The contemporary hunter-gatherers are viewed as a distinct people with a distinct mode of subsistence and societal type. It has been viewed that the contemporary hunter gatherers possed the features of the past hunter-gatherers. This view is now questioned by some anthropologists who are designated as revisionists like C.Schrire (1984) Edwin N. Wilmsen (1989). They questioned the notion that the cultural
features of recent hunting gathering peoples resembled those hunter gatherers of the past. They argue that hunting and gathering was pursued not only for domestic consumption but also for exchanging for commodities produced by agriculturists, pastoralists and traders. Thus hunter-gatherers were in contact with larger more complex food producing societies. Due to this interaction, the revisionists argue that the social organization of hunting gathering communities possessed some traits of property, class, domination, some kinship features found in the wider society.
Further these communities were subjugated under influence of capitalism and modernity which almost destroyed the their cultures.
On the other hand some anthropologists like Nicolas Peterson (1991) view that markets and welfare states have only altered the foraging economy and the impacts are absorbed by the foraging communities to ascertain their own identity within wider society.
Apart from this controversy, the hunting-gathering communities world over are undergoing rapid changes in many spheres of their life. John E. Yellen raises a question: “Why did most hunting gathering societies disappear rapidly after coming in contact with societies that kept domesticated animals and plants”(1990).
Particularly referring to the! Kung Bushmen of Kalahari, he says that dissatisfaction with foraging style of life is not correct explanation for the rapid changes. He comes to a conclusion that sudden access to various types goods is the major factor for the changes among the! Kung.
There are several other reasons which could have effected changes in hunting – gathering mode of life. The major transformation recorded was a shift from hunting gathering to herding and cultivation. There are number of factors which might have effected a shift from hunting and gathering to intensive husbandry of animals and plants. These include climatic change, technological innovation, forest policies
restricting or prohibiting hunting, large scale plantation activities which rendered extinction of many edible plants, creation of alternative livelihoods particularly wage labour, establishment of cooperative societies to buy NTFP and sell essential commodities, penetration of monetary economy, and introduction of new varieties of animal or plant amenable to intensive husbandry, increasing contact with neighbouring cultivators, displacement and resettlement etc.
It is very difficult to synthesize and draw broad generalizations in the modes of hunter-gatherer transformation because of contextual complexity in which hunter gatherers are placed. Some broad generalizations can be made:
1) Assimilation as occurred among the Kucongs of Yunnan forest of China.