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The hunter-gatherer name given to these people came from the way they got their food, they either hunted it or gathered it. Hunting was either for meat, wild boar, deer (again) or even the bears that roamed the land in those days or the odd woolly mammoth, or for fish in the sea or rivers. Hunting would be done with a spear with a sharp piece of flint at the tip while fishing might be done with a carved bone used to spear the fish underwater. Shell fish were very popular as they don’t swim off. Shellfish, such as mussels and oysters, just cling to rocks. Archaeologists have found great piles of discarded oyster and mussel shells as these don't rot away. The food would be cooked over an open fire, or, more likely, in an open fire as they didn't have pots or pans while fish was often eaten raw. The people also ate berries and nuts but this could be dangerous. Berries and nuts growing in the wild don't have labels with sell by dates or warnings. I guess it was just trial and error, although if the berries were poisonous it was a pretty serious error. Still you'd only make it once. Maybe this is one reason why people didn’t live as long as they do today; few people made it past 50. As forests grew, meat became scarcer as animals could hide. It is thought that the hunter-gatherers may have deliberately burnt large areas of forest to frighten animals out so they could then be killed for food. Hunter gatherers didn't use plates.

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