Hunter-gatherers have historically been viewed either as savages or as naturalists in tune with their environment. Early thinkers like Hobbes and Lubbock portrayed hunter-gatherers as living in a brutal state of nature, constantly struggling for survival. More recently, scholars like Flannery have taken a more positive view, seeing hunter-gatherers as skilled botanists who used ingenious techniques to thrive in diverse environments. There is also a debate around whether hunting or gathering provided more to survival and about the gender roles and relationship to nature within hunter-gatherer societies.

1. Hunter Gatherers: The Debate - Savages or Naturalists

2. What words come to mind?

3. Savages “ No culture of the earth: no navigation…no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” Hobbes, 1651

4. Savages “… he is the slave to his own wants, his own passions; imperfectly protected from the weather, he suffers from cold by night and the heat of the sun by day; ignorant of agriculture, living by the chase, and improvident in success, hunger always stares him in the face, and often drives him to the dreadful alternative of cannibalism or death.” Lubbock, 1879

5. Romantic “ We no longer think of pre-ceramic plant collectors as a ragged and scruffy band of nomads; instead, they appear as a practiced and ingenious team of lay botanists who know how to wring the most out of a superficially bleak environment.” Flannery

6. Hunter-Gatherer or Gatherer-Hunter? Which was more important to survival?

7. Describe their economy

8. How did they survive?

9. What was their relationship to nature?

10. Describe the gender roles