The New Era
Perhaps it comes in part from the way I read the evidence and perhaps in part it is only intuition, but I feel that the materials of this chapter suggest a new era in the ways of life. Before about 40,000 years ago, people simply “gathered” their food, wandering over large areas to scavenge or to hunt in a simple sort of way. But here we have seen them “settling-in” more, perhaps restricting themselves in their wanderings and adapting themselves to a given locality in more intensive ways. This intensification might be suggested by the word “collecting.” The ways of life we described in the earlier chapters were “food-gathering” ways, but now an era of “food-collecting” has begun. We shall see further intensifications of it in the next chapter.