Whatever the reasons, most Paleolithic communities remained small enough to organize themselves through notions of family or kinship, like most modern foraging societies. That’s why it makes sense to think of Paleolithic communities as families rather than societies. And if modern foraging communities are any guide, they probably had a broad understanding of the term family that extended beyond the world of humans to include other species and even features of the landscape, such as mountains and rivers. Paleolithic societies were embedded in their surroundings ecologically and culturally in
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