A lot of my kids showed a lot of confusion about how hunter-gatherers and nomads might have lived at the end of the Paleolithic age or the beginning of the Neolithic, sometime between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago. This text is now about two pages long, and encompasses most of what I know about hunter-gatherer peoples, and their methods and means. It’s also probably inaccurate, but I thought it was sufficiently good that I wanted to post it, and get constructive feedback. Anything you can think to add or edit would be useful.
Early Neolithic peoples lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, in small extended families. Each tribe lived within a large territory, up to a hundred miles in every direction. It included diverse landscapes. Moving around in tune with seasonal rhythms, Neolithic tribes people viewed their territory as a complete world. They knew the landscape intimately.
In summer, a tribe settled in the plains near a lake or watering hole. The pond provided the tribe with fish; men hunted in the surrounding grasslands for deer and antelope. Women gathered berries and medicinal herbs from thickets and small woodlands.
As summer waned, wary animals moved away. Plants died or dried out, and women would have to travel farther to provide food and medicines. The tribe celebrated summer, then packed and moved. A slow walk of ten days brought them to the seacoast, where salt marshes provided birds, fish and shellfish. Careful work turned oyster and clam shells into beads and knives. The occasional pearl adorned a necklace for a chief.
As autumn continued, the tribe moved again, to hunting grounds for woolly mammoths or horses. Here they would pass the winter, living off of herbs, seeds and nuts gathered in autumn, and meat from the animals they chose to hunt. During the coldest weeks, when the storms were worst, they stayed indoors and made new tools, carved statuettes, or decorated clothing and baskets. They used bird feathers to make fancy headdresses, and beads to make armbands and bracelets.
When winter ended, the tribe followed the horses into the mountains, There, goats and sheep became their prey. Here the tribe gathered wool for string making, killed animals to make leather for clothing and armor, and slaughtered sheep to make warm winter clothes.
There in a mountain cave, the men initiated their sons into manhood, surrounded by painted scenes of the animals they hunted. Girls underwent their own initiation at the time they first menstruated, and it became possible for them to bear children. When the tribe encountered strangers, warriors would approach visitors first, and determine if trade or warfare would follow. More often than not, meetings with other people were chances to trade beads, leather, clothes, and even technologies and ideas.
Each tribe practiced some division of labor. Men hunted animals to provide meat for their families. Animal protein provided high-energy food, and the bones and skins were vital components of human survival. Some men hunted alone, and went after smaller animals like squirrels, rabbits, and possibly deer — game that had little chance to fight back. These men used traps, bows and arrows, and atlatls to bring down small game. Some men hunted for fish from dugout canoes, using fishhooks hung from lines, and nets. They captured large schools with weirs — enclosures of stone or basketwork built right in the water — and used conical nets to snare lobsters, crayfish and crabs.
Other men hunted in groups, and went after larger herd animals like mammoths, horses, and bison. They used stabbing spears, throwing spears, atlatls and cliff ambushes as their tools. The men worked in groups to corner, cut off, and kill their prey. All the hunters made use of the full moon and the weather to take advantage of animals; the full moon provided enough light to hunt and dress an animal’s carcass; the dark of the moon hid human movements from predatory animals who competed with humans for food.
Back in camp, men filled leadership roles, acting as chiefs and traders with other tribes, and sometimes as medicine men or shamans. Some men went on long journeys to trade beads, stones, leather, furs and other sought-after goods. The men played games with knucklebones, an early form of dice, and engaged in contests of skill with throwing spears and bows and arrows. They also may have begun the process of taming and domesticating dogs, horses, camels, cattle, cats and sheep.
Women demonstrated early the power of multi-tasking. Younger and more mobile women gathered nuts, roots, seeds, berries, edible leaves and roots. Older mothers with infants looked after the camp and took care of children. They prepared the foods, both day-to-day meals and the elaborate feasts when hunters brought home meat, or travelers from distant places. When grass was plentiful, some women braided cordage for rope or basketry. They used primitive looms or boiled water to make cloth and felt out of wool, cotton fibers, hemp fibers and even mammoth fur.
Women also took on leadership roles. As fire tenders, house keepers, and as mothers of the tribe’s children, the women often decided when a girl was ready to be married, and when a boy was ready for his initiation to manhood. They could be keepers of the tribe’s stories and legends, and controlled much of the tribe’s plant lore and mysteries. At least some of the women would be skilled as medical practitioners of sorts, helping women through childbirth and caring for the elders of the tribe. In some places, where the role of men in the creation of children was not well-understood, they had power flowing from their ability to create life — apparently without help — and bring new humans into the world.
In the evenings, the tribe gathered around the fire. Conversation flourished, as hunters told stories of the crazy antelope who bucked and kicked around the watering hole, and women told of the plants they had found, or the medicines they made. Perhaps the tribe made music, either through singing or through playing instruments — drums, perhaps a flute, perhaps a plucked string made from horse tendon or sheep gut. Strangers would be invited to tell of their travels, and the things they had seen and heard.
