Anthropology Essay on Foragers

Anthropology considers the food acquisition techniques as factors of great importance to categorize the impressive array of human cultures. First in terms of emergence and importance, the subsistence pattern of early or contemporaneous uncivilized societies, taken in the literal sense of "non-urbanized societies," has been the foraging model, which encompasses the hunt and the food gathering. The preponderance of hunting over the gathering, or vice versa, is not as conspicuous as one could imagine. Those two food acquisition techniques have profound consequences in terms of nutrition and place in society because they influence the health, the labor specialization, and the social stratification.

In the first place, the comparison of hunt with gathering permits to evaluate the nutritional consequences for the people that belong to foraging societies. Foragers have necessitated meeting their caloric needs through stable supplies of food, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to avoid malnutrition or starvation. Hunting and gathering have provided them with about the same amount of proteins, although they have needed to collect large quantities of edible plants to equal the outcome of proteins supplied by the relatively small pieces of meat. However, gathering has been less energy consuming than hunt because foragers could more simply locate vegetables in the forest or in the open ground than animals. Besides, even the scavenged animals have required humans covered longer distances to amass available carcasses than to cover distances to accumulate vegetable food. The major implication of the concurrent use of hunting and gathering has been the development of a generalized alimentation through a mixed diet. Such a varied nutritional regime offers the foragers flexible eating habits that permit them to conserve a high income of proteins, even in times of paucity of either animal flesh or eatable vegetation, and thus escape starvation.

In the second place, the