ere a vital aspect of survival (for new food and plant sources of food), eventually the more sedentary cultures would evolve into the more complex hunter-gatherers, who would in turn become the first agrarian societies. This sedentism was favorable because it did away with the "material limitations imposed by a more nomadic lifestyle" (Price & Brown, 1985, p. 433).
In any society there must be a means of affording the individuals of that society the resources to live: "All societies have structured arrangements to provide the material means of individual and community life. It is these structured rules that we call an economic system" (Dalton, 1971, p. 89).
Yet too often economics and economic systems are thought of as being an aspect of mankind. However, even nature itself has a natural economic system that arises from a combination of biological, hereditary and environmental factors:
Nature does have an economy. Life processes occur only within specifiable ranges of temperature, altitude, nutrient availability and other environmental parameters. The competition which occurs within an ecological niche obliges organisms to adapt by making optimal use of the available resources (Ortiz, 1983, p. 160).
Ember (1978) notes that "the discrepancy between Lee's (1968) survey and the present one raises the possibility that what is typical of hunter-gatherers may vary considerably by geographical region" (p. 443). This is true where hunter-gatherers are concerned, like the Bergdama and the Veddas. The lives of hunters and gatherers have more variety than we might expect in the sense that these people were quite dependent on the plants and animals in the environment where they had their camps. Since this is the case, they
must act differently according to whether they live in the tropical forests of the Congo, Ceylon (Veddas), or Sumatra, in the polar regions of Greenland or Alaska, or in the deserts or steppes of Africa or...