Nomadic: pertaining to, being, or resembling a member of a group or tribe that has no permanent home and moves from place to place

Forager: a person who searches for food or supplies

Modern humans have been on Earth for about 250,000 years. But most history courses, tend to only focus on the last 12,000 years. That’s because this period of human history came after the creation of farming, complex societies, and writing. But humans have lived as nomadic foragers for far longer than they’ve lived as sedentary (settled) farmers. Even once people began farming, many communities still continued to forage. This suggests that foraging must have been a pretty effective way to obtain resources and nourish the body. But what does it mean to be a forager? How did foragers live? And what kinds of cultures did foragers create?

The foraging way of life

Forager societies existed—and in some cases still exist—all around the world. Foraging societies were incredibly diverse, depending on the environments they called home. But evidence from the past lets us draw some generalizations about forager societies and the ways in which their lives were different from those of farmers.

Here are four generalizations about foraging societies:

• Foraging is the gathering and hunting of food. Foragers move around their environment and use what nature provides, rather than intensively changing or using it to produce food in a small area. That means that they had to be pretty mobile, to hunt or gather different kinds of food, often available in different seasons, across often quite large areas. Foragers were often on the move.
• Foraging produces less food than farming. As a result, foraging couldn’t support a large number of people in a single community. In foraging communities, humans generally lived in family units, usually with no more than 20 to 50 people in their groups. Foragers moved around to obtain more resources once one area had been picked over. Both the difficulty of organizing people in this nomadic lifestyle, and limits on the amount of food available, meant that human communities tended to keep their group numbers low. Smaller communities were more likely to have enough food, and also easier to keep moving together.
Egalitarian: of, pertaining to, based on, or characterized by belief in the principle of equal rights for everyone
• Labor may have been divided based on gender. Men would hunt and women would gather. But the work of both was necessary for survival and was probably viewed as equal in the eyes of the group. Whatever food and other resources were gathered were then generally distributed in an egalitarian way—so that everybody got something.
• Foragers had more free time than farmers. Hunting and gathering did not take up the whole day. Most of the community’s resources could be gathered in about four to six hours of the day. In turn, foragers had more time to sit by the fire and share stories of the day than those who would later become farmers.

But hang on a moment! Recent research has shown that some of these characterizations weren’t true for all foraging societies. For example, archaeological findings from the Andes Mountains show that women in foraging societies there played a role in hunting large animals. Remains from elsewhere suggest that the division of labor between the genders was often quite flexible. A lot of evidence shows that foragers sometimes transformed whole landscapes. In Australia and North America, for example, scientists have shown that foraging societies used controlled fires to stimulate seed-bearing plants to grow, or to herd animals for hunting. At times, they also selected the best seeds and dispersed them to get better food to grow. It’s also likely that not all foraging societies gathered food sustainably. In some places—most notably the Americas and Australia—foragers probably killed all the large animals by overhunting them. Many foraging societies were not egalitarian. There’s evidence from burials and other archaeological sites that in some places, some members of society did easier labor and got better food than others. Finally, foragers experienced many challenges that may have taken away from their leisure time, from dealing with dangerous animals to finding enough resources in times of drought or floods.

Paleolithic culture and shared human experiences

Still, there seem to be many similarities linking foraging societies in different regions. That may be because they all tended to share a relatively simple set of tools. These were Paleolithic tools, the earliest toolkit humans devised. Paleolithic tools included many modified stones—that’s where the name comes from: paleo (old) and lithic (stone). These stones were turned into hand axes, knives, or spearpoints. Other tool components probably included animal parts like bones, hides, teeth, and scales that could be used for different purposes.

Over time, the Paleolithic toolkit got bigger and tended to become more specialized and unique for each foraging community. This specialization in the later Paleolithic period was partly because different kinds of materials were available for making tools, and partly because the foods available in each region required unique solutions. But these differences also arose because each group of foragers began to develop its own culture.

What is a culture? For our purposes, we’re going to use historian Bob Bain’s definition for this term: “Ideas, beliefs, and practices that are acquired, created, or learned as a member of a group to manage human challenges.” For early humans living in the Paleolithic era, these challenges might have included:

• How to maintain order and manage conflicts between group members and with strangers.
• How to produce and distribute food, shelter, and other requirements for survival.
• How to communicate.
• How to deal with nature.
• How to organize labor.
• How to manage relationships between old and young, men and women, and parents and children.
• How to design and use tools.

One of the special things about humans, including both ourselves and every Paleolithic community in our past, is that we solve these sorts of challenges through communication.

Foraging groups developed names for different animals and plants to tell others where to find them, how to prepare them, or the best way to capture them. Communication was also necessary for safety: to keep the fire burning at night to ward off animals, or to learn how to interact with other groups in the local area. Decisions had to be made about the best way to raise children and how to teach them the necessary skills to survive. Information was passed down orally from one generation to the next about which plants were poisonous, or which ones might help cure an illness, all of which was a trial-and-error process. Stories were also shared about common beliefs or how certain groups explained natural phenomena like a flood or an eclipse.

Language played a crucial role in allowing humans to develop and share beliefs. Communities that lived close to one another usually spoke similar languages or they were able to speak the languages of their community and of the other communities in their region. Sometimes, a particular set of skills or even a specific culture was invented by one group and then shared or adopted by others in that area who were part of the same language network. In this way, ideas could spread across large regions. For example, consider the Venus of Willendorf figure shown above. Figures of this shape, size, and structure were found in multiple areas across Afro-Eurasia from the Paleolithic era. These figures may have had some spiritual meaning or been used to help overcome challenges, such as infertility. These statues may indicate that beliefs and ideas were communicated and shared across many communities. All of these practices combined to form a particular group or community’s culture. These practices included how they acquired, created, or learned the best ways to survive in their particular set of circumstances.

During the Paleolithic, humans developed and shared responses to challenges and the ways in which they responded are how human cultures began to emerge. However, human culture can vary greatly depending on the different challenges faced in every environment. That’s why there are such a variety of beliefs, practices, and experiences among humans today. Sometimes these differences lead to arguments, violence, and distrust, but overall, these differences make humans unique, and our ability to share and mix these cultures adds diversity to the world.