Primitive economic activity is economic activity that relates natural resources and primitive tools and methods to harvest and hunt for food.
For example, underdeveloped or developing countries like Bangladesh use land, labor, and primitive tools and methods in the agriculture sector for growing food. Though it is unbelievable but still people in rural areas of Bangladesh use a barter system. Children in rural areas of Bangladesh are influenced by their inheritance.
Finally, we can say that a society uses natural resources for earning livelihood traditionally influenced by religion and inheritance such as mining, agriculture, and forestry.
Primitive Gathering
Primitive gathering is the oldest of all economic activities where human beings supported themselves almost exclusively by collecting a variety of products provided by nature.
Even today, where primitive gathering is the predominant way of life, people subsist on the fruits, nuts, berries, and fibers that they collect from trees, shrubs, and small plants. They spend no time cultivating the soil and do not try to improve and control their habitat.
Primitive gathering persists primarily in isolated pockets in the low latitudes, including the territories of some Indian tribes dispersed throughout the Amazon basin. Yields per acre and the yield per person in those areas are so low that surpluses are almost nonexistent.
A very low man-land ratio occurs in such areas, typically no more than two persons per square mile. Gathering economies often involve tribal societies in which individuals or single families possess a strong recognition of territory.
For example, individual family units of the Semang, an extremely small group of primitive gatherers in Malaya, each control a traditional territory containing about 30 square kilometers.
Furthermore, their claim over certain valuable trees and fruits is recognized by their neighbors. This notion of territoriality plays an important stabilizing influence in these areas. Primitive gatherers still live in the Stone Age much like their ancestors of 100 centuries before.
Only a few thousand people currently practice this form of livelihood worldwide. Their overall health is generally poor, and their life expectancy is vastly different from ours; they adhere to traditional ways of the world.
Primitive Hunting
Primitive hunters share many characteristics with gatherers. Both groups know how to use fire, prepare food, manufacture tools and implements, and construct shelters.
Hunting is primarily a communal activity, often requiring planned, large-scale expeditions and a very well-developed division of labor. Almost every hunting group recognizes this method of obtaining food as a cooperative venture and mobilizes most of its members to help capture the prey.
Hunting Zones
As it exists today, hunting occurs primarily in latitude zones. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, specialized hunters could be found throughout the Americas, in Southern Africa, and the interior of Australia.
With the arrival of Europeans in North and South America, the indigenous hunters who were not killed lost their lands and their means of livelihood.
Who Were Hunters?
North American Eskimo and Indian tribes were hunters in the primitive era. Typical of the people today who make a living by hunting are the North American Eskimo.
These are very skilled hunters and have refined their abilities into a fine art. The Eskimo are experts at fashioning kayaks from skins and harpoons from bones.
They hunted sheep, goats, seals, cattle, camels, and yaks. Indian tribes remain essentially at the hunting stage. These Indians are landsmen whose main targets are deer.
The Physical Environment of Hunting Zones
The physical environment of the Arctic features extremely low average temperatures and a very short summer period. The barren land called tundra is comprised of meager vegetation. Primitive hunters can be credited with maintaining a fine balance between the supply and harvest of animal resources.
This is in sharp contrast to the performance of some members of more advanced economies, who have seriously damaged the environment and have caused the extinction of types of wildlife.
Only a few thousand people still make their living exclusively by hunting. Many are under pressure to change their way of life and enter the commercial occupation of raising animals.
Eskimos who have abandoned hunting altogether find employment with private companies or with the Canadian or U.S. government and live in permanent coastal settlements.
Primitive Herding
Primitive herding is a more advanced economic activity than either gathering or hunting since those who live at least invest some effort to enhance natural production.
The product is animals, and the investment is labor, not just the labor required to extract from the natural supply, but that necessary to nurture and increase that supply. Herding activity encompasses the single largest territory on earth.
It should be noted that the existence of nomadic herding in a region does not preclude other types of activity.
In the Persian Gulf area, for example, more people are concerned with oil or gas exploitation today than with herding animals. The material culture of herding is characterized especially by a dependence on domesticated animals.
Physical Environments of Herding Areas
Most of the regions where nomadic herding occurs possess an arid or semi-arid climate under these physical circumstances.
Trees do not grow over broad areas. As grasses and shrubs comprise the natural vegetation, most primitive herding occurs in the regions of shrubs, bunch grass, and short grass.
The physical environment is different in the primitive herding region of northern Eurasia.
Precipitation is low, but evaporation is even lower, thus the climate there is considered to be a humid one. Plants grown in the tundra climate and the shrubs grown in the deserts or the grasses grown on the steppes.
But certain animals in this case, caribou and reindeer, can exist even on this limited vegetation.
Herding Cultures and Their Future
The development of herding as a distinct culture has been an issue of some controversy for anthropologists and economic geographers.
Some years ago, the prevailing theory was that herding represented a lower form of economic activity than agriculture. Furthermore, this Darwinian notion asserted that groups of people evolved through stages of culture and that once they progressed to a certain level, they never regressed or developed. People are assimilated along the margins or, in some cases, the exigency of government policy demands that they change their long-standing way of life.
Primitive Agriculture
Primitive cultivation represents the first endeavor of people to control static resources, that is, the boundary of the land. Primitive agriculture is influenced by technological innovations and applications of capital and energy. Primitive cultivation manifests only rudimentary technical management of the land, and limited amounts of time, effort, and capital are devoted to this activity. It should be noted that unlike the other economic activities described, primitive forms of cultivation are still practiced widely in the modern world. Today there are three broad regions where primitive agriculture can be found.
Firstly, the largest and most populous is in central Africa.
Secondly, straddling the equator, nearly half of the continent lies in this zone.
Lastly, most of West Africa’s farmers practice rotational bush.
Recent estimates by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) indicate that nearly 200 million people make their living by these systems of agriculture.