Shark Kills Kayaker in Attack off Maui

HONOLULU December 3, 2013 (AP)

By JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER Associated Press

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A kayak fisherman died Monday after a shark attack off Maui, local officials said.

Maui County Ocean Safety officials received a report that a shark attacked a man fishing in a kayak between Maui and Molokini, a small island less than 3 miles off the southwest coast of Maui that's popular for diving and snorkeling.

Maui County police identified the man as Patrick Briney, 57, of Stevenson, Wash.

The shark bit his dangling foot while he fished with artificial lures to attract baitfish, a news release from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources said.

His fishing partner in another kayak tied a tourniquet on the man and sought help from a nearby charter tour boat. The boat took them to shore, and the man was then taken to a hospital, the state said.

The kind of shark involved was not immediately available.

Though the attack happened far from shore, the state advised the public to stay out of the water a mile north and a mile south of Makena State Recreation Area in southwest Maui.

There have been eight shark attacks near Maui this year and 13 statewide. On Friday, a woman suffered nonfatal injuries in a Maui attack.

"We are not sure why these bites are occurring more frequently than normal, especially around Maui," said department Chairman William Aila Jr. "That's why we are conducting a two-year study of shark behavior around Maui that may give us better insights."

Over the last 20 years, Hawaii has averaged about four unprovoked shark incidents per year, the state said.

In August, a German tourist died a week after losing her arm in a shark attack. Jana Lutteropp, 20, was snorkeling up to 100 yards off a beach in southwest Maui when the shark bit off her right arm.

Before Lutteropp's death, the last shark attack fatality in Hawaii was in 2004, when a tiger shark bit Willis McInnis' leg while he was surfing in Maui.

Isaac Brumaghim knows firsthand the dangers of kayak fishing, which he said is growing in popularity. He was fishing off Oahu's west coast in April when a camera mounted on his kayak captured footage of a 9-foot shark jumping up and chomping on the tuna he was reeling in.

Sharks are "an absolute danger, every single day," he said. "You have to respect the fact they can bite you at any time."

He said bait in the water can easily attract the animal.

"Just a little bit of blood, a little meat in the water, that's all you need," he said. "It's like dogs out there."

Satellite spots light show in the middle of the ocean

By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News 18 hours ago The Sideshow

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Those weird lights in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — what are they?

Are they an unstoppable force of electric underwater creatures swimming, slowly but steadily, toward the shore where they will flood our cities and force us all to watch "Finding Nemo" from now until the end of time?

Fortunately, no (for now). The lights, which were spotted using Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite, are actually a large collection of fishermen.

NASA explains, "There are no human settlements there, nor fires or gas wells. But there are an awful lot of fishing boats."

Yep, that's right, those lights that could easily be mistaken for a series of heavily populated islands are actually powerful lights on boats.

What exactly are the fishermen looking for? And why are they out blasting their high beams?

From NASA:

The night fishermen are hunting for Illex argentinus, a species of short-finned squid that forms the second largest squid fishery on the planet. The squid are found tens to hundreds of kilometers offshore from roughly Rio de Janeiro to Tierra del Fuego (22 to 54 degrees South latitude). They live 80 to 600 meters (250 to 2,000 feet) below the surface, feeding on shrimp, crabs, and fish. In turn, Illex are consumed by larger finfish, whales, seals, sea birds, penguins ... and humans.

Fishermen use the powerful lights, "generating as much as 300 kilowatts of light per boat," to draw the plankton and fish that the squid eat toward the surface. The squid then follow the food. Alas, it's the last meal for many.

Sexual division of labour

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

• 1 Behavioral ecological perspective
  • 1.1 Man the hunter vs. woman the gatherer
• 2 Hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of SDL
  • 2.1 Traditional hypothesis
    • 2.1.1 Provisioning household
  • 2.2 Alternative hypotheses
    • 2.2.1 "Show-Off" / Signaling hypothesis
  • 2.3 "The Victorian Period"
• 3 SDL and optimal foraging theory
• 4 Cooking and the sexual division of labor
• 5 Sexual division of labor and the evolution of sex differences
• 6 Significance: Why the sexual division of labor?
  • 6.1 Evolutionary perspective
• 7 See also
• 8 References

Behavioral ecological perspective

Man the hunter vs. woman the gatherer

See also: Women's work

Both men and women have the option of investing resources either to provision children or to have additional offspring based on life history theory. Males and females monitor costs and benefits of each alternative to maximize reproductive fitness;^[4] however, trade-off differences do exist between sexes. Females are likely to benefit most from parental effort because they are certain which offspring are theirs and have relatively few reproductive opportunities, each of which is relatively costly and risky. In contrast, males do not have an absolute certainty of paternity, but may have many more mating opportunities bearing relatively low costs and risks. Though not every hunter-gatherer population pinpoints females to gathering and males to hunting (most notably the Aeta^[5] and Ju'/hoansi^[6]), the norm of most current populations divide the roles of labor in this manner. Natural selection is more likely to favor male reproductive strategies that stress mating effort and female strategies that emphasize parental investment.^[4] As a result, women have been relegated to the low-risk task of gathering vegetation and underground storage organs that are rich in energy to provide for themselves and offspring.^[4] Since women provide a reliable source of caloric intake, men are able to afford a higher risk of failure by hunting animals.
This classic theory of natural selection positing a difference in male and female reproductive strategies has recently been reexamined, with an alternate theory being proposed that promiscuity was encouraged among women and men alike, causing uncertainty among males of the paternity of their offspring, allowing for group cooperation in raising all offspring due to the possibility that any child could be the descendant of a male, similar to observations of the closest relative of humans, the bonobo.^[7] Moreover, recent archaeological research done by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that the sexual division of labor did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 and 10,000 years ago) and developed relatively recently in human history. The sexual division of labor may have arisen to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently.^[8]

Hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of SDL

Traditional hypothesis

Provisioning household

The traditional explanation of the sexual division of labor finds that males and females cooperate within pair bonds by targeting different foods so that everyone in the household benefits.^[9] Females may target foods that do not conflict with reproduction and child care, while males will target foods that females do not gather, which will reduce variance in daily consumption and provide a broader diet for the family.^[9] Foraging specialization in particular food groups should increase skill level and thus foraging success rates for targeted foods.

