ABSTRACT
Research on foraging societies is likely to be very different in the next quarter century than it was in the last, and hunter-gatherer studies may cease to exist as a distinct specialty within sociocultural anthropology. The extent to which research on the structure of foraging societies has been replaced by a concern with the survival problems of contemporary hunter-gatherers has been dramatically demonstrated at the International Conferences on Hunting and Gathering Societies. A model that purports to be a truly general representation of the structure of gatherer-hunter societies should be tested against evidence from simple, intermediate, and complex foraging societies, both historic and prehistoric. The length of the maturation period will vary from one case to another, but presumably it will be at least eighteen years in the case of immediate-return hunter-gatherers, and twice that in the case of highly modernized societies.
