Lee, R.B. & R. Daly. Eds. 2004. The Cambridge encyclopedia of hunters and gatherers. – Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Abstract

The way human's function, physically and mentally, has essentially been shaped in the time that our subsistence was based on gathering and hunting. It is worthy of note that we became fully bipedal and as intelligent as we are with all our cultural flexibility amid grasses, trees, herbivores and carnivores, not by sitting behind a computer. As the two editors, Lee & Daly remark in the introduction of this encyclopedia (p. 1): “The world's hunting and gathering peoples – the Arctic Inuit, Aboriginal Australians, Kalahari San, and similar groups – represent the oldest and perhaps most successful human adaptation. Until 12,000 years ago virtually all humanity lived as hunters and gatherers”. Taking Homo sapiens idaltu from Ethiopia, dated between 160 000 en 154 000 BP, as our oldest fossil representative, our species lived more than 90 % of its time as hunters and gatherers. Good change that our ancestors started to live as hunters and gatherers, with a shift to more meat in their diet, about 1.7 myr ago, which would mean that the genus Homo has survived by this mode of life about 99 % of its evolutionary history. Considering the fact that also chimpanzees hunt (Goodall, 1986) it is even reasonable to suggest, as is done Smith (p. 384), that: “The idea of hunting and foraging was probably already embedded in the social life of our non–human primate ancestors before they walked on two legs”. Read more...