Forum: Story Recommendations

True, but NC-Retired didn't use the word primitive, you did. What the OP requested was stories about pre-civilization hunter-gatherer groups.

While "civilization" is a complex idea without a single, easy definition, it is generally understood to refer to societies that have complex social, economic, and political structures and usually have cities, though there is no requirement that large populations live in the cities.

What the OP requested was stories about pre-civilization hunter-gatherer groups.

No, what the OP requested was "people living in pre-civilization tribes"

A tribe is organized, it has leadership and rules. It is an early, primitive form of civilization.

You discuss terms here. As the classic reading of history goes, established by Victorian British thought, it's pretty much civilization = city. And yes, that's very unfair to many cultures and ways of life. And thus there this more inclusive term "culture" that cover everything, very nearly down to chimpanzee clans waging wars (yes, they do).

As to tribe and social structure, for foraging hunter gatherers it can be extremely fluid, and change even from season to season.

Like, there was those people who until relatively recently successfully inhabited one of world's harshest environments in northern Africa. Their year consisted of three seasons: foraging, hunting, and story telling. Each with dramatically different social structure and rules.

I'm now speaking from memory, and may get it wrong, but it was like: for half a year they would be basically constantly on a hike, subsiding mostly on fruit based diet, wandering around in very small groups, no much larger than three generation families. Then the semi-arid desert dry up, and they switch to hunting, hooking up in adhoc associations. Internal violence is nearly expected too. Following the game, those groups congregate in a floodplain of a drying lake, setting up a major compound camp for basically three months of an all out party, as the location offers temporary abundance. Then the rain starts, the lake floods the campsite, and people scatter to visit best berry bushes they remember or have heard claims about, many weeks of walking away. They owned basically nothing but primitive weapons, but created everything else as they went along. Healthy 90+ year old individuals were around, with colossal body of knowledge about their environment and still able to catch birds with bare hands. The overall lifestyle we would describe as near leisure, most of the time, not only the "story telling season" when its a given.

The problem of those lifestyles is, the population density that can be supported is very, very low. Also, they remain stable only as long as hoarding and defending "unfair" accumulations of resources isn't feasible or advantageous.

Organized agriculture created slavery and delivered extreme drop of human health, but it enabled overpopulation and what we commonly refer to as "civilization."

Just ignore DS. He usually posts something irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Will do. There's a few people I tend to just not respond to, but I usually try to give someone a couple of chances before writing them off.

If we're going to include dead tree, I'll throw out the People series by Michael & Kathleen Gear. They're not as well known as the Auel books, but they were equally popular in the 90s, mostly because the Gears didn't take a decade to write each book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America%27s_Forgotten_Past#People_of_the_Wolf

Just ordered a used copy. Delivery within a few days.

Thanks for the recommendation.