THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUNTER-GATHERER TECHNOLOGY
Technology has always been closely linked to the ways in which people have lived. Before the development of civilization, humans lived for many millennia with tools and techniques that allowed them to live successfully in a wide variety of environments. From primitive stone implements to fairly sophisticated and specialized tools, prehistoric humans developed technologies that allowed them to increase their control over the natural world. In return, the tools that they used increasingly changed their way of life.
To discuss the entire breadth of human existence, vast lengths of time are required. Anthropologists have made convenient divisions to help us conceptualize this long time scale. Most generally, the term "prehistoric" is used to discuss all time before the use of writing, which began with the development of complex civilizations about 4000 BCE. But once we enter prehistoric time, we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of years. To make some sense of this vast time scale, other categories are used. First, and most ancient, is the Paleolithic Age. The term Paleolithic literally means "old stone" and gives an indication of how technology related to human existence. The Paleolithic Age extended from roughly two million to about 10,000 years BCE. This is an immense length of time. It is so large in fact that anthropologists have broken the Paleolithic Age into three subsections: Lower Paleolithic (two million to 100,000 BCE), Middle Paleolithic (100,000 to 35,000 BCE), and Upper Paleolithic (35,000 to 10,000 BCE). Next comes the Mesolithic Age. It falls roughly between 10,000 and 8,000 years BCE. Mesolithic means "middle stone". The last period before the development of complex civilizations is the Neolithic Age, which falls roughly between 8,000 and beginnings of civilization. Neolithic means "new stone". Collectively, these three ages make up the prehistoric period of human existence, and they all relate to human tool-making activity.
The ability to make and use tools has seemingly always been a part of human abilities. The earliest tools date from the lower Paleolithic Age. These were stone tools used for smashing and perhaps scraping. Anthropologists call these tools "core" tools. They look, frankly, just like rocks to the uninitiated, and in fact it takes significant training to identify such primitive tools. Nevertheless, early humans employed such tools to extract food from their environment and to make it edible. They also perhaps used such tools to make rough shelters.
Pause a moment to consider what kinds of things you could do with such basic tools. Could you kill a small animal? Could you kill a large animal? Could you kill a bird? A fish? Can you begin to see how the tools that you use can limit your actions? Paleolithic humans probably used a number of tools and techniques for hunting, including coordinated hunting among members of the group. Whatever their methods, they were generally successful in extracting essential resources from their environment. This, of course, was the crucial test. Failure to extract food or shelter would mean certain death. The fact that you are here to read this essay is proof of the success of Paleolithic technology.
There was another important tool that was used during the lower Paleolithic Age. This was fire. Archeologists have found the remains of burned food, and even of cooking fires that date from as early as about 200,000 BCE. Think of the possible uses of fire. You can obviously cook with it, but is this essential? No, it is not. It is certainly possible to eat your food raw. (Try this next time you go to the cafeteria.) But what does the cooking of food do? Yes, it probably makes it taste better. But it also preserves food, doesn't it? How long does a cooked piece of steak last compared to, say, raw hamburger? Cooked food also has fewer parasites and bacteria. Of course Paleolithic humans knew nothing of micro-organisms, but the effect was the same for them as it is for us. Cooked food (food treated with fire) is healthier. Prehistoric people who used fire probably lived longer and had healthier lives.
What else can you do with fire? You can make artificial light. What significance might this have had? You can also hunt with fire. Native Americans on the Great Plains, for example, lit fires to drive huge herds of buffalo over cliffs to their deaths so that the people could have meat and skins. You can protect yourself with fire. There is one animal that is not afraid of fire -- the human animal, so fire can keep hungry predators at bay. You can also warm yourself with fire. This in turn has an impact on where you can live, doesn't it? After the harnessing of fire during the Paleolithic, people began to live in climates and altitudes that were much colder. The use of fire technology allowed people to live more securely, to extract resources from their environment, and to spread out over a greater part of the earth's surface than they had before.