Alternative hypotheses

"Show-Off" / Signaling hypothesis

The "show‐off" hypothesis proposes that men hunt to gain social attention and mating benefits by widely sharing game. This model proposes that hunting functions mainly to provide an honest signal of the underlying genetic quality of hunters, which later yields a mating advantage or social deference.^[10] Females tend to target the foods that are most reliable, while men tend to target difficult-to-acquire foods to "signal" their abilities and genetic quality. Hunting is thus viewed as a form of mating or male-male status competition, not familial provisioning.^[11] Recent studies on the Hadza have revealed that men hunt mainly to distribute food to their own families rather than sharing with other members of the community.^[12] This conclusion suggests evidence against hunting for signaling purposes.

"The Victorian Period"

The Victorian era that has been so closely examined by Sally Shuttleworth and company shed light on women during the Victorian era. They played dual roles and were expected to deliver with conviction in the aspects in which they were required to perform duties in and outside of the household. She states, "Two traditional tropes are here combined: Victorian medical textbooks demonstrated not only woman's biological fitness and adaptation to the sacred role of homemaker, but also her terrifying subjection to the forces of the body. At once angel and demon, woman came to represent both the civilizing power that would cleanse the male from contamination in the brutal world of the economic market and also the rampant, uncontrolled excesses of the material economy."^[13]

SDL and optimal foraging theory

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time.^[14] In other words, animals behave in such a way as to find, capture, and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The sexual division of labor provides an appropriate explanation as to why males forgo the opportunity to gather any items with caloric value- a strategy that would seem suboptimal from an energetic standpoint. The OFT suggests that the sexual division of labor is an adaptation that benefits the household; thus, foraging behavior of males will appear optimal at the level of the family.^[15] If a hunter-gatherer man does not rely on resources from others and passes up a food item with caloric value, it can be assumed that he is foraging at an optimal level. But, if he passes up the opportunity because it is a food that women routinely gather, then as long as men and women share their spoils, it will be optimal for men to forgo the collection and continue searching for different resources to complement the resources gathered by women.^[16]

Cooking and the sexual division of labor

The emergence of cooking in early Homo may have created problems of food theft from women while food was being cooked.^[17] As a result, females would recruit male partners to protect them and their resources from others. This concept, known as the theft hypothesis, accommodates an explanation as to why the labor of cooking is strongly associated with the status of women.^[17] Women are forced to gather and cook foods because they will not acquire food otherwise and access to resources is critical for their reproductive success.^[17] On the contrary, men do not gather because their physical dominance allows them to scrounge cooked foods from women. Thus, women's foraging and food preparation efforts allow men to participate in the high-risk, high-reward activities of hunting. Females, in turn, become increasingly sexually attractive as a means to exploit male interest in investing in her protection.^[17]

Sexual division of labor and the evolution of sex differences

Many studies investigating the spatial abilities of men and women have found no significant differences,^[18][19][20] though metastudies show a male advantage in mental rotation and assessing horizontality and verticality,^[21][22] and a female advantage in spatial memory.^[23][24] The sexual division of labor has been proposed as an explanation for these cognitive differences. This hypothesis argues that males needed the ability to follow prey over long distances and to accurately target their game with projectile technology, and, as a result, male specialization in hunting prowess would have spurred the selection for increased spatial and navigational ability. Similarly, the ability to remember the locations of underground storage organs and other vegetation would have led to an increase in overall efficiency and decrease in total energy expenditure since the time spent searching for food would decrease.^[25] Natural selection based on behaviors that increase hunting success and energetic efficiency would bear a positive influence on reproductive success. However, recent research suggests that the sexual division of labor developed relatively recently and that gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, contradicting the theory that each sex is naturally predisposed to different types of work.^[26]
The discussion of the division of gender roles have been an ongoing debate and Gerda Lerner quotes the philosopher Socrates to demonstrate that the idea of defined gender roles is patriarchal. It also identifies how men and women are capable of performing the same job descriptions with the exception of when it calls for anatomical differences, such as giving birth. "In Book V of the Republic, Plato—in the voice of Socrates—sets down the conditions for the training of the guardians, his elite leadership group. Socrates proposes that women should have the same opportunity as men to be trained as guardians. In support of this he offers a strong statement against making sex differences the basis for discrimination: if the difference [between men and women] consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to proof that a woman differs from a man in respect to the sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits.^[13]
He continues to add that with the same set of established resources such as education, training and teaching, it creates an atmosphere of equity which helps to further the cause of gender equality. "Socrates proposes the same education for boys and girls, freeing guardian women from housework and child-care. But this female equality of opportunity will serve a larger purpose: the destruction of the family. Plato's aim is to abolish private property, the private family, and with it self-interest in his leadership group, for he sees clearly that private property engenders class antagonism and disharmony. Therefore "men and women are to have a common way of life . . . —common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common. "^[13]
Some researchers, such as Cordelia Fine, argue that available evidence does not support a biological basis for gender roles.^[27]

Significance: Why the sexual division of labor?

Evolutionary perspective

Based on the current theories and research on the sexual division of labor, four critical aspects of hunter‐gatherer socioecology led to the evolutionary origin of the SDL in humans: (1) long‐term dependency on high‐cost offspring,^[28] (2) optimal dietary mix of mutually exclusive foods,^[29] (3) efficient foraging based on specialized skill, and (4) sex‐differentiated comparative advantage in tasks.^[30] These combined conditions are rare in nonhuman vertebrates but common to currently-existing populations of human foragers, which, thus, gives rise to a potential factor for the evolutionary divergence of social behaviors in Homo.

