Collecting and Hunting

2 min read

What did people in the remote antiquity live off? It was collecting and hunting that were the earliest forms of human labor. In the remote ages people concentrated on the verges of the grasslands and forests and lived at the mercy of Nature in that they lived off collecting the wild plants’ roots, stalks, leaves and fruit or hunting animals. Such a living prevailed in the Paleolithic Age.

It is a common belief that the ancient ape men originally living in the trees were mainly fed on the fruit and leaves. But with the climate dramatically turning dry and cold, the growth of the plants was terribly affected and the coverage offorests dwindled consequently, which exasperated the food crisis of the ape men.

Urged by the instinct to live on, the ape men no longer lived in the trees all thetime, but went to open up their living space in the land between the forests. After they began their life on the ground, they plucked fruit, dug out rootstalks, caughtinsects and small animals to supplement their food supply. Thus for a fairly longperiod of time in the infanthood of humanity people mainly lived off collecting.

In the site of the Peking Man who lived 500 thousand years ago, it could be discerned that great changes had taken place in people’s labor. Though there were no special hunting tools in the mass of stoneware in the caves, the tools for processing the hides and beast meat had obviously increased in number and many beast bones of different species bore marks of chopping, smashing, burning and roasting.

Evidently the animals had been taken into the caves as game. Besides there were bones of huge mammals, which indicated that hunting had already begun at that time.

The tools used for hunting were very crude and simple, and they were nothing but the wooden clubs and blocks of stone. Later on people invented the sling and the bow, which signified that people had made headway in terms of the hunting techniques.

When hunting for huge animals, firstly a bonfire was lit to besiege the animals and then the stone blocks, slings and bows were utilized to kill them.”Fire hunting”is kept in the oracle records. The utilization of fire in hunting was a breakthrough indeed.

The application of a large number of slings and bows rendered the hunting an independent business. The archeological findings prove that plants accounted for a fairly big proportion of the food consumed by the humanity earlier on, but later on the proportion of beasts increased along with the advent of the indirect beating and hitting technique in producing microlithic ware. So this was another milestone in the accumulation of human wisdom and progress of techniques.