By 12,000 years ago, human populations had spread into most of the habitable regions of the globe, including Australia and the Americas. With the aid of their flexible, rapidly evolving cultures, these groups, loosely organized as small bands of "hunter-gatherers" were able to adapt to virtually any environmental situation.

The essence of hunting and gathering or what we might think of as foraging economies is to exploit many resources rather than to depend heavily on only a few. This means they tend to have a generalized subsistence strategy rather than a specialized one. Small, mobile human groups subsist on whatever resources are available within a defined territory. They adapt to conditions as they find them, using what is already there. They tend to move on a seasonal basis lacking any permanent settlements in an effort to optimize different sources of food throughout a relatively large territorial range. Having a fairly large range has relatively little impact on the environment. Hunter-gatherers tend to accumulate a large and intimate knowledge of their range and the food sources, dangers, and opportunities which exist within it. This knowledge is largely communal; it is shared by the group.

In most circumstances, the activity of gathering of resources is very important providing 75 to 80% of the total calories consumed. We often think that hunting provides the major portion of the diet but it tends to only provide the balance. Technically, we ought to speak in terms of "gathering and hunting" rather than "hunting and gathering." In existing hunting and gathering cultures, women usually do most of the gathering, while the men specialize in hunting. This is recognized as division of labor. Other than this kind of gender specialization--and it is by no means universal--there is little specialization of roles within the Hunter-gatherer group.

Hunter gatherer societies typically enjoy a surprisingly diverse diet and abundant leisure. They live in a small, personal world seldomly consisting of more than 250 people. Hunter gatherers have no accumulated wealth; they have marriage rules that require them to marry outside of their immediate group; the form bonds with neighbors largely through marriage and can rely on neighboring groups in time of need. Strong marriage bonds form alliances between groups making it unlikely that hostilities will ever exist.

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