Most advanced and complex hunter-gatherer civilization possible?

What would be, in your opinion, the highest level of social and technological development a hunter-gatherer civilization could reach, and how would it get there?
 
Places like Pacific Northwest due do abunsance of fish could support relatively large population without farming, so complex societes could rise there.
Other such place is Hokkaido with Ainu people.
 
Coast Salish people created a sedentary, stratified slave society despite being hunter-gatherers.
Places like Pacific Northwest due do abunsance of fish could support relatively large population without farming, so complex societes could rise there.
Other such place is Hokkaido with Ainu people.

I'm aware that the peoples of the Pacific Northwest had such an abundance of fish and game in their lands that they could support actual sedentary villages through hunting, but would it be possible for such a civilization to reach an even higher level of development, comparable to that of the empires and kingdoms south of the Rio Grande, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and so on?

The Haida in particular seem like a very likely candidate for the role of hegemon in what is now known as "Cascadia", to me.
 
Now, assuming OP is "culture" and not "civilization", following is one really broad strokes take on looking at the question: Is domestication of plants an inevitably, or is it constrained by the availability of suitable candidate crops and climate?

The GGS style theory is that you really need the right candidate founder crops and animals around, and this is really part of the trigger that set off the Neolithic Revolutions where and when they happened. The converse is that early farming really could've happened anywhere, with almost any set of plants outside deserts, and really the triggers are something else.

If it's the former, and domesticates are important, then in theory an ASB world where these plants simply didn't exist would still I would guess tend to show the slow but steady increases in hunter gatherer toolkit complexity and sophistication which seem to happen on the average over time among populations across essentially every continent post-OOA (e.g. the Broad Spectrum Revolution), but never become sedentary or semi-sedentary agriculturalists. You'd might see composite bows, metallurgical exploitation, etc. without ever seeing agriculture, if you waited long enough (especially, as other people note, at particularly rich grounds for forager exploitation).

That's harder to achieve if it was an "almost any plant will do... but humans need to go through the right climatic events" scenario (for instance the Cold Snap scenario Spencer Wells lays out here - https://blog.insito.me/the-neolithic-revolution-28a018799851). Though even in that case, agriculture can be avoided while maintaining increases in technology / sophistication, if you allow butterflying away of our climatic shifts.

Where it can't be avoided is if agriculture is simply an inevitable consequence of increases in human group size and the quality of the human toolkit, almost any plants will do, and no specific climatic shift was required. In that case, sophistication of HG cultures is probably capped to those that it was capped at in our world, in that once the toolkit becomes sophisticated to a certain level, and this happens outside extremely inhospitable cold and hot deserts, then agriculture becomes really inevitable.

(The same applies for animals and stock raising, though in that case, I would say it seems a good bit more tenable that particular animals were required, as the ubiquity of animal domestication is much less...)
 
Complexity of civilization usual depend on population size. Population size depend on access to food. So you need a h-g culture with access to large amount of food one place either the entire year or for a period annual, which would make a large number of people willing to migrate to the same place. Another effective way to increase carriage capacity are a culture able to have larger hunting and gartnering grounds, in a pre-domestication society this means boats. The problem with a society like this are if you keep people sedentary long enough, they will develop some kind of agriculture, simply by them removing first the non-food plants for fuel, then the plants which gives the least food, so fundamental yo goes from a hunter-gartnering society to a hunter-gardening society and at some point you will end up domesticate some animals too, and you're going down the road to agriculture.
 

Infinity

Banned
China used spear tips made out of jade in hunter-gather times. I'd look there for the greatest complexity.

Source: The Art Institute of Chicago
 

RousseauX

Donor
From what I understand you can basically get a small city with hunter-gather in an abundant enough enviroment (several thousand people living in the same place all year-round)

there's also a thin line btwn hunter-gatherer and farmer sometimes, even hunter gathers nomads will, for instance, do stuff like try to remove barriers and obstructions for berry bush/tree growth when they leave a spot for the winter so they get a better "harvest" when they come back next spring
 
If fishing count as hunting gathering, then how about a culture with highly developed sea fishing technology (sail, big nets, large boats) and acess to prime fish populations would be a good way to go.
 
Probably the best candidates for advanced hunter-gatherer cities are along trade bottlenecks/hubs. Especially along a strait or isthmus where trade can be monopolized leading to an accumulation of wealth generated far away.

Such candidates include:
1. central america if a robust land-based trade can develop between mesoamerica amd the andes
2. derbent as the gateway between the steppe and the iranian plateau/middle east
3. the strait of gibraltar
4. egypt (sepficially the nile delta/sinai) before seafaring technology allows crossing of the mediterranean/red sea
 
Would the Scythians, Huns, or Mongols count?

Pastoralism is not hunting / gathering. All three were nomadic / semi-nomadic steppe pastoralists. Their livelihood was derived from herds of semi-domesticated horses, sheep and goats, with some hunting. Hunters and Gatherers do not rely on domesticated animals or plants for their food. Even then, all three cultures likely supplemented their diets with foraging, but they were not rooted in foraging.

A good contemporary example of a cluster of highly complex hunter-gatherer societies would be, as others have said the Pacific Northwest Cultures. Kwakiutl, Haida, Tlingit, Coast Salish etc.
 
Has anyone done a Jomon/Emishi TL? Because if so I'd love to read it.

How did Jomon society look like, though? Even though they've been compared to the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, while we know a lot about said peoples - for example, they mostly were matrilineal societies that, unlike most other hunter-gatherer groups, were not egalitarian but had distinct social classes - I've looked for information about the Jomon but most of what it's written about them's related to pottery.
 
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