Question

Assignment Details Scenario One of the possible reasons that hunters and gatherers do not work more than they do may be to avoid overexploitation of their environment. Think about this: overhunting might allow people to feast for a few days, but over the long run, the effect would simply be to destroy the local game supplies. Hunters and gatherers also demonstrate less patriarchy and ownership taboos than industrial society members. You will explore these differences in a PowerPoint presentation for this assignment. Assignment Details Use this Hunter-Gatherers resource page as a starting point. There, you will find an in-depth examination of the hunter-gatherer society as well as additional sources to explore. Make sure you use and refer to at least two sources in your presentation. Use this template to create a presentation of 10–14 slides, with speaker notes. A title and reference slide should be included. PowerPoint help is available through Smarthinking. Be sure cover the following in your presentation: What are 2 examples of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies? How do hunters and gatherers view rights to land? How do hunters and gatherers view rights to property, such as tools or personal possessions? What evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies have a conservationist ethic? What can an industrial, modern society learn from hunter-gatherer societies?

Answer 1

A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging (collecting wild plants and pursuing wild animals). Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species.

Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change have been displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world.

Modern hunter-gatherer groups

• Aeta people.
• Aka people.
• Andamanese people.
• Angu people.

Hunter-gatherers typically are small groups and tend to recognize collective rights to the products of their territory within the group. Members of other groups (bands or tribes) can seek permission to collect or hunt, but usually this involves some level of negotiation and gift exchange. Hunter-gatherers are entirely dependent upon the land they live on for survival. As such they were generally very conscious about landuse rights. At the same time, because of small group size and common taboos on kin marriage, they also needed to maintain cordial relations with neighboring groups. In areas where resources are dispersed in a coarsely “patchy” manner, one group may have access to an “excess” of some resource (say workable tool stone) while another has good access to fishing grounds and riparian resources (good for basketry, tool hafts, weapon manufacture, etc. By maintaining polite relations and intermarriage, the two groups through goods and spouse exchange can smooth out the difficulties that patchy resource availablility create.

While the evidence of environment-specific adaptation in hunter-gatherers from genomic studies is a major focus of this review, we also consider and account for the ethical implications of this research. Marginalized by the spread of agricultural and industrialized societies, modern hunter-gatherers have often been confined to liminal environments worldwide, from the Arctic tundra to the rainforests of equatorial Africa and the Australian desert. Because these societies are inherently reliant on a mobile lifestyle to procure their subsistence, many of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are threatened by the imposition of political boundaries and property rights that severely restrict their ability to access traditional resources. The richness of the hunter-gatherer genetic heritage combined with the exclusion of these societies from many of the formal institutions of the nation-states that control their traditional homelands suggests that they should be considered vulnerable populations by bioethicists and genomic researchers

The modern society can learn the below things from the hunter-gatherer societies

Providing children with ample time to play and explore and thereby to learn

Providing children with the culture's tools so they could practice using them

Allowing children to observe and participate in adult activities, and tolerating children's interruptions

Showing how, and presenting information, to children who wished to know

Exercising children's natural desires to share and give