Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans?

[Mark44]

Work at that time was Warfare, Hunting, foraging for food, scouting and toolmaking/creating things with your hands.

I'm reading "Crazy Horse and Custer" by Stephen Ambrose at the moment. The quote above is roughly what the Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux Oglala Sioux, spent his time on. During the good times before the vast buffalo herds were wiped out (a conscious decision on the part of US Army leaders such as Gen. Sherman, to deprive the Sioux and other hostile tribes of their means of making a living), the living was relatively easy.

Work was divided by sex, with men doing the hunting, making bows and arrows and other weapons, and women doing the cooking, scraping hides, and so forth. When the men weren't off hunting or making war or stealing horses from other tribes, they had a fair amount of leisure time in camp.

Ambrose includes voluminous citations from historians who interviewed the Indians.

 

[Sereninha]

Go look at human remains, cross check joint wear with diet from collagen analysis, Q.E.D.
I'm sure if you google about the data is all there. I live in a remote peasant village, their joints give out well before the rest of them, this does not seem so true of paleolithic peoples. I expect there might be some sexual dimorphism.
BTW. "Modern" covers a few centuries, even "Contemorary" includes around fifty percent rural, and of the rest defined as Urban may truly graft. This might be a prime example of "College-o-centric" questioning. I'm sure our ancestors, and the members of the human race who don't, would consider a job in an office at a keyboard, or in a lab hardly "work". In physics "work" as in "work hardening" implies physical strain.
One could also ask about stress though, for how many hours a day were they "alert"?

 

[votingmachine]

Go look at human remains, cross check joint wear with diet from collagen analysis, Q.E.D.
I'm sure if you google about the data is all there. I live in a remote peasant village, their joints give out well before the rest of them, this does not seem so true of paleolithic peoples. I expect there might be some sexual dimorphism.
BTW. "Modern" covers a few centuries, even "Contemorary" includes around fifty percent rural, and of the rest defined as Urban may truly graft. This might be a prime example of "College-o-centric" questioning. I'm sure our ancestors, and the members of the human race who don't, would consider a job in an office at a keyboard, or in a lab hardly "work". In physics "work" as in "work hardening" implies physical strain.
One could also ask about stress though, for how many hours a day were they "alert"?

It is important to remember that modern work does not JUST include the 8 hours bought by a job. People have to commute, cook, clean, raise children, etc..

 

[Evo]

http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf finds otherwise. To quote from their summary:

Post-reproductive longevity is a robust feature of hunter-gatherers and of the life cycle of Homo sapiens. Survivorship to grandparental age is achieved by over two-thirds of people who reach sexual maturity and can last an average of 20 years.

And:

The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68–78 years. This range appears to be the closest functional equivalent of an “adaptive” human life span.

Drakkith, this study was not about ancient hunter gatherers, it was about modern man, the first 5 years of the 21st century, to be exact, not what the OP had asked about. I know they had one study from Sweden that had a study from 1906 that covered the 18th century, maybe I am missing something that is not in their chart, or you have another study.

I found this interesting, although maybe too off topic, but about how agriculture hurt human health and development. It is also full of misspelled words.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

from page 2, continued

http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

 

[Drakkith]

Drakkith, this study was not about ancient hunter gatherers, it was about modern man, the first 5 years of the 21st century, to be exact, not what the OP had asked about. I know they had one study from Sweden that had a study from 1906 that covered the 18th century, maybe I am missing something that is not in their chart, or you have another study.

I realize that they studied modern hunter-gatherer societies, but I don't agree that it isn't relevant to the topic at hand. One of the five main questions they address in the paper is:

2) How robust is the occurrence of a post-reproductive life span, and how likely is it that older adults were alive and available in human populations?

They're studying several modern day societies, yes, but I see little reason to believe that their findings don't apply to early humans. The authors of the paper certainly think they do.

I found this interesting, although maybe too off topic, but about how agriculture hurt human health and development.

That's also my understanding. Agriculture may allow you to produce more food with fewer people, but in general you end up with a less diverse food supply, especially among the lower social classes, leading to malnourishment.

 

[Evo]

I realize that they studied modern hunter-gatherer societies, but I don't agree that it isn't relevant to the topic at hand. One of the five main questions they address in the paper is:

2) How robust is the occurrence of a post-reproductive life span, and how likely is it that older adults were alive and available in human populations?

They're studying several modern day societies, yes, but I see little reason to believe that their findings don't apply to early humans. The authors of the paper certainly think they do.
That's also my understanding. Agriculture may allow you to produce more food with fewer people, but in general you end up with a less diverse food supply, especially among the lower social classes, leading to malnourishment.

The reason I disagree with the finding of older humans in ancient times is how rare it is to find older human remains in ancient times. I can look them up, but it would take awhile and right now I have other things I am doing.