See also

• Hunter-gatherer
• Division of labor
• Evolution
• Adaptation
• Natural selection

From “Man the Hunter” to Homo X: Rethinking Human Nature

In their myriad telling, “scientific” narratives of human evolution have accumulated a ton of ideological baggage; human origins accounts often are more rooted in fiction than fact, and many were spawned before recent archaeological and scientific breakthroughs. Few models are as dominant as the story of “Man the Hunter.” This theory of evolution and human nature argues that human beings (1) are natural carnivores, (2) were always hunters, and (3) are inherently violent and aggressive. Not only prevalent in science, these assumptions spread into culture and everyday life, where they shaped anthropocentric worldviews and sedimented into “common sense.” Yet each element in the Man the Hunter model is a fiction and myth that both stems from and perpetuates false concepts of human identity. The prevalent notion of “human nature” has no grounding in historical reality and in fact is a social construction with troubling implications and consequences.
Clearly, these three assertions sustain and support each other. If humans are natural carnivores, they have to hunt to survive; since hunting, moreover, is impossible without killing, violent behaviors form the basis of social life.  To say that humans are natural carnivores is to state that since our hominid beginnings 5-8 million years ago we ate a meat-based diet and killed animals to satisfy our cravings for flesh and blood. But it also makes a stronger claim that the human physiology requires meat and cannot flourish or function properly on a vegetarian diet. Meat consumption is primordial, natural, good, and necessary. Thus, humans cannot and should not live without killing animals, and violence is inherently and necessarily a part of their existence. Natural carnivores are therefore born to hunt and kill; they are violent not only toward animals but also toward each other; carnivorism is our original sin.
The Man the Hunter view has influenced many views about the biological basis and evolution of violence in human life. These are arbitrary claims rooted in speciesist, carnivorous, and patriarchal biases, and we shall take them apart one at a time.
Carnivorism
The fact that our early hominids ate some animal flesh in no way entails that they were “carnivores.” Our australopithecine ancestors were opportunist omnivores who ate anything they could, a diet largely composed of fruits, nuts, seeds, plants, and any scraps of flesh they could find. For at least three million years, they maintained this diet and the little meat they consumed came from scavenging carrion or eating insects, but not hunting. The jaws, small incisors and canines and blunt and flat molars of australopithecines were hardly suited for cutting, tearing, and masticating meat.
According to many theorists, however, once the genus Homo emerged over two million years ago, and with it the first primitive tools, the hominid diet changed. Whereas ten percent of australopithecine food intake was meat, this figure doubled for Homo erectus, the first hominid species thought to actively hunt animals. In the turn from scavengers to hunters, many argue, Homo erectus established a dramatic new mode of life whereby human survival was secured not by whatever the environment provided but rather through actively securing sustenance by hunting animals. The Homo erectus diet was far more versatile than other hominids, enabling it to freely move about independent of the food supply of any specific locale, and thus to begin a dynamic exodus out of Africa to other continents.
For many interpreters, meat was not just a key part of the Homo erectus diet two million years ago, it was a crucial stimulus to the human brain and the evolution of society. In Ape Man: The Story of Human Evolution, Robin McKie writes: “Meat …made us brainy. Easy to digest and rich in energy, meat provided the vital resources that our expanding brains demanded … The new diet provided mothers with high-quality for the brains of their developing babies, and provided continuing neurological sustenance as those infants grew up. And not just meat, but fat and bone marrow – easily digested, energy-rich foods that permitted the evolution of smaller stomachs which in turn saved internal energy… We started to eat meat, got smarter and thought of clever ways to obtain more meat.” As hunting demanded intelligence, stealth, communication, and cooperation, it sparked the development of a more complex social life.
Behold how patriarchal, carnivorist fantasies are projected from the present to prehistory. There is no evidence linking meat consumption and the qualitative advancement of social life and the human brain. Moreover, the gathering or production of any food source surely required as much cooperation as hunting and would logically have brought about the same evolutionary result. Indeed, whereas hunting is framed as an exclusively male activity, gathering plants involved the cooperation of men and women and thus – as a practical activity — should have been a greater catalyst for social cooperation and brain development than hunting.
The claim that human beings are natural carnivores who thrive from eating meat is falsified by mountains of scientific evidence and everyday experience in modern populations plagued by heart disease, cancer, strokes, obesity, osteoporosis, and other diseases. An overwhelming body of scientific data demonstrates that animal fat causes disease processes in the human body, such as prostate and breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and strokes. Carnivores are many times more likely to fall victim to these diseases, along with obesity, than vegetarians and vegans. No truly carnivorous animal dies from the fat and protein of another animal. Human physiology is radically different from that of bona fide carnivores such as tigers and hyenas. Humans lack the teeth, saliva, and digestive systems necessary to eat and digest meat efficiently.
Even if humans have been carnivores and killers throughout their history, even if meat-consumption was crucial to the stimulation of the human brain and social evolution, it does not therefore follow that a carnivorous mode of existence continues to be a healthy lifestyle, an ethical diet, or a positive stimulant of social evolution. Appeals to tradition always beg the question of whether or not the tradition is valid and viable and should be perpetuated rather than ended.
The entrenchment of carnivorous lifestyles makes it difficult to change, to be sure, but not impossible and nor undesirable. Because the intense propaganda of modern meat and dairy industries drives consumer appetites, now at staggeringly high levels on a global scale, in the last century an omnivorous hominid has mutated into a carnivorous ecomorph. Champions of hunting and meat-eating fail to grasp that what was once a necessary survival mechanism and functional behavior is now – putting aside the debatable exception for any rare prehistorical cultures still left — an unnecessary, unjustifiable, addictive, health-destroying, environment-devastating, dysfunctional behavior and social practice.
Whatever greater adaptability and brain stimulation meat eating might once have provided (a dubious proposition), hunting and meat consumption also endowed Homo species with the technologies to massacre one another, to exterminate countless other animal species, and to colonize the planet. Armed with spears, knives, swords, guns, blades, and forks, Homo sapiens — no longer a vulnerable source of prey — became the most powerful predator on the planet and an agent of mass extinction. From scavenging and hunting to factory farming and the erection of the Global Meat Culture on the ruins of ancient rainforests, humans’ socially constructed carnivorous appetites have become a driving force of social and ecological crisis.
Hunting
Our hominid ancestors secured their meat primarily through scavenging, not hunting, and therefore were dependent upon the efforts of other species. In contradistinction to the killer-carnivore dogma, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman’s book, Man the Hunted, emphasizes that our ancestors were prey far longer than they were predators, and this vulnerability sparked the evolution of intelligence. Adults were only 3-5 feet in height, weighed 60-100 pounds, had small teeth and no claws, and lacked tools or weapons. Whether sleeping in caves or walking through savannas, hominids were constantly vulnerably to attack from mega-predators such as hyenas, saber-tooted cats, reptiles, and raptors who regularly dined on hominids and other primates. Outnumbered, slower, and weaker than the ferocious beasts that hunted them, they had to band together, be versatile, communicate with sounds, guard sleep sites, and on the whole be clever and smart. The status of hominids as the hunted instead of the hunters destroys the image of powerful hominids at the top of the food chain, and it also underscores a key dynamic in human evolution, involving a coevolution between humans (as prey) and powerful carnivorous animals (as predators).
