1. What does it mean to be a Hunter- gatherer?

A hunter-gatherer society is a band, a small group of people, who are subsistent and usually migrate to accommodate their needs. Everybody in this society has a job. The men go out and hunt and the women and children gather natural food. For example, in the jungle, the gatherers would strip the bark from the sego trees and prepare the insides for eating. Gathering food is the most stable and reliable part of this society. Hunting normally doesn't bring home enough food to feed the community. Hunter and gatherer communities, as I mentioned before, are subsistent meaning their main focus is survival. They don't have a surplus of materials and they don't have any extra luxuries. The gatherers do a lot of hard work while the hunters rarely come home with food, so the gatherers tend to support the community the most. Natural foods don't have enough calories to feed a lot of people, so hunter-gatherer societies have limited population. This relates to Malthus theory that the human race grows too quickly and the Earth will run out of resources to feed the people. Although these societies did struggle with these disadvantages, they had a great connection with nature that they expressed through art. They treated animals as other people, as equals, and they maintained a very spiritual relationship with nature, triggering artwork of animals such as horses and elephants. Hunter-gatherer societies are productive societies that survive on minimal resources and still exist today.

Kate Ainbinder for extra information: http://hraf.yale.edu/resources/faculty/explaining-human-culture/hunter-gatherers-foragers-2/

sources: My First Farmers Video Notes

picture: http://www.kenmore.org/ferryfarm/archaeology/arch_special/hunters.html