Humans were hunting long before there were humans like us
The oldest undisputed evidence of hunting dates to roughly 1.7 million years ago, around when Homo erectus appeared and spread. Hunting is older than our own species, and chimpanzees, which also hunt in bands, hint that the habit may reach back five million years to the ancestor people share with them.
Not everyone agrees early hominins were skilled hunters. In 1986 Louis Binford studied the bones of animals they ate and concluded they were mostly scavengers. The same year, the researcher Blumenschine proposed a bolder picture, confrontational scavenging, in which early humans drove predators off their fresh kills. Stone spearheads from South Africa date back as far as 500,000 years. Wood rarely survives, so the oldest wooden spears, found at Schöningen in Germany in 1976, are about 300,000 years old and linked to Homo heidelbergensis.
The toolkit grew steadily. Early wooden spears had tips hardened in fire. The atlatl, a spear-thrower that adds force and range, appeared before 30,000 years ago, and the bow about 18,000 years ago. Around 15,000 years ago, dogs were domesticated and joined the chase. Some theories hold that hunting helped reshape human society, and one sociologist argues it lowered the status of women; yet a 9,000-year-old burial at Wilamaya Patjxa in Peru held a female hunter alongside her projectile points and butchering tools.
People had a heavy hand on the landscape. Hunting may have been one of the main factors behind the extinction of large Ice Age animals, and humans probably played a major role in the loss of Australia's megafauna. Across North America and Eurasia, caribou and wild reindeer may have been the single most important quarry of all.
Even after farming began about 11,000 years ago, hunting kept supplying food along with bone, sinew, fur and leather. Economists once classed it with farming, forestry and fishing as primary production. In harsh climates it remains vital: Arctic Inuit use sea mammal skins for kayaks, clothing and boots. The word itself comes from Old English huntian, meaning to chase game.
Source: Hunting
