Almost everyone in modern Britain has more material possessions than any
hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they have a true "place" in the society we have created.
Both teams obtained the same striking result: Iberian
hunter-gatherers had a remarkable mix of genes, showing that they descended from two profoundly distinct groups of early European
hunter-gatherers.
But studies show that when people born into
hunter-gatherer societies move to large cities and adopt Western lifestyles, they develop high rates of obesity and metabolic disease just like everyone else.
In periods of drought or food shortages, when
hunter-gatherers were forced to move more often, the populations of house mice and field mice reached a balance.
* The site has been inhabited for 6,000 years, first by
hunter-gatherers and later by the Khoikhoi (Khoi, spelled Khoekhoe in standardized Khoekhoe/Nama orthography) and used as a place of worship and a site to conduct rituals.
As the
hunter-gatherers didn't go to sleep at sunset and didn't wake up at sunrise, light exposure probably didn't have much effect on their sleep patterns.
Ensuing busts and retreat of pastoral frontiers seldom resulted in much of a reprieve for
hunter-gatherer communities as in many cases the damage had already been done and it was usually a matter of time before abandoned land was re-occupied again.
Allow me to support my
hunter-gatherer theory with this amazing story comparing city and tribal children from Kwa Zulu, South Africa.
FURTHER to Mr Robert Dutton's letter (Views of the North, August 25), I recall my first geography lesson in 1956 which began by Mrs Young writing on the board: "Man is a
hunter-gatherer." I got my O-level in geography and my
hunter-gatherer genes from well before Stone Age times, so perhaps last night's dinner was quite normal.
A study reported in the March II issue of Science casts doubt on this theory, known as "inclusive fitness." A research team led by the anthropologists Kim Hill of Arizona State University and Robert Walker of the University of Missouri analyzed data on band composition for 32 contemporary
hunter-gatherer societies.
In the
hunter-gatherer era, any stressful situation was of a physical nature where the physiological response was to prepare to either fight or flee from the danger.