Thus, obtaining the social skills and smarts necessary to avoid being eaten by deadly predators, not eating their flesh, stimulated the growth of social complexity and the hominid brain. The first evidence of stone tools was 2.3 million years ago; the earliest human fossils date back at least seven million years, and thus our ancestors walked about for five million years before inventing tools. As there is no good evidence of our ancestors using fire until 800,000 years ago, and the “first unequivocal evidence of large scale, systematic hunting … is available from paleoarchaeological sites possibly only 60,000-80,000 years old,” Hart and Sussman conclude that “meat consumption could not have been the main or only catalyst in the qualitative leap toward humankind.”
If, as Hart and Sussman argue, large-scale hunting does not begin until 60,000-80,000 years ago, this aspect of human behavior has been grotesquely overemphasized. It is a strange “hunter” species who has hunted only a small fraction of its existence, who mostly killed insects and small animals, who scavenged more than killed, and who — until very recently in Western nations – obtained the bulk of its calories from plant foods. As Jared Diamond writes in The Third Chimpanzee, “Studies of modern hunter-gathers with far more effective weapons than early Homo sapiens show that most of a family’s calories consumes from plant food gathered by women. Men catch rabbits and other small game never mentioned in the heroic campfire stories…I would guess that big-game hunting contributed only modestly to our food intake until after we had evolved fully modern anatomy and behavior. For most of our history we were not mighty hunters but skilled chimps, using stone tools to acquire and prepare plant food and small animals.”
Clearly, the Man the Hunter theory is a patriarchal construct which inflates the role men played in social reproduction and minimizes the contributions of women. Observing chimpanzees, feminists have discerned that most food is obtained by gathering, not hunting; analysis of modern human hunter-gatherer cultures shows that tools are also used mainly for gathering (plants, eggs, small insects and animals) not hunting, that most of the tools are made and used by women, and that women collect 60-90% of the food. Thus, a far more accurate view of early human history would single out not Man the Hunter but rather Woman the Gatherer, for in early societies women play the more important role in feeding families, socializing the young, and acquiring and sharing knowledge that is passed to subsequent generations.
Killing
The unfortunate mythology linking carnivorism, hunting, and violence was spawned in large part by archaeologist Raymond Dart. Looking at the holes and dents in  australopithecine skulls, Dart concluded that our ancestors not only hunted and killed prey, but also murdered each other by using the bones of animals as clubs and weapons. In the 1960s, Robert Ardrey popularized Dart’s theory in a number of books that were influential on the public and scientific community alike. Following Dart’s thesis, Ardrey believes that “Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.” Killing stimulated the development of big brains, and war and territorialism have led to great accomplishments of Western man.
In the mid-1970s, however, South African fossil specialist, C.K. Brain, refuted the killer ape-man theory through meticulous research and common sense. He realized that the bones Dart interpreted as the lethal weapons wielded by australopithecines were actually fragments of hominids and other primates discarded by tigers and hyenas. Brain examined the marks and indentations in the skulls of baboons and australopithecines and saw that they were consistent not with weapons used by hominid, but rather with bites from predators such as leopards and hyenas, who dragged their prey into a cave. Dart confused cause and effect: the hominids were the meals not the diners.
Brain’s critiques began the shift in anthropology away from Dart’s theory, but the killer-ape view persisted in many quarters of science and certainly in the popular imagination. On top of Dart’s initial error, elaborate falsehoods were written about the aggressive, territorial, bloodthirsty human type whose true beastly nature lies simmering beneath the veneer of “civilization” and morality. Forced to hunt and kill throughout its history, the argument goes, humans have a violent nature that can explode at any time, and is barely subdued with morality and law.
In his book, Primates and Philosophers, Frans de Waal takes apart the “veneer” model of civilization which sees animality as inherently violet and brutal, such that civilization succeeds only to extent it covers it over, holds it back, and creates a gauzy and fragile barrier between primates and humans. Morality is a “thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature.” We are “bad” when we lapse into “nature” and “good” when we stave it off. We are “bad” when we lapse into “nature” and “good” when we stave it off. The veneer model commits two grave errors: (1) it denies the continuity between animal and human, and (2) it gives a one-dimensional view of animal conduct as selfish and violent, completely missing the empathetic and cooperative side of primate behavior.
Homo ambiguous
While portrayals of humans as natural born carnivores, hunters, and killer were highly distorted, for the last two centuries Western culture and anthropology has spawned yet another myth. Rejecting Thomas Hobbes’ bellicose view of human nature (initialed locked into a “war of all against all”), many theorists turned the opposite extreme and embraced Jean Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the “noble savage” and the peaceful nature of preliterate cultures (before the emergence of agricultural societies ten thousand years ago). As discussed in Lawrence Kelley’s War Before Civilization, however, a new body of research suggests that warfare was pervasive throughout prehistory, such that the percentage of the population killed annually exceeds that of any modern society.
The truth of human nature is somewhere between the Hobbesian view of people as inherently wicked though manageable through coercive social authority, and the Rousseauian belief that humans as innately good but corrupted by society. The very same species that produced the rock paintings in the caves of Lascaux, the Parthenon, Hamlet, the Sistine Chapel, and the Eroica Symphony also operated the ovens of Dachau, dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations in Japan, and fertilized the killing fields of Cambodia with bones and blood. As Homo ambiguous, we are a Janus-faced species capable of peace and warfare, love and hatred, good and evil, compassion and contempt, and creativity and destruction.
We need to acknowledge the dark side and violent tendencies of human nature without lapsing into pessimism and determinism. We should recognize that human violence is more pervasive that often thought, but also that peaceful cultures have existed and that hierarchical societies invariably spread violence, warfare, and ecological destruction. We need a frank evaluation of human nature, social history, and the gravity of the current social and ecological crisis, while also envisioning alternative ethics and social institutions. We must realize that traits which are “natural” are not unchangeable, nor are they bad (e.g., reciprocal altruism in primates). Once we grasp that culture itself is a product of nature, that our capacities for language, thought, and ethics stem from potentialities and dynamics inherent in evolution, and that genes require suitable environments to be expressed, the rigid wall between biology and culture comes crashing down. It’s not nature vs. nurture, but rather nature via nurture.
We are not infinitely plastic, pliable, and malleable, but nor are we rigidly fixed and inflexible due to our biological make-up. Everything turns on the basic but crucial distinction between being influenced by genes and being controlled by them; genes shape us in a wider social, cultural and psychological context, which in turns conditions genes. If we have the capacity to change by learning and education, as has been demonstrated countless times in human history, then we are not defined solely by our biological nature and genetic make-up, and our socialization and cultural practices play a major if not decisive part of why we are and become. This leaves the door wide open for education, moral evolution, and progressive social change.