Technology became increasingly important during the Paleolithic. But other techniques acquired for survival were just as, if not more, important. There were many problems associated with hunting; the hunters might not have found any animals, or the animals might have fought back, or fled. In fact, studies have suggested that the eating of meat was probably much less consistent in prehistoric societies than we would normally assume. So who provided the basic foods for most early humans?
There are other ways to get your food besides hunting. You can gather up what happens to be available. These basic activities that refer to the ways in which prehistoric people acquired their food and supplies are used to describe their fundamental lifestyle. Prehistoric people were "Hunter-Gatherers." This means that they lived by a combination of hunting food and finding the roots and fruits and nuts and leaves that their environment had to offer.
It is essential that you are familiar with the main characteristics of this lifestyle so that you will understand how profound the changes in lifestyle that came with civilization were. Hunter-gatherers were nomadic, they moved from place to place. They had to be nomadic in fact because they had a tendency to eat up all the food in a particular area. They did not produce food, they acquired it. Therefore, they relied on what the environment naturally provided. Soon, however, this natural supply of food would have been depleted, and the hunter-gathers needed to move to survive.
Hunter-gatherers could carry very little possessions with them. They lived in fairly small bands, most likely between about 50 and 200 persons. They tended to develop a gender-based division of labor where the men hunted while the women gathered various other foods. They were very much subject to the weather and natural disasters of all kinds. Their supply of food was limited to whatever existed in the immediate area. They also tended to be rather egalitarian within their social groups. This was human life during virtually the whole of the prehistoric period. It was as hunter-gatherers that humans evolved, and this is the reason why so many of us have trouble adapting to the very different lifestyle associated with civilized life. Physically, and perhaps mentally, we are still fundamentally hunter-gatherers.
Towards the end of the Paleolithic, new tools and techniques developed that allowed humans to more efficiently exploit their environments. In the upper Paleolithic, very specialized tools were made. Stone tools were still used, but there were tools made from other materials such as bone, antler and wood. There was also a significant increase in the knowledge of their environment since people during this period knew what animals to eat and how to catch them. They also had fairly good knowledge of what plants were edible. People regularly hunted large numbers of herd animals, for example. They knew how to store grains. They began to successfully hunt animals that are very hard to catch, animals such as birds, fish, lions, mountain goats, etc. These animals could only be hunted if people had the right technology and the right knowledge. The tool kit of prehistoric people was expanding.
The Mesolithic Age followed the Paleolithic, and technology developed very quickly. People made nets and fishhooks, sickles and baskets. They used bows and arrows and sleds and canoes. People dug storage pits to keep limited supplies of grains and dried meats. They domesticated dogs. They also learned even more about their environment and what it could yield. People ate frogs and snails. They ate insects and rodents. They found shellfish and semi-toxic plants. (Semi-toxic plants are edible if you cook them first, otherwise they poison you.) Think of the knowledge required to find and eat this stuff. Think of the technology required to harvest it. The ultimate result was a dramatic increase in the resource base. More food was taken from the environment, and there was therefore less of a need to move as often. More people could be fed.
The Neolithic Age however saw the most important technological breakthrough of the prehistoric period. It was during this age that humans developed the new technology of agriculture. This formed a radical new way of extracting food from the environment. In fact, where hunter-gatherers had only acquired their food by collecting what the environment offered, agriculturalists -- farmers -- managed to control the environment in such ways that they actually made it produce the food that they needed.
The consequences of this technology were tremendous. First, and most significant, farmers stopped being nomadic. They no longer had to roam the land in order to find enough food to eat. Now, humans that farmed became sedentary. They did not, indeed they could not, move. Humans became tied to the land. Another major consequence was that farmers began to produce an incredible amount of food. For the first time, people actually had a significant surplus of food. It was upon this agricultural surplus that civilization first developed.
New tools and new techniques for obtaining food were essential to the survival of the earliest human societies and to the formation of the earliest civilizations. Moreover, technology also played a fundamental role in the way people interacted with their environment.