It's been a while since I had an anthropology class. If I remember correctly, it's really tied to how harsh the environment was. So natives in Alaska had to hunt or starve. For equatorial people, the stakes were much lower. There was an abundance of alternatives.

One way to look at it, how much art did they produce? Lots of art? Food was probably pretty easy to come by. Scratch a line on a log? Those folks worked _hard_ to survive.

I'm sure there were lean times for everybody. I'm not trying to say you or parent poster are wrong, I'm saying it's a big world, and all of those things and more were true for somebody, somewhere.