There are many reasons not to find older remains though, tuberculosis from smoke was very common, warfare was very common. Even removing the infant and early childhood deaths, you just did not find that many "old people" in ancient times. They died from abscessed teeth, infections that we could easily cure with an antibiotic. To say that a majority of people lived to an old age goes against everything I've ever read. Where is the proof? Where are the remains? I assume they have hundreds and hundreds of skeletons of ANCIENT people from thousands of years ago aged around 70, at least 2-3 times the number of people found of that same era in that same region.

 

[Drakkith]

The reason I disagree with the finding of older humans in ancient times is how rare it is to find older human remains in ancient times.

What time period do you mean by "ancient"?

 

[Evo]

What time period do you mean by "ancient"?

I'd say 5-10k years ago at least, farther back is really hard to find evidence.

If we were talking about modern day hunter gatherers, no problem.

 

[Drakkith]

I'd say 5-10k years ago at least.

If we were talking about modern day hunter gatherers, no problem.

The paper observed modern day hunter gatherers, but they are using those observations to make predictions about ancient hunter-gatherer societies.

To say that a majority of people lived to an old age goes against everything I've ever read.

That's fair. I guess I really can't say much on this other than what I've read in the paper, as this isn't an area I know much in (not that I really have any ).

 

[Ygggdrasil]

From systematic studies of hominid fossils:

Although we expected to find increases in longevity over time, we were unprepared for how striking our results would turn out to be. We observed a small trend of increased longevity over time among all samples, but the difference between earlier humans and the modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic was a dramatic fivefold increase in the OY ratio. Thus, for every 10 young adult Neandertals who died between the ages of 15 and 30, there were only four older adults who survived past age 30; in contrast, for every 10 young adults in the European Upper Paleolithic death distribution, there were 20 potential grandparents. Wondering whether the higher numbers of burials at Upper Paleolithic sites might account for the high number of older adults in that sample, we reanalyzed our Upper Paleolithic sample, using only those remains that had not been buried. But we got similar results. The conclusion was inescapable: adult survivorship soared very late in human evolution.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n2/full/scientificamerican0811-44.html (bolding mine)

See also: http://www.pnas.org/content/101/30/10895.full

Notably, the Upper Paleolithic (beginning ~ 50,000 years ago) predates the origin of agriculture (~10,000 years ago in the Neolithic period), so stone-age hunter-gatherers had 20 potential grandparents for every 10 young adults in their society.

 

[Evo]

From systematic studies of hominid fossils:

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n2/full/scientificamerican0811-44.html (bolding mine)

See also: http://www.pnas.org/content/101/30/10895.full

Notably, the Upper Paleolithic (beginning ~ 50,000 years ago) predates the origin of agriculture (~10,000 years ago in the Neolithic period), so stone-age hunter-gatherers had 20 potential grandparents for every 10 young adults in their society.

I don't have access to the Scientific American article, so thank you for the PNAS paper. From what I am reading they use age 30 for an average age for a grandmother, but I couldn't quite make out how much longer life expectancy in the studied groups were. I know it's hard to tell, but did they have enough evidence to make a guess to what age the majority appeared to have survived? And please forgive me if I completely missed it, another sleepless night. Thanks Ygggdrasil

 

[Sereninha]

Subsistence farmers do/did all that on top of hoeing the field in driving sleet at dawn.

 

[Sereninha]

It is important to remember that modern work does not JUST include the 8 hours bought by a job. People have to commute, cook, clean, raise children, etc..

Subsistence farmers did/do all this as well as hoeing the fields in the driving sleet, or baking sun.

 

[Sereninha]

The original Q was about work, work and longevity do not have a direct linkage, this discussion seems to have drifted into longevity, OK there is easier evidence there. Hunter gatherers were more vulnerable to individual "events", though less to infectious disease. Farmers have more levels of security, where do herders fit in? They have some elements of both, and in my anecdotal experience do not actually graft as hard as farmers.
Dogs have made a massive difference I guess to both hunters and herders in terms of workload and personal security. Herding was the link in many cases between hunting and farming, less so in PNG. Perhaps this is a factor in the sudden uptick in paleolithic survival into old age. Did siblings take active part in childcare before dogs set the example? Was this a pattern for care of the elderly? Did the cultural resource of the old become more worth protecting as there was more culture to store?

 

[Sue Rich]

They worked less, but their work was generally harder. The men hunted. They did not plant because they were 'hunter-gatherers'. While the men hunted which wouldn't have been every day, the women gathered the berries, nuts, fruit, whatever was in season. But the work wasn't over for either after the men skinned their kill. Both would have had a hand in turning the skins into wearable garments.