Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.
Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.
Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.
Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.