What were hunter-gatherer societies?

Hunter-gatherer societies — also called foraging societies — represent the original and longest-lasting form of human social organization. For at least 290,000 of Homo sapiens' roughly 300,000-year existence, every human on Earth lived this way. It was only with the development of agriculture around 10,000 BCE that some populations began transitioning to a fundamentally different way of life.

Typically organized in bands of 20 to 50 closely related individuals, hunter-gatherers sustained themselves through a combination of hunting wild animals, fishing, and gathering wild plants, nuts, fruits, and insects. Despite popular misconceptions about a "nasty, brutish, and short" existence, ethnographic studies of modern foraging peoples suggest many enjoyed more leisure time, better nutrition, and greater social equality than early farming communities.

Hunter-gatherer societies were remarkably diverse — from the Arctic Inuit to the Australian Aborigines to the San of southern Africa. But they shared certain features: egalitarian social structures that actively resisted hierarchy, deep ecological knowledge accumulated over generations, flexible residence patterns, and rich oral traditions. Resources were typically shared through reciprocal obligations rather than accumulated by individuals.

The transition away from foraging was neither inevitable nor universally beneficial. Studies of skeletal remains show early farmers were shorter, more disease-prone, and nutritionally stressed compared to their foraging contemporaries. What agriculture offered was not individual quality of life but collective power — the ability to support far more people per square mile, enabling the population densities that would eventually give rise to civilizations.