A continent of hunter-gatherers?

Abstract

In the popular Western imagination the nineteenth century unilineal social evolutionary theories of Tylor, Morgan and Spencer are often still commonly held in which ‘hunter-gatherer’ is essentially a metaphor for primitive in which – to quote Hobbes – life was ‘… nasty brutish and short’. The idea that hunters and gatherers lived a perilous existence – eking out a living, teetering on the brink of existence, desperately seeking the next meal – is a powerful trope in the Western imagination with the idea that it is only when we became farmers that we truly ‘progressed.’

Topics & Concepts