The phrase ‘hunter-gatherer’ evokes in the general consciousness an image not much better informed by scholarship than the general ideas people have about interstellar travel. The Sentinelese, and various other uncontacted peoples are often dubbed remnants of the stone age, which implies that hunter-gatherer peoples have undergone essentially no substantive change in the thousands of years and more that they have occupied the earth. That assumption seems patently absurd when we try to apply it to agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial societies, so I tend to be quite suspicious of it. What do we know about how the lifestyles and social organisations of hunter-gatherer peoples have changed throughout the millennia?