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This entry was posted on January 7, 2010 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Animal Liberation, Environment, Indigenous, Revolution with tags carnivorism, food, hunting, meat, omnivorism, radical anthropology, veganism, vegetarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. 

   Ⓐb Irato Says:
   January 8, 2010 at 1:29 am

   A few initial thoughts:
   

   If humans are natural carnivores, they have to hunt to survive; since hunting, moreover, is impossible without killing, violent behaviors form the basis of social life.

   This, to me, seems like a leap in logic. Why must violence thus form the basis of social life? If you look at intact, earth-based indigenous/aboriginal forager-hunter people, you will often find a softness and a sense of remorse during the hunt, kill, and act of using the animal for food and other products. It is also clear that this subsistence-based hunting does not lead to an increase in the violence characteristic of social life. Not to romanticize tribal people, but most indigenous forager-hunter cultures seem to exhibit far less violent and abusive behavior in their social life, towards other human beings, towards other animals, and towards the land base in general than say, modern people who no longer have to physically and personally kill what they eat due to the division of labor and global capitalist system.
   

   …it also makes a stronger claim that the human physiology requires meat and cannot flourish or function properly on a vegetarian diet.

   I for one would and do inherently reject such a claim and don’t think it is a necessary component of a worldview that includes omnivorous humans.
   

   Natural carnivores are therefore born to hunt and kill; they are violent not only toward animals but also toward each other…

   First, there are countless examples of plant-eaters who are also violent towards other animals and one another. Second, this borders on something I’ve been worrying about: making a moral call against carnivorism and predation, defining it as somehow immoral, unethical, or wrong for ALL animals. That seems to be the case you must make in order to fall into the traps of anthorpocentrism and speciesism: If you were to propose that it is only wrong for humans and NOT other animals then you would be saying we are somehow different than them and not bound by the same natural parameters. Then again, this rests of the acceptance of human beings as natural omnivores, which is my position. I believe the Pleistocene diet was supplimented opportunistically by animal flesh, even hunted but also scavanged, although it was in large part a plant based diet. Without the mechanisms of modern industrial capitalism veganism would be all but impossible for many people to obtain (and preserve/store) enough nutritional value to get through the winter. How are arctic and sub-arctic peoples to do this?
   

   Even if humans have been carnivores and killers throughout their history, even if meat-consumption was crucial to the stimulation of the human brain and social evolution, it does not therefore follow that a carnivorous mode of existence continues to be a healthy lifestyle, an ethical diet, or a positive stimulant of social evolution.

   I agree wholeheartedly which I why I support veganism within the context we currently find ourselves (global capitalism) but am still not sure how it’s going to work for people who live in areas with harsh winters if we are to dismantle global capitalism and move towards local, bioregional and sustainable modes of food aquisition. Without the underlying fossil fuel infrastructure that brings me my vegan products from hundreds or thousands of miles away, how am I to obtain proper nutrition year-round? I live in Southwest Colorado and this is something I have been thinking about a lot lately, because we’re working on Transition Town stuff and thinking about re-localized food systems and what our community is going to do in the (inevitable) event of a severe energy crisis and collapse of global capitalism.
   

   Champions of hunting and meat-eating fail to grasp that what was once a necessary survival mechanism and functional behavior is now – putting aside the debatable exception for any rare prehistorical cultures still left — an unnecessary, unjustifiable, addictive, health-destroying, environment-devastating, dysfunctional behavior and social practice.

   Here it seems you may be willing to support sustainable and subsistence-based (aka survival based) hunting by traditional, earth-based indigenous & aboriginal people, which I see as a hopeful sign. Perhaps you have some faith in technology and civilization that I do not, but I believe that in the long run, human beings will all return to small forager-hunter (or scavenger) units, if we as a species are to survive at all. There is compelling evidence that any other way of life is inherently unsustainable, particularly at the level of agriculture, where we see the emergence of cities, social stratification, the division of labor and gender roles, etc. So it is my opinion that we will only learn to live in balance with the land once again by learning from what you call the “rare prehistorical cultures still left” who still have an intact and intimate relationship with their immediate land base and food sources.
   

   For most of our history we were not mighty hunters but skilled chimps, using stone tools to acquire and prepare plant food and small animals.

   Here Jared reminds me of my own attempts to reclaim the earth-based survival skills of my ancestors. The rabbit-stick has proven very effective for me.
   

   Clearly, the Man the Hunter theory is a patriarchal construct which inflates the role men played in social reproduction and minimizes the contributions of women.

   While I totally agree that gathering is far more important than hunting and that plants should be the vast majority of our diets, hasn’t sexual dimorphism theory regarding the gendered division of labor (men hunt, women gather) been seriously challenged in radical anthropology? (Sahlins, Zerzan, etc.)
   

   The unfortunate mythology linking carnivorism, hunting, and violence was spawned in large part by archaeologist Raymond Dart. Looking at the holes and dents in australopithecine skulls, Dart concluded that our ancestors not only hunted and killed prey, but also murdered each other by using the bones of animals as clubs and weapons.

