This Fleeting World

Beginnings:
The Era of
Foragers
The era of foragers was the time in human history when all human
communities lived by searching out or hunting food and other
things they needed, rather than by growing or manufacturing them.
Such people are also called “hunter-gatherers.” This era is also known as
the “Paleolithic era” (Paleolithic means “old Stone Age”). The era of foragers
was the first and by far the longest era of human history. It was the time
when the foundations of human history were laid down.
Foragers gather the resources they need for food, for shelter and clothing,
and for ritual activities and other purposes. For the most part they do
so without trying to transform their environment. The exceptional cultural
and technological creativity of human foragers distinguishes their lifeways
(the many different ways in which people relate to their environments and
to each other) from the superficially similar lifeways of nonhuman species,
such as the great apes. Only humans can communicate using symbolic
language. Language allows men and women to share and accumulate
knowledge in detail and with great precision. As a result of this constant
sharing of knowledge, the skills and lifeways of ancient foragers gradually
adapted to a huge variety of environments, creating a cultural and technological
variety that has no parallel among any other large species. The
extraordinary facility with which human communities adapted to new
circumstances and environments is the key to human history.
As far as we know, the earliest human beings were foragers; thus, the
era of foragers began about 250,000 years ago, when modern humans—
members of our own species, Homo sapiens—first appeared on Earth.
Although some foraging communities exist even today, the era of foragers
ended about ten thousand years ago with the appearance of the first agricultural
communities because after that time foraging ceased to be the
only lifeway practiced by human societies.