter-gatherers are so limited, in their way of life, by several factors. It may be only lack of knowhow or freedom and safety in settling or a need to maintain environmental sustainability. People who practice this way of life are defined as hunter-gatherers and it is often a transitory state in a society evolution due the its precarity.

Hunter-gatherers do not grow plants or raise animals for food. Instead, they practice a lifestyle in which the men go out to hunt wild animals every few days, while the women gather wild but edible plants and useful medicinal plants every few days. In any case animal domestication should not be excluded from the definition of a hunter-gatherer societies, but not as a very complex methodology in animals husbandry, even if they could also see those animals as a food resource. Dogs for instance seem to have been domesticated more than 18,000 years ago. Note that we are defining a frame of Neolithic Age societies (10,200 BC to 4,500 or 2,000 BC) not those that we may still define as hunter-gatherers today. By the end of the Neolithic, larger human societies had emerged.

In hunter-gatherer cultures; There is usually a very strong division of labor between the sexes though men may gather some plants, and women may do some hunting, the expectation is usually strong that women will stay close to a family's camp while the men go far afield in search of food.

Every few months, as these resources become scarce in one region, the people pack up their few belongings and move to a new location within their territory. Each family may have a territory of hundreds of square miles over which they may range quite broadly in the course of a year, living off of what the land produces. A hunter-gatherer family might have a dozen favorite campsites, with one on the seashore, one by a lake, one in the hills and one in the woods. Fish and shellfish form their seashore diet while they make baskets from marsh reeds; by the lake they may eat deer and make arrows and spears from nearby trees; in the hills they eat mountain goats and make stone tools from a deposit of obsidian; in the forest they eat birds and fill their baskets with nuts and fruits for the winter.

Hunter-gathering is a remarkably simple life, and it is the way of life practiced by humans and hominids since back into the Paleolithic age's earliest years, as near as modern scientists can agree. People tend to have very few possessions, because they are very mobile, and they have no animals to help them carry their gear from one place to another. A tent may be the most elaborate piece of equipment the whole family owns. Modern hunter-gatherer clans tend to have fairly long life expectancies, usually around 70 years of age; some modern developing societies do not have such long life spans as hunter-gatherers do.

Today we can only guess at the lifestyles of ancient hunter-gatherers, based on modern examples. Most hunter-gatherers live and travel in extended families of at least three generations -- grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, as well as children. Older children take care of the youngest and the oldest. The family has to take care of all the needs of all its members, because there is no larger society to take on the work of caring for the elderly or educating the littlest ones. Aunts help mothers watch the youngest children, and collect the necessary plants to keep the family fed and healthy; uncles help train young boys to hunt smaller animals, and to help on the hunts for larger game. The same was probably true of ancient hunter-gatherers, as well.

Additionally, anthropologists and historians speculate that hunter-gatherer families 20,000 years ago belonged to larger groups called tribes. Tribes are clusters of families bound together by common taboos and beliefs for social advantage. While families lived on their own most of the time, such an existence in an otherwise empty landscape would have been difficult, especially if every other family was potentially an enemy. Thus, some families that spoke the same or similar languages would form alliances with one another, by marrying their children into one another's bloodlines, and by trading luxury goods, and feasting together. As families became too large to live together, they would bud off into new extended families that remained attached to the old relationships with other families. Strangers who proved their usefulness and loyalty could also marry into these arrangements, giving them both protection and responsibility.

In this way, different families and peoples experimented with the most useful prohibitions, prescriptions and modalities for living in a complex world. The tribes formed a social network which made it possible for individuals to travel great distances in relative safety. However, tribes may have also led to conflict, as different tribes began competing for water, food and other resources. Tribes may have also become so large that they subdivided, with clans existing as groups of families within the larger tribes.

Clans and tribes also offered opportunities for leadership.It is believed that leadership of these tribes was reserved for men, especially due to inter-tribal violence for the preservation of territory. Within an extended family, the oldest adult usually has tremendous influence and receives the respect of his or her descendants, for living so long and the experience he has. Keeping in mind that in the Neolithic the medium life expectancy is 20 years. The eldest man ruled until his death. However, within a tribe issues other than age may be a factor in choosing a leader. Some tribes may have chosen the biggest and bravest as their leaders, while others may have chosen the wisest or the most clever. Many modern hunter-gatherer tribes, and presumably ancient tribes as well, gradually developed four types of leader: the big man, who was usually the most important hunter; the chief, who was usually an older man or woman who was respected because of years of experience; the medicine man or woman, or shaman, who worked with plants and minerals to cure the illnesses and injuries of the tribe; and the artisan, who was particularly skilled at manufacturing goods necessary to the tribe's survival such as spears, baskets or clothing.

The beginning of the Ice Age must have startled and surprised these leaders and their dependents and followers a great deal. Colder temperatures and ice probably killed some tribes completely. Others moved toward the equator, seeking warmer temperatures and easier living conditions. Some must have stayed near the ice and weathered the cold, changing their habits and patterns of living to accommodate the change in environment.

However, the end of the most recent Ice Age around 12,000 years ago, put even greater pressures on the tribes that survived than the beginning had. As temperatures and sea levels rose, the Earth experienced a substantial die-off of plant and animal types. Some historians blame this pattern of extinction on our earliest ancestors; others attribute it to rapid climate change unrelated to human activity. Neither side has a total lock on the truth at this point. There is no solid evidence to prove the debate either way.

What is true is that many tribes, particularly in areas that received little rainfall or where few animals lived to begin with, needed to find new food and medicine sources. Part of the reason for the search for new foods may have been not simply that old foods were running out, but that our post-Ice Age ancestors had developed a taste for new things, and had invented a custom called feasting.

Feasting[edit]

Imagine that it is a major festival at your house. All your relatives and some of your family's friends are coming over for dinner. Your parents have gone shopping for food several times over the last few days, and everyone is bringing a favorite dish to eat. Some of the foods that will be served are traditional; you have the same things every year at this time. Other foods are novelties -- no one except the person who brought it has ever tried it before, and you are all either eager, or nervous (or both!) to try it. If the new food is good, everyone wants to have seconds, there is none left over, and all the guests want the recipe. The guest who served the dish can be sure of a repeat invitation. A disgusting dish will still be there at the end of the night, and no one wants to keep the leftovers.

Prehistoric feasting was probably quite similar. Within a small family, the question of who was the leader was probably not disputed often: the kids were kids, the adults were adults, and the adults tended to listen to one person's opinion of what everyone should do. However, tribes were more capable of being influenced by outside factors. A good meal, with decorations and entertainment, was likely to sway an important decision one way or the other. The hosts of a good meal could show that their way of thinking was superior, because it allowed them to have access to extra food that fed and brought happiness to more people.

Where did all the extra food come from? Remember that, unlike your family, there is no market or grocery store for finding the ingredients of these celebrations. Every other day or so, the men and women of the tribe have to go out into wild countryside to find food, water, and medicines. How did they find enough time to find enough food to feed all those people, when they were already working hard to find enough food for the immediate family?