What was the Hunter Gatherer Period?

Champions of the primitive often see the Hunter-Gatherer Period (HGP) in human history as some type of ideal—a Shangri-La in which humanity lived in blissful coexistence with its environment, resources were rarely strained, and the struggle for territory was, at most, ephemeral.

More detailed studies of hunter-gatherer societies that have existed on the periphery of great civilizations reveal that this ideal does not entirely accord with observed realities. Nevertheless, there are many positive aspects associated with this lifestyle. Simplicity, an egalitarian social ethos, kinship within smaller bands, and a focus on the fundamentals of human existence are just a few that spring to mind.

In a world where persistence was often the optimal strategy for survival over substantial spans of time, the longevity of the HGP—by some accounts, roughly 1.8 million years if we trace its origins back to Homo erectus, although perhaps 70,000 years or so when considering anatomically modern Homo sapiens—is testament to the viability of this way of life.

The term “Hunter-Gatherer Period” is itself somewhat of a misnomer, as many humans survived during this era through a combination of hunting, scavenging, and foraging. Nor were hunting methods necessarily as clean or straightforward as mythology would have us believe. Persistence hunting, involving the tracking and pursuit of prey over long distances, may have been relatively common in some environments. At the same time, the basic foundations of wild-forest gardening and the deliberate management of plant resources may have helped provide a transition toward the Agricultural Revolution that would eventually supersede the hunter-gatherer way of life.

In the West, however, what brought this period to an end appears to have been a combination of factors: overexploitation of local resources, unsustainable hunting in some regions, and, perhaps most importantly, the expanding footprint of agricultural communities beginning roughly 12,000 years ago. As agriculture spread, it transformed landscapes, populations, and the very economic foundations upon which hunter-gatherer societies depended.

Will it return? Perhaps in a post-apocalyptic scenario—The Walking Dead certainly hints at such a possibility. Yet the hunter-gatherer way of life did more than simply precede agriculture. It provided the foundation upon which the Agricultural Revolution could emerge and, in that sense, may have represented a necessary stage in the collective evolution of what would eventually become Human Civilization.