   Granted I would say the behaviour is a psychotic symptom of extreme habitat restriction/reduction pressures, have you seen the videos of the chimpanzee wars? I think they were on Planet Earth or something. Chimps are natural omnivores right? Opportunistic scavengers that sometimes eat bugs and stuff? Well they straight use tools in that video (one aggressive male has a stick he uses as a spear) and they cannibalize a female from the intruding group. Yikes!
   Anyways this is a great article Steve, thanks so much for submitting it. I hope my comments don’t come across as too ignorant or arrogant. I’m honored to have you contributing here.
   

   Reply
2. 

   Mauro Cavalcanti Says:
   January 8, 2010 at 3:22 am

   Dr. Best’s essay gives a very comprehensive overview of the role of carnivory in human evolution, grounded on better data and more carefully interpretation. However, I would like to add a few notes,
   as well as pointing out which looked to me as inconsistencies (or debatable aspects).
   I think it might have been emphasized that even if hunting had any role in the past evolution of man (and this is doubtful, or at least debatable, on the basis of more recent data and interpretations, as Best pointed
   out), there are absolutely no possible argument to defend hunting “for sport” in modern societies (just like no modern society would found morally justifiable to abandon its elders to die after they are not
   considered “socially useful”, as some preliterate societies did). That is, if hunting and carnivory had any important evolutionary role in the past, it has about none in the present.
   Also, although I do mainly agree with the portrayal of “Homo ambiguous” presented by Best, I cannot agree with the statement that “an overwhelming amount of evidence shows that war, murder, and massacres were pervasive throughout prehistory, such that violence was actually more frequent and lethal in nonstate societies than in state societies, especially the modern nations we think to be the most violent in history.” In support of this statement, Best cites a book by Lawrence Kelley (which I have not read), but other books could be equally offered to support the opposite opinion, ie., that state-based societies are
   indeed more violent and prone to agression than stateless ones. Two books which immediately come to my mind in this connection are Murray Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom” and John Zerzan’s “Future Primitive”
   (I could also add Pierre Clastres’ “Society Against the State”). I do not dispute the fact that there was agression and violence in primitive societies, but only with the rise of the State has organized war and
   systematic slauthering of human beings begun. Best cites Dachau, the atomic bombing of Hiroxima and Nagasaki, and Cambodia killing fields as examples (and many others are available) — all of them, systematic murderings performed in industrialized fashion by State-based societies. What, say, Indian societies did even come close to that?
   If we accept the view the preliterate societies were more agressive than “modern nations”, we are indeed contradicting all previous arguments presented to refute the notion of man as a “naturally” evolved hunter
   and warrior. Also, it would support another highly debatable theory (which has deep connections to the Man The Hunter hypothesis), namely the “blitzkrieg model” which proposes that mass extinctions of large
   mammals and birds in America and Oceania, about 10-15 thousands years ago, was caused (or at least greatly accelerated) by the hunting activities of protoindians and first Australian aborigines and
   Polynesian colonists of Hawaii, Marquesas, and New Zealand. The blitzkrieg model, supported by reactionary academics as Edward Wilson and Jared Diamond, is cleary rooted in the Man The Hunter hypothesis.
   I also missed mention to the book “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence”, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, which had attracted some attention in the 90′s (as did the books by Robert Ardrey in the 60′s, as mentioned by Best). This book, however, should be viewed with as much skepticism as “Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape” by Frans De Waal, which presents the opposite idea that bonobos (Pan paniscus, a smaller chimp species more closely related to the genus Homo than the larger, and presumed more agressive, species, Pan troglodytes).
   Other minor points which may be noticed are that the “out of Africa” model mentioned by Best “en passé”, although widely held, is also itself not accepted by all members of the scientific community — the alternative vicariance model of differentiation, without a “center of origin” is equally, if not more, plausible. This is also the view supported by Panbiogeography — itself a truly novel (if compared to the center-of-origin concept which has literally dominated biogeography since Darwin’s days) and deeply revolutionary interpretation of earth/life evolution (but I cannot dwell into this here). The available evidence suggests that the first actively hunting hominid was a highly polymorphic species, with forms living in Eastern Africa, south Europe, and most of Asia, which is consistent with the vicariance model. This can have potentially interesting implications for the discussion of the evolution of carnivory and hunting habits in Homo, as a polymorphic species
   differentiating over a broad front would experience quite different environments. Anyway, this point should deserve a more detailed analysis and discussion.
   Last, and probably least, just for the sake of accuracy, Best mentions “reptiles and raptors who regularly dined on hominids and other primates”, but he should have been more specific to avoid confusion. I suppose Best refers to large birds of prey when he talks of “raptors”, but these birds are either just scavengers (the vultures so common in the African savannas) or do not attack larger adult primates (much less on a regular basis). The reptile more apt to offer risks for the early hominds (but hardly on a regular basis, given the ecologically restrict habits of such animals) is the crocodile, although large varanid lizards could also pose a real threat to hominids in Indonesia and Oceania (as the still living “Komodo dragon”, Varanus komodoensis, and the even larger Megalania
   prisca which lived in Australia until Pleistocene times). Influenced by bad movies like “Jurassic Park”, uninitiated people may be lead to think of “reptiles and raptors” as those dinosaur species (badly) depicted in such movies (“Velociraptor” et al.), which went extinct several millions of years
   before the appearance of the first hominds. But Best correctly includes saber-teeth cats among the main predators of early hominds — there is evidence that they were indeed preyed by species of Dinofelis, as fossil remains of Australopithecus afarensis have been found in South Africa along with bones of this feline (Dinofelis, however, has canine teeth shorter than the so-called “true saber-teeth” cats, which belonged to different genera — but these all should have been fascinating, if formidable, animals).
   Just the humble thoughts of a Kropotkinian-Bookchinite-Croizatian zoologist…
   
   http://guerrillanews.wordpress.com/

Hunter gatherer brains make men and women see things differently

Men and women see things differently because of ancient hunter-gatherer programming in their brains, research suggests. 

7:00AM BST 30 Jul 2009

Scientists carried out experiments that showed men are better at judging faraway targets, while women are good at short-distance focusing.

They believe the findings reflect the way men and women's brains evolved for different hunter-gatherer roles many thousands of years ago.

