In Order to justify choosing a particular residence and social system as the system most likely to typify the majority of hunting societies, it is not enough that this system is ethnographically the most commonly known among hunting-gathering groups. It is desirable to state general reasons why this should be the case such that we may ask to what extent these conditions were present prior to the ethnographic present. If possible, especially for archaeologically testable deductions, this should include an estimate of temporal extent as well as the range of geographic and ecological diversity under which such a system would be expected.

Any such endeavor must, of course, be highly tentative. It will be approached in Section I through a series of postulates. Each postulate will be elaborated and its choice justified separately. These six postulates—rather, the conditions postulated—lead to a social organization which, it is believed, is a reasonable approximation to a system that typified most, although not all, past and recent hunting societies. The elaboration of the postulates should lead to an estimate of the range of conditions under which the postulates can be taken as valid.

Given that food is shared within the family and a sexual division of labor with respect to hunting-gathering activities exists, then territorial groups will tend to be patrilocally based

It has been shown that at least two types of territoriality may be distinguished—sexual and economic. These are associated with societies of animals which, intraspecifically, represent the smallest kind of grouping having maximal autonomy. In species which are largely food-limited, it is the food supply with which autonomy is largely concerned.

In species in which the family pair defends an economic territory, both the male and female may engage in this, though the male more frequently than the female. In the social ants, males exist only as breeders, and specialized females defend the territory. In all cases, the territory must be defended by the individuals who range the widest and, in accordance with Postulate One, have contacts with individuals of similar groups.

In Homo sapiens, the males defend the territory. There are two major reasons for this, both related to a division of labor along sex lines. The first is that the male, in this division of labor, is the widest ranging of the two sexes. The second is the primate heritage of sexual dimorphism which adapts the male as a combatant more than the female.

The postulates set forth in preceding chapters lead to a view of hunting-gathering society which, if correct, means that the mating system of paleolithic man varied little in different regions of the world. With the aid of some additional elaboration on this model, to be given in this chapter, we should be able to specify the effects of this mating system on cultural and genetic processes. Further, some consideration will be given to the expected results of relaxing some of the conditions underlying the model presented.

Implicit in Postulates Five and Six is the idea that marriages will not be contracted over such distances that the bands brouglit into connubial relation cannot visit one another occasionally even if rarely. It was assumed, therefore, that these usually involved the bordering band territories. Among these bordering bands, the size of each as visualized in the model is such that each must contract marriages with most, if not all, neighboring bands to provide wives for the band males. But this is true only if they are all of equal size. As they will not often all be of equal size or exactly equal in offspring production in any given age period, there must be provisions to insure that alliances, once established, are not subject to random loss.

Investigations of the Birhor were confined to Hazaribagh District in the southern part of the state of Bihar, India. Hazaribagh District is on the northern edge of the Chota Nagpur plateau. The plateau is 540 to 600 meters in height with isolated rocky hills rising sharply from this surface as much as another 270 meters in altitude. At its northern edge, the plateau drops off sharply to the Gangetic Plain. When approached from this plain, the escarpment appears as a range of rugged, densely forested hills. This topography is the major reason for the continued existence of tribal people in the area despite the existence of a center of fairly advanced civilization in northern Bihar for over 2000 years.

To the west are the central mountain ranges of Madhya Pradesh. To the east, toward the coastal plain of Bengal and Orissa, the plateau is dissected by river drainages to give the configuration of successive ranges of low hills rather than a plateau. The study area is shown in Figs. 7 and 8.

Plant and animal populations on the plateau have been greatly changed in the past three centuries due to the agency of man. All areas of forest have been cut over in the past and most areas are recut often enough to give a dense scrub-forest cover.

The Birhor constitute a society which is easily distinguished and studied apart from the dominant Indian social groups surrounding them. But they by no means constitute a politically autonomous society. The ultimate characteristics of political autonomy such as capital punishment, the waging of war, and so forth, do not arise as a possibility for the Birhor. Actual contact with the larger society in the form of government power is infrequent, inconsistent, and understood very little by the Birhor. A more important relation with the larger, agricultural Hindu and Muslim society is the traditional caste structure in which the Birhor, regardless of their own opinions, are defined as a very low caste group and are so treated by villagers.