Over time, many hunter-gatherer groups discovered they could gather far more food than they could eat. As a result, many tribes began to designate specific men and women to do specific jobs for the tribe. A disabled man made the tribe’s stone knives and arrowheads. A blind made baskets from bundles of grass others brought her. An elderly man became the tribe’s physician and medicine man, who guarded the tribe from evil spirits and set broken bones. An old woman and her crippled daughter mixed potions to ward off disease.
Over generations, tribes became too large. Then they split their numbers and their skills, and divided their hunting and gathering grounds. Meetings between tribes became more frequent. Some sites took on sacred significance, while others became trading camps and sites for battles between rival clans. The tribes cooperated with each other in eliminating predators — bears, wolves, and big cats — from their territories, and in eliminating the more troublesome males from the herd animals they pursued for food. Opportunities for trade became more common; so did chances for warfare and rivalry.
Trade may have been haphazard. In many cultures, gift-giving and gambling took the place of outright trades of equal value. Related tribes took this a step further by establishing specific gift-giving patterns — in which one chief honors another, who honors another, who honors the first chief — so that no one in an established circle of related tribes would be left out. Tribes sheltered strangers and fellow tribesmen alike, under an iron-clad code of hospitality: do not let a guest be injured under your roof, nor allow the guest to do injury to others.
War, such as it was, was also haphazard. At the slightest hint of some real or perceived insult or slight, the men of the tribe would march out of camp, usually to some pre-arranged spot where the warriors of the other tribe would meet them. The battle consisted of a two or three hour boasting match, followed by a single combat between warriors from both sides.
If one-on-one fighting failed to decide the issue, an all out melee ensued, in which a dozen or twenty spears might be thrown. The side that broke and ran usually lost not only their honor but their lives. Victors hunted down survivors, and united the losing tribe’s women with their own. In places where the men survived, they often suffered great abuse and injury from the women of their own tribe. No one tribe could afford to lose too many battles; without men, hunting would come to a standstill, and their women and children would starve.
Gradually, many such clans took control of the landscape, with each tribe ruling different parts of the land, yet united by a common belief that the whole landscape belonged to them together. The roaming tribes were becoming settled and sedentary, living off the land’s abundance.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Okay, I sent you an email with a long list of books and such, I hope it helps! 🙂
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Try the bibliography for The Cartoon History Of the Universe, Vol. 1. The chapter on early human development is good, encompassing several varieties of early “lifestyles” and areas.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
It makes me very happy that you want to know this. I sent an email to my former anthropology teacher/mentor and asked if he could recommend some material (he knows a hell of a lot more than I do). So I’ll wait to see if I get a response from him soon. Let me know if you need some stuff sooner if you haven’t heard from me and I’ll work more on digging it up.
Serenitysolaris@gmail.com
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Maybe, but I need to be schooled in this stuff. I need the data, and the source materials, so I can figure out how to interpret it to my kids.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
This is totally constructive.
Now I have some serious stuff to add and ask and change…
Armor needs to come out; I actually knew that. I want to include something about housing.
I wrote this based on a vague sense of how tribes lived, but in point of fact it’s not based on any specific group. I want sources. I want places to go for more information. I want links. I want hard data so I can talk about some specific peoples.
The trouble is, there’s lots of stuff now on Paleolithic living — evolution of hominids into humans, tool use, language, stuff like that. The kids have lots of material available to them. THere’s virtually nothing describing life 20,000 years ago, though, and how it gradually shaded into pastoralism and farming on two parallel and interweaving tracks before merging into a coherent sedentary/chalkolithic framework around 3500 to 2900 BCE or so.
I have directions printing as I write
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Okay, so that made me sound like a pretentious bitch, but I know you could school me in standard history.
sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
* I think this is pretty good if you are going on the basis of a particular (north american native?) tribal group. I would recommend indicating the specific group you got this information about because even within the north american natives there were many distinct cultural areas and traditions.
* If this is site specific you may want to include what style of housing they utilized.
* Groups tended to be around 25- 30 individuals
* Hunter-gatherers did not tend to make armor. Armor and military efforts tend to come in with agriculture when people start to accumulate personal wealth which would attract raiders. Though this may have been accurate for the specific region.
* Late paleolithic-early neolithic peoples refer to a certain stage in the process of cultural development. They aren’t necessarily restricted to that time frame, some groups still exist today, but that might also be accurate based on the area.
* If you were looking to portray overall life of late paleolithic-early neolithic cultures, This wouldn’t be so accurate. Either way I might have some books to recommend, if you’re interested.
sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
* I think this is pretty good if you are going on the basis of a particular (north american native?) tribal group. I would recommend indicating the specific group you got this information about because even within the north american natives there were many distinct cultural areas and traditions.
* If this is site specific you may want to include what style of housing they utilized.
* Groups tended to be around 25- 30 individuals
* Hunter-gatherers did not tend to make armor. Armor and military efforts tend to come in with agriculture when people start to accumulate personal wealth which would attract raiders. Though this may have been accurate for the specific region.
