ABSTRACT
One place to start in introducing students to the data used by social anthropology is with people who invest no labour in making the land produce but merely use its natural products. Here we are talking of productive activities that, although they still exist today in some places, are associated in technologically advanced societies with man’s prehistory. Hunting and gathering, as a means of making a living, are associated with the ‘old stone age’ or palaeolithic era, while the domestication of animals began, contemporaneously with the growth of agriculture in the neolithic or ‘new stone age’, some 12,000 years ago.
