The Antiquity of Hunter-Gatherers Revisited

Summary

One of the challenges of Paleoanthropology is developing coherent models for ancient social and economic systems that have no close analogues in the recent archaeological and historical records. Systematic observations of variability among recent foragers produced by Binford, Kelly and others, are vital tools for understanding early humans. They provide necessary frames of reference for predicting variation, and for understanding why observations may not fit predictions. In a 2001 paper we argued that Middle Paleolithic hominins were very different kinds of hunter-gatherers than recent humans. Data accumulated over the past decade provide an opportunity to refine and reshape these arguments. Both theoretical and empirical findings highlight the importance of demographic factors in explaining the anomalous features of the Middle Paleolithic record. However, this begs the question of what might account for differences in the demographic potentials of hominin populations.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Foraging Spectra: Hunter-Gatherer Diversity in Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage