ABSTRACT
Nearly all of the world was initially colonized by people equipped with a foraging adaptation. How hunter-gatherers adapt to “empty” land masses, therefore, is a question that is essential to understanding an important segment of human history. It is a frustrating question, however, for there are no easy analogies. We have no cases of ethnographically known hunter-gatherers moving into terra incognita.1 Yet too often it is assumed that the first prehistoric foragers to occupy a region fit an ethnographic model, one based on only one or two ethnographic cases that serve as simple ethnographic analogies. In recent decades, it has been the Ju/’hoansi (the !Kung, San, Basarwa, or Bushmen), or some amalgam of Arctic groups (Kelly 1996). But it is clear that such analogies are not always useful even when examining later Holocene foragers (Kelly 1995). How much less so for colonizing populations that faced environmental and social circumstances that would have been foreign to ethnographically known foragers?
