The Current Status of the World’s Hunting and Gathering Peoples

Abstract

Ten thousand years ago the entire population of the earth subsisted by hunting and gathering, as their ancestors had done since the dawn of culture. This chapter aims to enumérates and characterizes the regions of the world where peoples with hunting and gathering economies survived long enough to be studied by modern ethnographers, with special reference to those groups amongst whom fundamental field research may still be possible. Several groups of peoples who subsist primarily by hunting depend largely on domestic animals which they ride in pursuing or surrounding their game. Various other peoples who lack both agriculture and large domestic animals depend not so much on hunting and gathering as on fishing, shellfishing, or the pursuit of aquatic animals. Several participants in the symposium, notably Crocker with reference to the Ge, characterized such incipient agriculturists as having a hunting-gathering ideology.

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