In some other low-latitude regions of subsistence gathering the environment is exceedingly dry. For example, in central Australia the bindibu tribe has lived for 10,000 years in a desert, surviving on drought-resistant plants and on animals depent on the same type of vegetation.
In the high latitude, primitive gathering is carried on in a physical environment of low average temperatures and short growing seasons. The barren land supports a meager growth termed tundra (mosses, lichens, and shrubs) which makes poor food for humans.
But tundra provides an adequate diet for caribou, musk ox, and deer, and these animals in turn furnish food to the human beings who range over these uninviting expanses in search of animal prey.
Cultural phenomena. Substence-economy cultures are backward. The people still live in the Stone Age, much like their ancestors of a hundred centuriesago. Indeed, some of them are not even that far advanced; the charante and camayura tribes in the wilds of Mato Grosso, western Brazil, do not yet have stone points for their arrows, according to Edward M. Weyer of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California in Beckeley. Primitive gatherers lack written languages. Their health is generalli poor; life expectancy is short. The Eskimos are probably the most advanced of all the gatherers, yet even they never domesticated a herd until they were taught to do so by Laplanders from Scandinavia.
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