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A hunter-gatherer or forager[1] society is a nomadic society in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species. Anthropologists have remarked that the term foraging is a more appropriate description of the predominant food source for most non-agricultural groups: Gathering is a far more important source of food than is hunting for the majority of non-agricultural societies, according to Richard Borshay Lee. Foraging[2] was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo. As The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers says: "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans lived this way."[3] Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers have been displaced by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming and/or keeping animals. |
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