ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the co-evolution of the human life span, infant dependency, shared parenting, brain size, and culture. It lays the groundwork for the analysis of health, difference, and conflict, and shows that human evolution has shaped who we are today, but not always in the expected ways. The alternative term to foragers, hunter-gatherers, underscores a cultural tendency to associate human evolution with meat, but the symbolic value of meat does not match its true proportion in the diet. Notwithstanding the variability across foraging societies and the sustained contact between foragers and villagers, foraging societies share some distinctive common features that help form a rough picture of preagricultural foraging lifestyles. A small minority of foraging societies have lived in permanent settlements. They are known as complex or sedentary foraging societies. The chapter underscores the flexibility of cultural forms, not their fixity. It challenges invented reconstructions of the past which misleadingly counter-pose 'tradition' and 'nature' against 'modernity' and 'civilization'.
