Acorn, especially from valley oaks, was a staple food for Native Central Californians. It is still prepared and eaten at some special occasions.
PREHISTORIC HUNTER-GATHERERS IN CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Unlike prehistoric3 Americans in the East and the Southwest, most Native Californians never took up farming as a way of life. When the Spanish first came to the Central Valley, they found people who obtained their food by hunting wild game, fishing in the rivers and lakes and sloughs, collecting shellfish along the coast, and gathering edible wild plants. While there is no evidence that these people tilled the soil, planted seeds, or kept livestock, they did "manage" their environment, for example by setting fires to clear land, drive game, and encourage new plant growth.
These hunter-gatherers tended to be more mobile than most farmers, since they were not as closely tied to particular plots of land, and they moved around the landscape to take advantage of whatever resources were available at different times in the yearly cycle: runs of salmon and steelhead in the spring and fall; seeds, berries, and nuts from late spring through the summer and into the fall; large herds of deer and elk, and flocks of waterfowl, from late fall to early spring.
Hunter-gatherer adaptations - that is, the ways people adjusted to, and influenced, their natural environment - is a major topic of study for archaeologists. We believe that the way a prehistoric population lived within its environment was influenced by such factors as the types of natural resources (plants, animals, water, toolstone, etc.) that were available to them, the technology at their disposal for working with these resources, how their social and family groups were organized, and the amount of competition they had from neighboring groups. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers also were vulnerable to things like food shortages brought on by drought, plant and animal diseases, and other factors. One way they may have adjusted to these circumstances - that is, one of their adaptive strategies - was by trading with people from other regions, who were not suffering from the same problems; this favor might be returned in future years, when the situation was reversed. Another adaptive strategy used by many hunter-gatherer peoples was to store foods (for example, dried fish or dried acorns) to carry them through lean times.
All human societies may have started out as hunter-gatherers. We are not sure why some groups went on to develop other ways of living (especially agriculture and sedentary villages) while others did not. One important reason probably was the increase in
3 - The Prehistoric period in America is that time before the arrival of people who had a written language.
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