Migrations and Livelihoods of Asian Hunter-Gatherers: Diversity of Environmental Adaptations in Human History

Keywords

Asia,hunter-gatherers,environmental adaptation

Objectives

The hunter-gatherer period is said to account for 99.8% of the entire course of history of humanity, estimated at seven million years. Despite the fact that humans have developed agriculture, pastoralism, and modern civilization since it ended, prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture has not died out entirely. The hunter-gatherers that still live today as minorities in the states they find themselves in, maintaining relationships with agricultural and pastoral peoples, have survived thanks to a variety of ingenious ideas. This study sets out to understand how hunter-gatherers in Asia have adapted to their environment from prehistoric times to the present. For this purpose, I divided the Asian environments into six kinds of ecological region: (1) frigid or cold zones; (2) temperate humid zones; (3) temperate arid zones; (4) tropical highland zones; (5) tropical forest zone; and (6) tropical islands zone (Ikeya, 2022). For convenience, I also divided up the history of humanity into four phases: the hunter-gatherer period; the period of symbiotic relationships and assimilation with agricultural peoples; the period of state formation in the pre-modern/modern; and the market economy period. Using this framework, I focused on migration and livelihood to critically examine the effectiveness of this categorization scheme, in terms of the approach to environmental adaptation in each ecoregion and time period.
• Kazunobu Ikeya 2022, “Survival Strategies of Hunter-Gatherers: Migration and Environmental Adaptation” in “Human Resilience : Past, Present and Future”, edited by Tetsuya Inamura et al., Kyoto University Press.