Given the extensive data from both Panter-Brick and Bassett's groups, as well as from other nontechnological farming populations (Table 2 and Figure 2), there is little doubt that non-technological subsistence farming required extensive, long-duration, and low-intensity physical activity on a daily basis.
I imagine a Paleoindian cultural landscape defined, not just by the distribution of food and non-food resources, but also other people, to propose that mobility and exchange both contributed to the patterns of toolstone conveyance we see, perhaps operating at different scales in relation to subsistence, technological, and social motivations.
It's hard to break new technological ground in a subsistence village.
The Paleoindian literature reflects a tendency to assume that toolstone conveyance reflects direct acquisition (i.e., mobility) motivated by subsistence and technological concerns, rather than acquisition (i.e., exchange) motivated by social concerns.
Primates and giant squirrels appear to have been targeted not just for subsistence, but also for technological production.
Technological change might drive wages above subsistence levels, but only temporarily because the fecundity of the poor would soon drive wages back down.
In both cases, the impoverished rural people are forced to practise subsistence farming with a very low technological level, extensive livestock farming and to migrate to the towns.
Subsistence remains are not abundant, but microwear and technological analyses of flaked stone tools can be used to infer production of dugout canoes and document trends that reflect new sustainable and resilient lifeways and complex social networks.
We are told that the opponents of industrial agriculture want to eschew technological advance and keep developing regions mired in non-mechanised, subsistence-style agriculture.
According to Bellwood (2005), species with technological uses may have been among the first to be domesticated because they were often essential for hunter-gatherers' subsistence.
Several environmental factors may have helped maintain southwest Ethiopia as a cultural isolate where people had only a late interest in switching their subsistence to food production and where incorporation of livestock and ceramic production took place in longstanding, highly conservative, technological and economic systems.