* Late paleolithic-early neolithic peoples refer to a certain stage in the process of cultural development. They aren’t necessarily restricted to that time frame, some groups still exist today, but that might also be accurate based on the area.
* If you were looking to portray overall life of late paleolithic-early neolithic cultures, This wouldn’t be so accurate. Either way I might have some books to recommend, if you’re interested.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Okay, so that made me sound like a pretentious bitch, but I know you could school me in standard history.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Maybe, but I need to be schooled in this stuff. I need the data, and the source materials, so I can figure out how to interpret it to my kids.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
This is totally constructive.
Now I have some serious stuff to add and ask and change…
Armor needs to come out; I actually knew that. I want to include something about housing.
I wrote this based on a vague sense of how tribes lived, but in point of fact it’s not based on any specific group. I want sources. I want places to go for more information. I want links. I want hard data so I can talk about some specific peoples.
The trouble is, there’s lots of stuff now on Paleolithic living — evolution of hominids into humans, tool use, language, stuff like that. The kids have lots of material available to them. THere’s virtually nothing describing life 20,000 years ago, though, and how it gradually shaded into pastoralism and farming on two parallel and interweaving tracks before merging into a coherent sedentary/chalkolithic framework around 3500 to 2900 BCE or so.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
It makes me very happy that you want to know this. I sent an email to my former anthropology teacher/mentor and asked if he could recommend some material (he knows a hell of a lot more than I do). So I’ll wait to see if I get a response from him soon. Let me know if you need some stuff sooner if you haven’t heard from me and I’ll work more on digging it up.
Serenitysolaris@gmail.com
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Try the bibliography for The Cartoon History Of the Universe, Vol. 1. The chapter on early human development is good, encompassing several varieties of early “lifestyles” and areas.
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Okay, I sent you an email with a long list of books and such, I hope it helps! 🙂
Re: sorry for my redundantness – I hope this is constructive?
Have the list, no need to worry about redundantness.
How are things with the extended-family-meeting-wolfie fallout going? Nice pic, just a few entries ago. Sorry about the long delay in getting back to you.
I just found out rehearsal is at 7, we’re going out to eat after….I know directions from route 2 if you need ’em. I’ll email you my cell number.
We are going to the dinner!
So we’ll see you there…. except that I don’t know if we have directions, yet. Or know where we’re going. OR when we’re supposed to be there….
hey …thanks for the clarifications.
I am in the wedding too (as is my daughter)…are you guys coming to the rehearsal dinner?
Drum and Dance is next weekend due to Twilight Covening.
cya!
I have a role in the Tami and Bill Wedding, so I don’t think we’re going to make Drum and Dance.
A blind woman made baskets …
An atlatl is a spear thrower. It is a curved piece of wood, antler or bone that effectively gives the thrower a second elbow or wrist, and doubles the force and distance of a thrown spear. Pretty nifty.
Fishhooks in the early Neolithic were usually bone or antler. Metal wouldn’t come for another five or six thousand years.
Wow…..this was well written and informative…I wish I had had a teacher like you in my school years….I was left with a few questions:
1. “During the coldest weeks, when the storms were worst, they stayed indoors and made new tools, carved statuettes, or decorated clothing and baskets.”
This left me asking: “Where indoors? Did they build a structure, or did they use natural shelter, like a cave?”
2. You mentioned fish hooks….how were these made? metal? bone?
3. one typo: “A blind made baskets from bundles of grass others brought her.”
4. What the hell is a “atlatls”?!?
see you this weekend….maybe tonight?
Wow…..this was well written and informative…I wish I had had a teacher like you in my school years….I was left with a few questions:
1. “During the coldest weeks, when the storms were worst, they stayed indoors and made new tools, carved statuettes, or decorated clothing and baskets.”
This left me asking: “Where indoors? Did they build a structure, or did they use natural shelter, like a cave?”
2. You mentioned fish hooks….how were these made? metal? bone?
3. one typo: “A blind made baskets from bundles of grass others brought her.”
4. What the hell is a “atlatls”?!?
see you this weekend….maybe tonight?
I have a role in the Tami and Bill Wedding, so I don’t think we’re going to make Drum and Dance.
A blind woman made baskets …
An atlatl is a spear thrower. It is a curved piece of wood, antler or bone that effectively gives the thrower a second elbow or wrist, and doubles the force and distance of a thrown spear. Pretty nifty.
Fishhooks in the early Neolithic were usually bone or antler. Metal wouldn’t come for another five or six thousand years.
hey …thanks for the clarifications.
I am in the wedding too (as is my daughter)…are you guys coming to the rehearsal dinner?
Drum and Dance is next weekend due to Twilight Covening.
cya!
We are going to the dinner!
So we’ll see you there…. except that I don’t know if we have directions, yet. Or know where we’re going. OR when we’re supposed to be there….
I just found out rehearsal is at 7, we’re going out to eat after….I know directions from route 2 if you need ’em. I’ll email you my cell number.
I have directions printing as I write