Hunters, who were traditionally men, needed an ability to observe from afar.

Women, on the other hand, had to be adept at searching the area immediately within reach for fruits, nuts, berries and edible roots.

Researchers asked a group of 48 men and women to mark the midpoint of lines on a piece of paper within a laser pointer.

Men were more accurate than women when the target was placed far away at a distance of 100cm.
When the paper was within a 50cm hands-reach distance, the women were more accurate.
Psychologist Helen Stancey, from Hammersmith and West London College, said: "Evidence already exists that separate pathways in the brain process visual information from near and far space. Our results suggest that the near pathway is favoured in women and the far pathway is favoured in men.
"These sex differences in visual processing may be a result of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary legacy. As the predominant gatherers, women would have needed to work well in near space, whereas the prey for (predominantly male) hunters would have been in far space."
The findings are published online today in the British Journal of Psychology.
In a second study, volunteers were asked to carry out the same tasks using a stick rather than a laser pointer.
This time women were significantly better than men at judging both distances.
The finding suggests that pointing with a stick helps the brain to process distant information as if it is in near space, said the scientists.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Hunter-gatherer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Two Hadza men return from a hunt. The Hadza are one of the few contemporary African societies that live primarily by foraging.

A hunter-gatherer or forager^[1] society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunter-gatherers are a type of nomad.
Hunting and gathering 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."^[2] 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.

Contents

• 1 Archaeological evidence
• 2 Common characteristics
  • 2.1 Habitat and population
  • 2.2 Social and economic structure
• 3 Variability
• 4 Modern and revisionist perspectives
• 5 Americas
• 6 See also
  • 6.1 Groups or societies
  • 6.2 Social movements
• 7 References
• 8 Further reading
• 9 External links

Archaeological evidence

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One hypothesis is that the earliest humans lived primarily on scavenging, not actual hunting.^{[citation needed]} Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in mixed habitats, which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals for meat, according to this view, they used carcasses of such animals that had either been killed by predators or that had died of natural causes.^[3]
According to the endurance running hypothesis, long-distance running as in persistence hunting, a method still practiced by some hunter-gatherer groups in modern times, was likely the driving evolutionary force leading to the evolution of certain human characteristics. (This hypothesis does not necessarily contradict the scavenging hypothesis: both subsistence strategies could have been in use – sequentially, alternating or even simultaneously.)
Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, and from its appearance some 0.2 million years ago by Homo sapiens. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago, and after this was replaced only gradually with the spread of the Neolithic Revolution.
Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of (often larger than had previously been hunted) game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools, like fishing nets and hooks and bone harpoons.^[4] The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated and spread in several different areas including the Middle East, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes beginning as early as 12,000 years ago
Forest gardening was also being used as a food production system in various parts of the world over this period. Forest gardens originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions.^{[citation needed]} In the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified, protected and improved, whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Eventually superior foreign species were selected and incorporated into the gardens.^[5]
Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have continually declined, partly as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in the developing world, either in arid regions or tropical forests. Areas that were formerly available to hunter-gatherers were—and continue to be—encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition, Jared Diamond has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods, particularly animal resources. In North and South America, for example, most large mammal species had gone extinct by the end of the Pleistocene - according to Diamond, because of overexploitation by humans,^[6] although the overkill hypothesis he advocates is strongly contested.
As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. This process of agriculture-driven expansion led to the development of the first forms of government in agricultural centers, such as the Fertile Crescent, Ancient India, Ancient China, Olmec, Sub-Saharan Africa and Norte Chico.
As a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures usually live in areas unsuitable for agricultural use.

Common characteristics

A San man from Namibia. Fewer than 10,000 San live in the traditional way, as hunter-gatherers. Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move San out of their lands.^[7]

Further information: cultural universal

Habitat and population

Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile, given their reliance on the ability of a given natural environment to provide sufficient resources in order to sustain their population and the variable availability of these resources owing to local climatic and seasonal conditions. Individual band societies tend to be small in number (10-50 individuals), but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group (100 or more) when resources are abundant. In a few places where the environment is especially productive, such as that of the Pacific Northwest coast or Jomon-era Japan, hunter-gatherers are able to settle permanently.^{[citation needed]}
Hunter-gatherer settlements may be either permanent, temporary, or some combination of the two, depending upon the mobility of the community. Mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available.^{[citation needed]}

Social and economic structure

Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos, although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America) are an exception to this rule. Nearly all African hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, with women roughly as influential and powerful as men.^[8]
The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never perfect, but is striking when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organisation.^[9][10][11]
Some archaeologists argue that violence in hunter-gatherer societies was ubiquitous. They argue that approximately 25% to 30% of adult male deaths in these societies were due to homicide, compared to an upper estimate of 3% of all deaths in the 20th century. They claim that the cause of this is near constant tribal warfare: "From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year." ^[12] However, many anthropologists, including some who have lived with hunter-gatherers, disagree with this viewpoint and claim that nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are remarkably low in violence.^[13]
Some anthropologists maintain that hunter-gatherers don't have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.^[14][15][16] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.^[14] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.^[17] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.^[18] This means that young mothers can enjoy childcare support from their own mothers who continue living nearby in the same camp.^[19] The systems of kinship and descent among human hunter-gatherers were relatively flexible, although there is evidence that early human kinship in general tended to be matrilineal.^[20] A few groups, such as the Haida of present-day British Columbia, lived in such a rich environment that they could remain sedentary or semi-nomadic, like many other Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest coast.
It is easy for Western-educated scholars to fall into the trap of viewing hunter-gatherer social and sexual arrangements in the light of Western values, which today tend to be liberal and feminist. One common arrangement is the sexual division of labour, with women doing most of the gathering, while men concentrate on big game hunting. It might be imagined that this arrangement oppresses women, keeping them in the domestic sphere. However, according to some observers, hunter-gatherer women would not understand this interpretation. Since childcare is collective, with every baby having multiple mothers and male carers, the domestic sphere is not atomised or privatised but an empowering place to be. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women appreciate the meat brought back to camp by men. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele's study of the southern African Ju/'hoan, 'Women Like Meat'.^[21] Recent archaeological research suggests that the sexual division of labor was the fundamental organisational innovation that gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.^[22]
To this day, most hunter-gatherers have a symbolically structured sexual division of labour, most often conceptualised through an ideology of blood.^[23] However, it is true that in a small minority of cases, women hunt the same kind of quarry as men, sometimes doing so alongside men. The best-known example are the Aeta people of the Philippines. According to one study: "About 85% of Philippine Aeta women hunt, and they hunt the same quarry as men. Aeta women hunt in groups and with dogs, and have a 31% success rate as opposed to 17% for men. Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men: mixed hunting groups have a full 41% success rate among the Aeta."^[15] It was also found among the Ju'/hoansi people of Namibia that women helped the men during hunting by helping them track down quarry.^[24]

A 19th century engraving of an Indigenous Australian encampment.

