No one in Europe talks about catching big fish with your hands, and you can't just spear them either like in Rambo. Amy game is a hard hunt without modern technology such as firearms and traps, and not so abundant.
Finding food in the wild seems very hard.
So how did hunter gatherers survive in Europe before advanced tools and husbandry / agriculture?
Meat and dairy.
hunter-gatherer society is (usually) before pastoralist society, you silly goose!
as for the OP, primo-Euros survived the same way everyone else did at the time: follow the megafauna herds, and use pointy rocks to frick them up
like, six to eight reasons, ten even
Old Europe is also associated with insanely massive and complex astronomically aligned megaliths and pyramids. So you should take some common preconceptions about the period with a grain of salt. The peopling of Europe over just the last 14ky was varied and complex. Truly old European haplogroups (to 40kya at least, in Europe) have been identified (think Germanics, Nordics, Balkan and Black sea Slavic, and old pre-Italic Celtic and Italic in males lines and Finnish, Sardinian, Basque and Indo-European female lines), and there is controversy over this that will not see the light of day in the mainstream because of it. It is almost certain that there was some form of permaculture, animal husbandry, and agriculture prior to academically accepted dates limiting it to just the holocene. Most megalithic structures in Europe were already present prior to genetic input from neolithic farmers.
Europe before agriculture was a much different place. There were massive forests with loads of deer, elk, moose european bison, aurochs, boars, beavers and tons of birds. The waters were teeming with fish, including masses of salmon moving in to spawn and huge numbers of waterfowl.
Nuts, especially hazel were also an important staple that would be collected in fall and stored for the winter. Combine all of that with some mushrooms, fruit, edible greens and roots and you got plenty to eat.
As for how to catch the animals, the people back then were living in the wild and practicing tracking, throwing spears, rocks and hunting sticks or shooting bows and setting snares daily from a young age. They were much more skilled hunters than any modern european.
low population
>you can't just spear them
sure you can
Humans don't need spears or their bare hands to catch fish. The oldest fishing hook ever found is 20,000 years old, carved from snail shells and found on Okinawa And that's just the oldest we know of.
There's also nets. Humans have been making cordage even longer than hooks.
>flint napping to make spear heads
>hooks
>nets and basket traps
>dogs
>fire and chase methods
Humans are pretty smart believe it or not, all their brain power went into their survival. The knowledge they have of hunting would have geen immense and at short distance I bet they could throw a spear as good as your average Joe hunter could shoot.
>at short distance I bet they could throw a spear as good as your average Joe hunter could shoot.
Probably not.
Firearms and even archery is so much more precise than spears, even at distances under 15 yards. A man with limited experience with a rifle can drop a deer where it stands.
A man experienced in throwing spears can reliably hit an animal. But where he hits the animal will always vary.
We spent a lot more time following blood trails before Firearms.
>We
i strongly doubt this
i practiced throwing a homemade spear for like an hour and I went from woman-tier wacky inaccurate throws to hitting a medium sized branch up in the air from 10+ yards away
i think if you practiced for a thousand hours you'd be pretty darn good at it
I'm confident in taking game anywhere up to 30 yards with a traditional bow, beyond that I'd rather not and instead see if I can get closer or wait it out. I'd assume the spear is similar in that, but at a much shorter distance. It's not so much just accuracy, I think. It's accuracy plus target distance plus momentum that determines your effective distance. That makes a spear quite a lot more difficult in a hunting scenario.
Now, spearing fish and gigging frogs on the other hand...
Keep in mind that archaeological finds in Europe show popularity of contraptions that let man slingshot spears - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower
Number of these found so far means that spears were definitely used, and I guess their use was not to miss game.
In general, I believe it has been more difficult to survive winter than to catch a big fish or spear a deer. But people still managed.
As far as 10,000 BC Europeans built huge structures for hunting.
In the Baltic sea there is a a stone wall around 1km long which weighed around 150 tonnes and it was used probably to drive animals into for hunting because there are no cliffs in the Baltic
It probably wasn't a border wall either since it's location makes no sense for that
>modern technology such as traps
Traps have been used for 10s of thousands of years and is by far the most effective way of hunting.
It's a different kettle of fish
There was a shit ton of herds, as far as the eye can see. Even to the year 6000 from when Gilgamesh was written lions could sustain themselves all over europe.
Finding food was not hard, it was becoming harder because people were wasting the food. Plenty of boars by the time of romans. Then all went to shit.
i read an interesting find that claimed Brits had carpentry 11k years ago.
So they had tools
Technology has made us weaker, but your right hunting is hard. But they fricking done it and here we are now.
>if you gaze long into a fish basket, the basket also gazes into you
Actually hunter gatherers only had to "work" 2 or 3 days per week to feed their whole extended family
You guys should read "The Emergence of Man".
Um sweety they only survived by stealing the sacred, holistic knowledge of black and brown indigenous folx