A propitious location and a sense of timing are crucial to hunter-gatherers in another way. The “harvest” of hunters and gatherers is less a daily hit-or-miss proposition than a carefully calculated effort to intercept the roughly predictable (late-April and May) mass migration of game such as the huge herds of gazelle and wild asses in the alluvium. The hunt was carefully prepared in advance. Long, narrowing lanes were prepared to funnel the herds onto a killing ground, where they could be dispatched and preserved by drying and salting. For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a
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