Résumé
Only 12000 years ago humankind was still depending exclusively on foraging activities for daily subsistence. Today, the hunter-gatherer societies whose livelihoods still primarily depend on resources that are "taken from the wild" represent only 0,002% of the current world population. We tend to consider these persisting nomadic foragers as the very last depositories of a bygone era when humans were struggling daily to obtain food in very precarious circumstances. This way of apprehending our contemporary hunter-gatherers induces several misconceptions vis-à-vis foraging activities and the potential role they could still play in managing uncultivated resources and in feeding the world. Read more Foraging is seen as an improbable way of tracking down resources. There is a strong belief that nature acts as a safety net in which poor and hungry people may occasionally pick something up to eat in periods of drastic food shortage. Resources in the wild are accordingly perceived as scarce and available only for small groups of people, and requiring long days of hard work to collect them. And according to the optimal foraging theory which was in vogue three decades ago, their caloric return is often seen as too low to compensate the energy mobilized to collect them. Foraging activities are perceived as belonging to the past: since it is the principal channel of subsistence for small human groups whose ways of life are about to disappear, foraging is in essence understood as an old-fashioned and anachronistic manner to exploit resources.