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Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

'Gathering food' is not the extent of the 'work' that hunter-gatherer societies performed, which is kind of the basis of that ridiculous pop-anthropology notion of hunter-gathers working some silly low number of hours per week.

Food preparation and preservation, shelter, crafting necessaries like eating implements, food storage vessels, clothing, and weapons - these keep a member of that society (except for some of the 'elites' of those societies, naturally) busy from dusk to dawn.

This persistent myth of the low effort required to subsist as a hunter gather needs to die.

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> “Man the Hunter”

I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of stuff that gets left out falls under the heading of "women's work". There's an enormous blind spot that underlies most discussions of work where working 'at home' is disregarded as though it is the natural state of women and not worth mentioning.

Women have always worked full time. Out of the home, in the home, with their partners, with their villages. Read frontier biographies from the US western expansion and notice the partnership and shared responsibilities. Notice who takes the deer carcass and processes the meet and hide. Notice who churns and cans and turns fabrics and leather into clothes and shoes and hats and bedding.

It rarely gets discussed, and feeds into a mythology which treats women 'working' as something that started in 1970 and is a sad byproduct of economic necessity.

Very very true, but to clarify too, those roles aren't as cut and dry either - it's true hunting was mostly a job for boys and young men, but older less spry men were also crafters and fabricators for their societies. They were also, a lot of the time, the 'elites' I spoke of - spiritual leaders, chieftains, hunting group leaders (which probably formed the kernel of later period dedicated warrior groups), etc. Elderly women also fulfilled spiritual leadership roles occasionally.

You make a good point, there's a lot of distribution and men didn't necessarily go out, hunt, and spend the rest of the day relaxing by the campfire either. The poster further up called it 'pop-antropology' and that is an accurate description. Take one part of what one society does and confidently declare that everything else doesn't count.

The world still has some hunter gatherer societies living today, so studying them could give us some insight into how many hours our hunter gatherer ancestors worked.

Those existing hunter gathers, almost invariably, have close economic contact with modern agricultural societies, so unfortunately there's a limit to how much studying them can tell us as far as that goes.

I don't think that's a given. Or, at least, not if the extent of the argument is "well, they seem primitive to me, I assume my ancestors were primitive, so...".

The hunting and gathering (and storing, and shelter, and guarding, and...) surely were as varied as semi-modern (pre globalization) societies. The amount of work would depend on the natural environment and climate, hunting or fishing, trade with other local tribes, culture and mythologies.

I'd argue that the few, highly sequestered, remaining hunter gatherer societies, by virtue of being the only ones still around, are likely to be very much outliers in some dimensions and actually plausibly quite different from our own ancestors.

The article makes a point that contemporary hunter gatherers are not living the life like their ancestors. "Modern" cultures displaced them into much less favorable environments.

Even without displacement, the amount of game available in an area a few centuries ago must have been at least an order of magnitude more dense before unlimited commercialized overhunting and overfishing decimated populations.

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