Diversity of forager lifeways in the prehistoric past

Extract

The underlying theme of Foraging in the past is how archaeology can be used to identify the full range of diversity among hunter-gatherers in the absence of ethnographic analogues. In the introduction, Ashley Lemke argues that forager diversity must have been greater in the past than is suggested by comparison with the spatially and temporally restricted ethnographic record of modern hunter-gatherer societies. The deep prehistoric past covers timeframes with no modern environmental analogue, and the subjects of our study include a broader range of human ancestors than just anatomically modern humans. Consequently, archaeologists must use models and hypotheses to identify novel forager adaptations that lack any modern ethnographic equivalent.