The major effect of this caste-like treatment, from the point of view of this study, has been to retard change in the Birhor way of life by denying them land and preserving their traditional relationship to the agricultural villages. This relationship might best be described as a parabiotic or commensal relationship. The most important aspects of this commensal relationship are lack of political autonomy of the Birhor and the importance, to them, of trade with villagers. On the other hand, the life of the villager would be little affected by the presence or absence of the Birhor. The economic aspects of trade between Birhor and villager are described in Chapter 7.

As brought out in the discussion of Birhor social organization, the band can be viewed as a loose union of families bound together by ties of kinship. This union easily splits or coalesces into smaller or larger units during the course of the year. These changes in composition of the residential unit are facilitated by fairly regular migratory movements of the yearly round.

This yearly round of the Birhor is not nearly so patterned as is found in agricultural populations, as there are a number of factors influencing their movement other than seasonal climatic changes. So far as economic activities are concerned, the three seasons for the Birhor are the wet season, June to October; the cold season, October to February; and the dry season, February to June. The relation of hunting, gathering, and ropemaking to these seasonal changes is described in the chapter on subsistence activities. This pattern of response to the distribution of economic resources leads to a general pattern of movement in which bands reach a maximum average size during the dry season. They may or may not remain in the same size unit during the wet season; however, they split into the smallest average size units at the end of the wet season.

Hunting remains the major activity of the Birhor despite the rapid deforestation now going on in the district. The forests in which they hunt are of second-growth sal trees, quite bushy and dense.

Within these forests, the Birhor rely entirely on small game and do not attempt to take anything larger than wild pigs and smaller varieties of deer. The Birhor word for the small barking deer (Cervulus muntjac) is jflu which is the same as their word for meat. But today the jflu, apparently once quite important to the Birhor, is taken only rarely. Also formerly of importance to the Birhor were monkeys—both the langur and macaque. These animals have decreased in number to the point that they now occur as isolated populations in rugged ghat areas or on steep hillsides. Formerly, they were hunted for food, and the hide of the langur was traded to Ghasi drum-makers. Today, there exists a market for live macaques but most Birhor bands of Hazaribagh District, at the present, take no monkeys within the course of a year. Of primary importance today is the hare (kulhāi). It is this animal which the Birhor think of, talk of, and hunt daily.

Before discussing the fit of the Birhor ethnographic data to our model of hunting-gathering society, a few observations are in order to indicate the frequency and distribution of ethnographically known hunting peoples who do, or do not, appear to fit the model. To do this, I shall rely primarily on the surveys of Steward (1936), Service (1962), Lee and DeVore (1968), Damas (1969), and Bicchieri (1972).

Since the objective of this investigation was the intensive investigation of a single test case, no broadly comparative analysis of ethnographies of other hunting societies will be given. I would like to suggest, however, that, if such a comparative survey were undertaken, the observance of three or four strictures in interpreting the data would lead to differing conclusions about some societies now considered exceptions to the patrilocal, patrilineal model.

A theory has been developed, in Chapters 1 through 3, of the social organization of hunting-gathering societies. This theory necessarily dealt also with the territorial or residential organization of such groups. Evidence was presented in Chapters 4 through 8 that the large majority of ethnograhpically known hunting-gathering groups corresponds in some detail to what would be expected from the theory. It also appears that occasional cases of matrilocal and bilocal residence, but not composite bands in the sense of neolocal residence, are predictable on ecological grounds from the more widespread patrilineal, patrilocal lineage-band.

This theory, then, has implications for the distribution of cultural items and the distribution of genes in past and present hunting societies. Some of these implications are potentially testable, others are not. In the following paragraphs, some of these implications will be presented. They will be presented in two sections—general implications and genetic implications. The first section—the general implications—is a brief section intended to display the possibilities which may be explored based on deduction from the theory. As it is a brief survey it is somewhat superficial and “speculative,” but the implications are real.