Introduction

Earth has been home to modern humans for about 250,000 years. However, social studies and history classes often focus just on the most past 12,000 years of human history. It makes sense. We have the most information about this period. After this time came the creation of important topics like farming, complex societies, and writing. But what about these older groups? How did we especially produce and distribute the food we needed before farming and writing? We foraged for it, meaning we hunted and gathered it.

Humans have been roaming foragers for a much longer than they’ve been settled farmers. Once people began farming, many communities still continued to forage. In fact, some foraging communities still exist today. Foragers survived for a long time. It must have been a pretty good way to obtain resources. But what does it mean to be a forager?

The foraging way of life

Foraging is the gathering and hunting of food. Humans aren’t the only ones who forage. Many animal species gather resources from the environment. Scavenging animals eat other animals that have died. Predator animals hunt their prey. Foraging means taking what you need from your environment in order to survive.

In foraging communities, humans generally lived in smaller family units. These contained around 20-50 people. Foragers had to move around. This way they could gather more resources once one area had been picked over. It’s much easier to organize a smaller group of people. They can all better move in the same direction at the same time.

Foraging communities also seemed to space out the birth of children in a family. They may have tried to limit the number of small children that needed to be carried on their journeys. Breastfeeding can sometimes reduce the chances of pregnancy. Perhaps foraging women breastfed their children for long periods of time. That would likely have helped limit how many children they had. This could have been a decision, or happened naturally. We don’t know for sure.

The population growth rate remained extremely low for the period from 1,000,000 to 5000 BCE. Population data adapted from the World Bank and Kremer, Michael. “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (2017): 683.

In foraging communities, men would likely hunt. Women would gather. But the work of both was necessary for survival. It was probably viewed as equal in the eyes of the group.

Anthropologists are experts who study human societies and cultures. They’ve studied modern foraging societies. Archaeologists have studied many older early human sites. It appears most foragers relied mainly on plant-based diets.1 Meat was enjoyed, but rare. Hunting and fishing could be unreliable as a regular meal. In some places women did more of the foraging. This suggests that their work was valued as much as that of men. This equal value given to the work of females and males was different than later farming societies.

This is not to say that these foraging communities had zero social divisions. They just looked a bit different. Farming communities usually ranked people based on wealth or gender. Foraging divisions were probably based on age. Older members of the community may have been given more respect or power.

Foraging groups also likely had more free time. Most of the community’s resources could be gathered in about 4-6 hours of the day. So, foragers had more time to share stories by the fire than those who would later become farmers. Twenty-first-century humans work on average between 8-9 hours per day. Of course, I’m sure most of us would love to be able to work for 4-6 hours and enjoy time with family and friends.

A forager’s diet was also probably healthier than that of a farmer. Studies show that modern-day foragers eat a more mixed diet. They exercise more compared to modern-day non-foragers. A healthy diet and more free time are certainly positive parts of a foraging lifestyle. However, foraging life was not totally easy.

For example, foragers didn’t live long. The average forager lived between 21 and 37 years. The average person today lives 66 years. But these numbers move up and down. For example, life expectancy in Japan is 82 years. In Zambia, the African country, it’s 39 years (Gurven and Kaplan 2017). One of the main reasons for this extended life expectancy is due to medicine. It got better as human history progressed. There’s also evidence of violence in foraging communities. In addition, some members of foraging groups were left behind if they were too old or too ill to keep up.

Less work hours meant that foragers also had more time to meet up with nearby communities. They could create small networks. They shared food, tools, weapons, and ideas. Foraging groups built early trade networks. They also may have met up for spiritual or religious purposes, and perhaps shared beliefs about spiritual matters. Some probably had shared rituals and practices. Stonehenge in England may have been such a sacred site, some archaeologists believe.

A transition to a more settled way of life

Human communities only foraged for over 200,000 years. But humans started to spread around the Earth. Some began to move from foraging to a more settled way of life. Some of the earliest communities to change were those that lived in areas of abundance, like river valleys. Fertile soil and fresh water were available. As the climate warmed toward the end of the last ice age—about 12,000 years ago—these areas became lush. As a result, some human groups no longer had to move around as much to find food. These groups were some of the first to make a slow, long transition from foraging to a settled way of life. Soon they would mostly tend to animals and plants. Many communities continued to forage long after climates warmed. Still, some did embark on a new path of farming. This new way of getting food was challenging. But farming marks a significant transition in human history.

1 Some foraging communities relied more heavily on meat. People in the Americas certainly did. In these areas, mammoths and buffalo were more available and easy to hunt. Some archaeologists have suggested that this may have changed the roles of men and women in those areas. However, others disagree. They say hunting-based communities still had relative equality between men and women.