“Until about 12,000-11,000 years ago, when agriculture and animal domestication emerged in southwestern Asia and Mesoamerica, all people were hunters and binders. Their strategies have been very different, depending heavily on the local environment; Foraging strategies have included hunting or trapping large game, hunting or trapping smaller animals, fishing, gathering shellfish or insects, and gathering wild plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, tubers, seeds and nuts. Most hunters and gatherers combine a variety of these strategies to ensure a balanced diet." The hunting and gathering lifestyle was also called foraging culture, any group of people who rely essentially on wild foods for their sustenance. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Early Holocene communities gathered plant food with stone-picking knives or dug tubers with digging sticks, and hunted with spears and bows. Like their Paleolithic predecessors, they exploited resources by moving across their landscapes, generally in small groups , occasionally gathering during annual salmon runs or similar locations rich in abundant resources Most Holocene hunter-gatherer societies are defined by flexibility and were small-scale in nature was a major shift in human adaptation. Population became increasingly sedentary, in territories with connections to a variety and plethora of resources, which replaced the mobility associated with most hunter-gatherer groups become dependent on humans for the reproductive success. Domestication can often be involuntary, being the result of continuous interaction between human and wild species. Domestication began as a result of hunter-gatherers' shift from involuntary plant gathering to voluntary management of specific plant species. The conversion from food gathering to food production has certainly increased the earth's ability to support a much larger population. Another biological implication was cultivation. Scarre defines cultivation as a phenomenon that involves the intentional preparation of fields, planting, harvesting, and storing seeds or other plants. This required substantial development in human technology, subsistence and outlook. Hunter-gatherers were more than relaxed spectators in the history of plant and animal use, they also altered the species they relied on. "An important characteristic for the development and spread of human societies as well as their ability to interact with the surrounding environment." it was "the adoption of technological means to overcome the difficulties imposed by hostile environments."4 Stone tools, wooden spears, bolas stones, wood, hides and fire allowed these groups to adopt a mobile existence and move around more difficult ecosystems. Technology has been particularly important in increasing humans' ability to hunt. Specifically, the bow and arrow, along with snares, traps, and nets, made hunting less time-consuming and more effective. Inevitably, groups of hunters and gatherers have adapted, over hundreds of thousands of years, to all possible environments in the world, from the semitropical areas of Africa to Ice Age Europe, from the Arctic to the deserts of South West Africa. During the domestication process e. 1992.