Question: How Was Early Man Life From Food Gatherer To Food Producer?

Anonymous
February 22, 2010

Answers

Anonymous's picture

People who practice a hunting and gathering subsistence strategy simply rely on whatever food is available in their local habitat, for the most part collecting various plant foods, hunting wild game, and fishing (where the environment permits).

They collect but they do not produce any food. For example, crops are not cultivated and animals are not kept for meat or milk. Hunters and gathers do and did modify the landscape to increase the amount of available food. One of the main ways hunters and gatherers modified their environment was through the use of burning. Today, only about 30,000 people make their living in this fashion.

Cultures of agriculturalists, having larger ecological footprints have pushed most hunters and gatherers out of the areas where plant food and game is abundant into the more marginal of the earth: the Arctic, arid deserts, and dense tropical rain forests.