I think it’s amazing that our Homo sapien ancestors were around 200-250,000 years ago occupying the earth with other Homo genus such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and homo heidelbergensis.  This means that the different species may have interacted and possibly interbred.  Could this mean Homo sapiens were a result of two other species breeding?  Our species out competed and survived the other species, but Homo sapiens were the latest to emerge in the context of world history.  Homo erectus walked the earth for nearly three million years.  Our time on earth is just a fraction of the erectus period.  It’s unfathomable to think where our species, or this earth, will be in another 2.5 million years. 

96% of Homo sapien existence was spent during the Paleolithic Era, 200,000 years ago, forming into small hunting and gathering groups.  This type of existence meant following the migration of animals and gathering plants when in season.    One would think that this unsettled hunting and gathering lifestyle must have been precarious and exhausting.  Pottery to store surplus food is a technology of the Neolithic Era coming into existence with the agricultural revolution.  I get anxious if I can’t simply reach in my cupboard and create a meal out of items on hand.  I understand how ideological it is to project my modern life of convenience onto the Paleolithic era and so I must also imagine how free people must have felt as well, with no boundaries confining them.  With no permanent settlement, Paleolithic people were free to pick up in search of more recourses.    

An interesting outlier to this traditional nomadic lifestyle are the Southern California Chumash Indians.  The hunting and gathering Chumash Indians settled in permanent villages forming complex societies and economies for several centuries following 1150 CE.  What confined the Chumash to the Santa Barbara coast and channel islands was the overhunting of inland deer and the invention of the planked canoe (tomol) allowing for travel between the islands and deep sea fishing.  So at first I was confused.  Did the Chumash qualify as people utilizing Neolithic ways of life due to their permanent settlements?  Or did the Chumash qualify as Paleolithic due to their hunting and gathering lifestyle?  Because the Chumash were hunter gatherers and did not engage in agricultural planting and harvesting, they are classified as engaging in Paleolithic tools and lifestyle.  The people of the Americas did not adapt to the settled agricultural lifestyle due to the lack of indigenous large animals such as the cattle or horse used in the Afro-Eurasian lands for plowing.  The Chumash were unique in that they settled in a resource rich area and maintained gathering and hunting, relying more on fishing.

So here’s another variation for you.  What do the nomadic herders, or pastoral societies, qualify as?  They occupy mostly un-farmable land such as deserts or arctic tundra.  They are mobile with their herd following the seasons of available vegetation.  Are the pastoral people engaging in Paleolithic or Neolithic lifestyles?  One would again think that since they do not participate in permanent settlements, that they are Paleolithic, but one would be wrong.  What supersedes the settled vs. unsettled lifestyle is how the group of people acquire their food source.  Pastoral societies engage in and rely on “animal husbandry” for meat, fur, and milk.  They are not hunting these animals, they are raising them.  If the agricultural revolution was characterized by the domestication of plants, so too then are the pastoral people engaging in a form of agriculture by domesticating animals.  Therefore the nomadic pastoral societies are classified as Neolithic.