Hunting

Hunting / Trapping / Fishing Test Blog

Hunting is the practice of seeking, pursuing and capturing or killing wildlife or feral animals.^[10] Hunting is most commonly done by humans to harvest useful animal products (meat, fur/hide, bone/tusks, horn/antler, etc), for recreation/taxidermy (see trophy hunting), to remove predators dangerous to humans or domestic animals, to eliminate pests and nuisance animals that damage crops/livestock/poultry or spread diseases (see varminting), for trade/tourism (see safari), or for ecological conservation against overpopulation and invasive species (see culling).

Many non-human animal species also hunt (see predation) as part of their feeding and parental behaviors, sometimes in quantities exceeding immediate dietary needs.Bushmen hunter in Botswana

Hunting by humans arose in Homo erectus or earlier, in the order of millions of years ago. Hunting has become deeply embedded in various human cultures and was once an important part of the rural economies — classified by economists as part of primary production alongside forestry, agriculture and fishing. Modern regulations (see game law) distinguish lawfully permitted hunting activities from poaching, which involves the illegal killing, trapping or capture of animals. The hunted species are referred to as game or prey, and are usually mammals and birds.Bowhunter in Utah

Apart from food provision, hunting can be a means of pest control. Hunting advocates state that hunting can be a necessary component^[11] of modern wildlife management, for example, to help maintain a population of healthy animals within an environment’s ecological carrying capacity when natural checks such as predators are absent or very rare.^[12][13] However, excessive hunting has also heavily contributed to the endangerment, extirpation and extinction of many animals.^[14][15] Some animal rights and anti-hunting activists regard hunting as a cruel, unnecessary and unethical practice.^[16][17]Professional deer-stalker standing over a downed red stag in Scotland

The pursuit, capture for food, or catch and release of fish is called fishing, which is not commonly categorised as a form of hunting. It is also not considered hunting to pursue animals without intent to kill them, as in wildlife photography, birdwatching, or scientific-research activities which involve tranquilizing or tagging of animals or birds, although green hunting is still called so. The practice of foraging or gathering materials from plants and mushrooms is also considered^{[by whom?]} separate from hunting.Hunter carrying reindeer in Greenland

Skillful tracking and acquisition of an elusive target has caused the word hunt to be used in the vernacular as a metaphor, as in treasure hunting, “bargain hunting”, and even “hunting down” corruption and waste.

Lower to Middle Paleolithic

Hunting has a long history. It pre-dates the emergence of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) and may even predate genus Homo.

The oldest undisputed evidence for hunting dates to the Early Pleistocene, consistent with the emergence and early dispersal of Homo erectus, about 1.7 million years ago (Acheulean).^[19] While it is undisputed that Homo erectus were hunters, the importance of this for the emergence of Homo erectus from its australopithecine ancestors, including the production of stone tools and eventually the control of fire, is emphasised in the so-called “hunting hypothesis” and de-emphasised in scenarios that stress omnivory and social interaction.

There is no direct evidence for hunting predating Homo erectus, in either Homo habilis or in Australopithecus. The early hominid ancestors of humans were probably frugivores or omnivores, with a partially carnivore diet from scavenging rather than hunting. Evidence for australopithecine meat consumption was presented in the 1990s.^[20] It has nevertheless often been assumed that at least occasional hunting behavior may have been present well before the emergence of Homo. This can be argued on the basis of comparison with chimpanzees, the closest extant relatives of humans, who also engage in hunting, indicating that the behavioral trait may have been present in the Chimpanzee–human last common ancestor as early as 5 million years ago. The common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) regularly engages in troop predation behaviour where bands of beta males are led by an alpha male. Bonobos (Pan paniscus) have also been observed to occasionally engage in group hunting,^[21] although more rarely than Pan troglodytes, mainly subsisting on a frugivorous diet.^[22] Indirect evidence for Oldowan era hunting, by early Homo or late Australopithecus, has been presented in a 2009 study based on an Oldowan site in southwestern Kenya.^[23]

Louis Binford (1986) criticised the idea that early hominids and early humans were hunters. On the basis of the analysis of the skeletal remains of the consumed animals, he concluded that hominids and early humans were mostly scavengers, not hunters,^[24] Blumenschine (1986) proposed the idea of confrontational scavenging, which involves challenging and scaring off other predators after they have made a kill, which he suggests could have been the leading method of obtaining protein-rich meat by early humans.^[25]

Stone spearheads dated as early as 500,000 years ago were found in South Africa.^[26] Wood does not preserve well, however, and Craig Stanford, a primatologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, has suggested that the discovery of spear use by chimpanzees probably means that early humans used wooden spears as well, perhaps, five million years ago.^[27] The earliest dated find of surviving wooden hunting spears dates to the very end of the Lower Paleolithic, just before 300,000 years ago. The Schöningen spears, found in 1976 in Germany, are associated with Homo heidelbergensis.^[28]

The hunting hypothesis sees the emergence of behavioral modernity in the Middle Paleolithic as directly related to hunting, including mating behaviour, the establishment of language, culture, and religion, mythology and animal sacrifice.

Upper Paleolithic to Mesolithic

Evidence exists that hunting may have been one of the multiple environmental factors leading to the Holocene extinction of megafauna and their replacement by smaller herbivores.^[29] North American megafauna extinction was coincidental with the Younger Dryas impact event, possibly making hunting a less critical factor in prehistoric species loss than had been previously thought.^[30] However, in other locations such as Australia, humans are thought to have played a very significant role in the extinction of the Australian megafauna that was widespread prior to human occupation.^[31][32]

Hunting was a crucial component of hunter-gatherer societies before the domestication of livestock and the dawn of agriculture, beginning about 11,000 years ago in some parts of the world. In addition to the spear, hunting weapons developed during the Upper Paleolithic include the atlatl (a spear-thrower; before 30,000 years ago) and the bow (18,000 years ago). By the Mesolithic, hunting strategies had diversified with the development of these more far-reaching weapons and the domestication of the dog about 15,000 years ago. Evidence puts the earliest known mammoth hunting in Asia with spears to approximately 16,200 years ago.^[33]

Many species of animals have been hunted throughout history. It has been suggested that in North America and Eurasia, caribou and wild reindeer “may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting”^[34] (see also Reindeer Age), although the varying importance of different species depended on the geographic location.Ancient Greek black-figure pottery depicting the return of a hunter and his dog; made in Athens c. 540 BC, found in Rhodes

Mesolithic hunter-gathering lifestyles remained prevalent in some parts of the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Siberia, as well as all of Australia, until the European Age of Discovery. They still persist in some tribal societies, albeit in rapid decline. Peoples that preserved Paleolithic hunting-gathering until the recent past include some indigenous peoples of the Amazonas (Aché), some Central and Southern African (San people), some peoples of New Guinea (Fayu), the Mlabri of Thailand and Laos, the Vedda people of Sri Lanka, and a handful of uncontacted peoples. In Africa, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes are the Hadza of Tanzania.^[35]

However, 9000-year-old remains of a female hunter along with a toolkit of projectile points and animal processing implements were discovered at the Andean site of Wilamaya Patjxa, Puno District in Peru.^[36]