Hunter-Gatherer Societies

For roughly 95% of human history, every person on Earth lived as a A way of life based on hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. This was the universal human lifestyle for over 200,000 years, until the agricultural revolution began approximately 12,000 years ago.. No farming, no cities, no writing, no states. Small groups of humans moved through landscapes, found food, and made do.

We tend to treat this era as a prelude, the boring stretch before civilization got going. That framing is wrong. Hunter-gatherer life shaped our bodies, our psychology, our social wiring, and even our modern anxieties far more than the comparatively brief experiment of settled civilization has.

The basic unit of hunter-gatherer life was the A small, mobile group of 20–80 individuals, typically connected by kinship, that forms the basic social unit of hunter-gatherer life. Bands are flexible — people can leave and join different bands., a group of roughly 20 to 80 people, usually connected by kinship. Several bands in the same region might share a language and intermarry, forming a wider network of perhaps 500 to 1,000 individuals.