Does anybody know if there are any books, documentaries etc. that accurately describe the life of the average hunter-gatherer, from birth to death? I'm very interested in all the aspects of his life.
Thanks! :D
Printable View
Does anybody know if there are any books, documentaries etc. that accurately describe the life of the average hunter-gatherer, from birth to death? I'm very interested in all the aspects of his life.
Thanks! :D
[I]After the Ice - A Global Human History from 20,000 to 5000 BC[/I] by Steven Mithen - authoritative but quirky masterwork that covers the period from the end of the last Ice Age through the agricultural transition and has some surprising theories as to why agriculture replaced hunting/gathering. Mithen examines archaeological evidence from all over the globe in this 15,000 year time span. And he thinks being a hunter/gatherer was pretty cool!
Nova: Becoming Human, its on Netflix, watching it now. Really interesting, also talking about meat being important to us evoking large brains about 2-3 million years ago.
Imagining Head Smashed-In, a book about the largest buffalo jump in the world. Covers native life over thousands of years. These people lived on a diet of almost entirely bison meat for 12,000 years.
The Old Way: A Story of the First People, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Try out about anything by Weston A. Price. A dentist that study many hunter-gather tribes back in the early 1900s. I'm reading "Nutrition and physical degeneration" now that I found a PDF copy of.
More about him here:
[url=http://www.westonaprice.org/]The Weston A. Price Foundation - Weston A Price Foundation[/url]
Here's something you can read online or as a download:
[url=http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38010/38010-h/38010-h.htm]The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Adventures of John Jewitt, by John Rodgers Jewitt[/url]
Not anthropology just a slice-of-life ethnographic source and a very interesting one at that.
And while there's a lot of social information, it is interesting on food:
[QUOTE]... their food consisting almost wholly of fish, or fish spawn fresh or dried, the blubber of the whale, seal, or sea-cow, mussels, clams, and berries of various kinds; all of which are eaten with a profusion of train-oil for sauce, not excepting even the most delicate fruit, as strawberries and raspberries.[/QUOTE]
Thank you all! :D
Something in a similar vein that might interest you is stuff by Spencer Wells. He has several great books, but I like Deep Ancestry quite a bit. Also, there is a documentary he did called "The Journey of Man."