The Pila Nguru, often referred to in English as the Spinifex people, are an Aboriginal Australian people of Western Australia, whose lands extend to the border with South Australia and to the north of the Nullarbor Plain. The centre of their homeland is in the Great Victoria Desert, at Tjuntjunjarra, some 700 kilometres (430 mi) east of Kalgoorlie, perhaps the remotest community in Australia. Their country is sometimes referred to as Spinifex country. The Pila Nguru were the last Australian people to have dropped the complete trappings of their traditional lifestyle.
The vast and harsh Nullarbor Plain, as seen from space. Courtesy NASA.
A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, bird eggs, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most vertebrates that are omnivores. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.
Pygmy hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin in August 2014
The Mal'ta-Buret' people in the Baikal region of Siberia lived in dwellings built of mammoth bones, similar to those found in Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasia.
A San man in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Many San still live as hunter-gatherers.
Bison hunt under the wolf-skin mask, George Catlin, c. 1832