forests and arid regions in the develop-
ing world that are deemed undesirable
Geography
In The
News™
Neal Lineback
and Mandy Lineback Gritzner
MODERN HUNTER-
GATHERERS
In some parts of the world people still
make survive by hunting and gathering.
National Geographic magazine recently
published an article detailing the lives
of the Hadza people of northern Tanza-
nia. The Hadza live as their ancestors did
10,000 years ago—as hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherers hunt game and collect
plant foods (called foraging) in the wild
rather than growing or tending crops. An-
thropologists use the term hunter-gather-
ers to describe a particular type of lifestyle,
one that was practiced by all human be-
ings until the advent of agriculture about
10,000 years ago.
In fact, 90 percent of human existence
has involved hunting and gathering. The
first hunter-gatherers
probably collected sea-
food, eggs, nuts and
fruits and scavenged
dead animals.
When the Neolithic
period began about
10,000 years ago, plants
and animals started to be
domesticated and agri-
culture began spreading.
Food production allowed
populations to increase
and farm-based societ-
ies began to displace or
destroy the habitats of
hunter-gatherer groups.
With the resulting pres-
sure for land use, many
Geography in the News 2/26/10
hunter-gatherers gradu-
ally adopted agriculture
or pastoralism (raising Sources: Finkel, Michael, “The Hadza,” National Geographic, December 2009,
livestock). As villages, pgs. 94-119; and Kelly, Robert L., 1995, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in
towns and fiefdoms
emerged, widespread
hunter-gatherer lifestyle all but ended in a
relatively short time span .
Today, while almost all human beings
rely on agriculture for food, some very
small communities of hunter-gatherers
still exist. Many of them live in tropical
According to National Geographic, the
Hadza lifestyle is very important to an-
for agricultural use. Over the centuries,
they were pushed to these marginal lands.
Small groups of scattered true hunter-
gatherer groups live in the Amazon, the
Arctic, Papua New Guinea, Australia, the
Andaman Islands and Africa. Robert Kelly
(The Foraging Spectrum. 1995) has identi-
fied 92 hunter-gatherer groups around the
world, some of whom may be only mar-
ginally hunter-gatherers. However, there
likely are many more unidentified groups
around the world.
As an example, the Hadza people live
in the wild lands of northern Tanzania
around Lake Eyasi in the Great Rift Val-
ley. Like most hunter-gatherers, they are
nomadic, having no fixed residence and
moving from place to place in search of
food and water according to the seasons.
Agricultural encroachment has whittled
the Hadza hunting and gathering land
down over the years to a quarter of the
4,000-plus square miles (10, 360 sq. km)
that the group once used. The Hadza now
number about 1,000, but only about 300 re-
main true hunter-gatherers.
The Hadza have neither crops nor live-
stock. Men and women have a distinct
division of labor. The men are responsible
for procuring meat, honey and the fruit of
the baobab tree. In the dry season, the men
Exploring Today’s Hunter-Gatherers
©2010
Hadza
Hunter-Gatherer Groups
Source: Kelly 1995
Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways. Percheron Press: New York.
wait at watering holes to kill game with
bows and arrows treated with poison.
Women specialize in foraging tubers, ber-
ries and greens. Most women carry a “dig-
ging stick,” a knife and a skin pouch for
holding foraged foodstuffs.
©2010 Maps.com
thropologists. It offers a glimpse of what
societies might have been like before the
advent of agriculture. The Hadza have
never suffered major infectious disease
outbreaks, perhaps because they have nev-
er lived in densely packed populations.
They have never experienced famine and
their diet is more stable and varied than
most people of the world. They have plen-
ty of leisure time and they have hardly left
an imprint upon the earth.
Unlike the Hadza who could feasibly
grow crops, the hunter-gatherer communi-
ties of the Arctic have no means to support
agriculture. The Arctic experiences long
periods of bitter cold, extreme seasonal
differences in sunlight and little natural
vegetation. For these reasons, most Arctic
hunter-gatherers subsist almost entirely
on meat.
Various groups of hunter-gatherers live
in the circumpolar region of the earth. They
are small subsets of the Inuit of northern
Alaska, Canada and Greenland and the
Yupik of western Alaska, Alaskan coastal
zones and areas of Russia. They exploit a
variety of Arctic animals including seal,
walrus, caribou, whales, polar bear, water-
fowl and fish to meet their caloric needs.
All of the world’s hunter-gatherer societ-
ies are fascinating. Their reasons for retain-
ing the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle are varied, from
lack of suitable agricul-
tural land to continuing
the ancestral ways. For
most, it is “just the way
it’s always been done.”
Virtually all hunter-
gatherer societies are
small and their members
have a deep appreciation
for the land and water
resources that support
them.
As time passes, these
groups are diminish-
ing in number as pres-
sures on their resources
encourage, if not force,
C. Franko/T. Smith
them to adapt new tech-
nologies. Studying these
societies is an urgent
matter while so few re-
main.
And that is Geography
in the News™. February 26, 2010. #1030.
Co-authors are Neal Lineback, Appalachian
State University Professor Emeritus of
Geography, and Geographer Mandy Lineback
Gritzner. University News Director Jane
Nicholson serves as technical editor.