At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition.
At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.^[25] These people met the same requirements as their sedentary neighbors through much less complex means. Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day,where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.^[26]
Recent research also indicates that the life-expectancy of hunter-gatherers is surprisingly high.^[27]
Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies.^[17] Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a "gift economy".

Variability

Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on climate zone/life zone, available technology and societal structure.
One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly,^[28] 31).
Hunting-gathering was the common human mode of subsistence throughout the Paleolithic, but the observation of current-day hunters and gatherers does not necessarily reflect Paleolithic societies; the hunter-gatherer cultures examined today have had much contact with modern civilization and do not represent "pristine" conditions found in uncontacted peoples.^[29]
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.^[30] In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.^{[citation needed]} This anthropological view has remained unchanged since the 1960s.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

Modern and revisionist perspectives

A Shoshone encampment in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, photographed by W. H. Jackson, 1870

In the early 1980s, a small but vocal segment of anthropologists and archaeologists attempted to demonstrate that contemporary groups usually identified as hunter-gatherers do not, in most cases, have a continuous history of hunting and gathering, and that in many cases their ancestors were agriculturalists and/or pastoralists who were pushed into marginal areas as a result of migrations, economic exploitation, and/or violent conflict. The result of their effort has been the general acknowledgement that there has been complex interaction between hunter-gatherers and non-hunter-gatherers for millennia.^{[citation needed]}
Some of the theorists who advocate this "revisionist" critique imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" disappeared not long after colonial (or even agricultural) contact began, nothing meaningful can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly,^[31] 24-29; see Wilmsen^[32])
Lee and Guenther have rejected most of the arguments put forward by Wilmsen.^[33][34][35] Doron Shultziner and others have argued that we can learn a lot about the life-styles of prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers - especially their impressive levels of egalitarianism.^[36]
Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. These activities are on an entirely different scale to those associated with agriculture, but they are nevertheless domestication on some level. Today, almost all hunter-gatherers depend to some extent upon domesticated food sources either produced part-time or traded for products acquired in the wild.
Some agriculturalists also regularly hunt and gather (e.g. farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter). Still others in developed countries go hunting, primarily for leisure. In the Brazilian rainforest, those groups that recently did, or even continue to, rely on hunting and gathering techniques seem to have adopted this lifestyle, abandoning most agriculture, as a way to escape colonial control and as a result of the introduction of European diseases reducing their populations to levels where agriculture became difficult.^{[citation needed]}

Three Indigenous Australians on Bathurst Island in 1939. According to Peterson (1998), the island was a population isolated for 6,000 years until the eighteenth century. In 1929, three quarters of the population supported themselves off the bush.^[37]

There are nevertheless a number of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples who, after contact with other societies, continue their ways of life with very little external influence. One such group is the Pila Nguru (Spinifex people) of Western Australia, whose habitat in the Great Victoria Desert has proved unsuitable for European agriculture (and even pastoralism).^{[citation needed]} Another are the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who live on North Sentinel Island and to date have maintained their independent existence, repelling attempts to engage with and contact them.^{[citation needed]}

Americas

Main article: Paleo-Indians

See also: Paleo-Indians period (Canada) and History of Mesoamerica (Paleo-Indian)

Evidence suggests big-game hunter gatherers crossed the Bering Strait from Asia (Eurasia) into North America over a land bridge (Beringia), that existed between 47,000–14,000 years ago.^[38] Around 18,500-15,500 years ago, these hunter-gatherers are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets.^[39] Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific coast to South America.^[40][41]
Hunter-gatherers would eventually flourish all over the Americas, primarily based in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, with offshoots as far east as the Gaspé Peninsula on the Atlantic coast, and as far south as Chile, Monte Verde.^[42] American hunter-gatherers were spread over a wide geographical area, thus there were regional variations in lifestyles. However, all the individual groups shared a common style of stone tool production, making knapping styles and progress identifiable. This early Paleo-Indian period lithic reduction tool adaptations have been found across the Americas, utilized by highly mobile bands consisting of approximately 25 to 50 members of an extended family.^[43]
The Archaic period in the Americas saw a changing environment featuring a warmer more arid climate and the disappearance of the last megafauna.^[44] The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers; but now individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally, thus with the passage of time there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization like, the Southwest, Arctic, Poverty, Dalton and Plano traditions. This regional adaptations would become the norm, with reliance less on hunting and gathering, with a more mixed economy of small game, fish, seasonally wild vegetables and harvested plant foods.^[45][46]

See also

• Modern hunter-gatherers and other Nomads
• Anarcho-primitivism
• Human migration
• History of the world
• Indigenous peoples
• Neolithic Revolution
• Origins of society
• Paleolithic
• Prehistoric music
• Primitive skills

Groups or societies

Negritos in the Philippines, 1595

• Batek
• Bushmen
• Cimba people
• Cro-Magnon
• Hadza people
• Homo erectus
• Indigenous Australians
• Inuit
• Man of Flores
• Mbuti
• Neanderthals
• Nukak-Makú
• Pirahã
• Pygmies
• Samoa
• Sentinelese
• Spinifex People
• Uncontacted tribes
• Yupik

Social movements

• Anarcho-primitivism, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild.
• Freeganism involves gathering of food (and sometimes other materials) in the context of an urban or suburban environment.
• Gleaning involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields.
• Paleolithic diet, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.
• Paleolithic lifestyle, which extends the paleolithic diet to other elements of the hunter-gat