Describe the culture of paleolithic hunting- gathering societies?
Nomadic hunter gatherers traveling around in large families or small tribal groups. Sedentary tribes don't seem to make an appearance until grain eating begins in Nubia. Usually they'll have a winter and a summer camp, and will keep possessions down to a minimum. Functional objects like clothing are often very decorative, and art objects are small and portable. Most nomadic groups tend to have very highly decorated clothing, or wear a lot of jewelery. Europeans appear to have been wearing woven clothing as early as 30,000 years ago, and living a lot like plains Indians did in hide tents, some in caves. The women in hunter gatherer groups tend to breastfeed until the kid is four or five to reduce their fertility, as you can really only carry one babe in arms at a time. Hunter gatherer groups tend to have a much lower mortality rate and better nutrition that subsistence farmers, but a lower birth rate. They don't really clash in large organized battles, although raiding other tribes for women and children was probably common, as it happens in modern hunter gatherer groups. Also, there's very little incentive to crimes like theft, as nobody really 'owns' anything other than a few tools and their clothing.
How is life different today from the Paleolithic Era?
Wel, in western society things are hugely different. Paleolithic people were hunter-gatherers, living in small nomadic communities, whereass most modern western people live in large cities or towns, and live in one place rather than moving on continuously. Paleolithic people would have hunted and gathered their own food, made their own clothing and tools etc, whereas we buy most things ready made in shosp, and articles we buy are masss produced rather than being made by individuals for their own use. We have a huge amount of sophisticated technology available to us to make our lvies easier. However, we spend more time working, hunter-gathering requires comparatively little work, people in modern society work much longer hours to keep themselves in their goods, and having more possessions means more work looking after them, cleaning them etc. However, there are still some communities in the world who live much as our paleolithic ancestors were. We can guess that their lives in many ways were similar to the few remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer societies in the world - like some African tribes for instance and some Aborigonal communities for instance. By looking at how these people live (or did until recently), we can deduce how our ancestors lived, in ways very different from our own.