The Hunter-Gatherers of Modern Times
Before agriculture took over, there were a few areas in which it was very easy to hunt, gather, and especially fish. For example, in the great river estuaries in the North Pacific, in North America, the salmon were so plentiful in season that people could catch them with their hands. Once smoked, they lasted a long time. Another prehistoric people who became numerous were the Japanese, who lived by hunting and acorn gathering but also by fishing. In particularly favorable environments, these fishing societies reached population levels hundreds or even a thousand times denser than the great majority of hunter-gatherer communities.
Before agriculture, the population of the earth was unlikely to have exceeded five or ten million people. It has been calculated that in England there were probably five, maybe ten, thousand inhabitants (almost ten thousand times less, that is, than today). The adoption of agriculture led to a demographic explosion. World population has increased one thousandfold in the last ten thousand years. Even in traditional African societies, those tribes who became cultivators several thousands of years ago (in Nigeria, for example) now number many millions of people. The tribes that stuck to the oldest style of living, hunting and gathering are still very small in number even now.
Before white colonization, farming societies often lived side by side with hunter-gatherers who perhaps practiced a little cultivation. The North American Indians, for example, were mainly hunter-gatherers. In the plains, they lived by hunting buffalo, which became much easier after the Spanish brought horses to the continent. Some of these escaped and returned to the wild, where they were captured by the Indians, who began to use them to hunt. On their arrival in North America, the first whites discovered that the natives had already developed some agriculture. The pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts at the beginning of the seventeenth century would not have survived the first winter alone because their provisions were insufficient. They procured corn and other foods from the Indians and later learned how to grow the local crops.
In South America, too, there were hunter-gatherers, but Central America and the Andes, along with a slice of the great plains and forests, were already highly organized in agricultural terms. At the southern tip of the Andes, especially in the Tierra del Fuego, land was poor and inhospitable, and agriculture had not arrived.