Hunter-Gatherers

When scholars like Marshall Sahlins or Jared Diamond contrast hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, they do so with the suggestion that hunter-gatherers were in many ways healthier than us. Diamond reaches the conclusion that the Neolithic agricultural revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look

Hunter-gatherer societies around the world have incredibly different diets, some of them very extreme, and almost never suffer from obesity.

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients.

One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.

Three characteristics consistently found in foraging societies roughly align with social, physical, and psychological realms: egalitarianism, mobility, and gratitude. Other aspects of hunter-gatherer life can be seen as extensions of these essential qualities, which anthropologists and ethnographers agree to be ubiquitous among practically all fora

Most of the daily activities of contemporary foragers from the Australian desert to the Arctic Circle have remained remarkably consistent since preagricultural times, including how they hunt, gather, prepare food, build their shelters, make collective decisions, resolve conflict, educate their children, and so on.