Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans?

[Jupiter60]

Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans? Apparently consensus is that they worked less. There are those who believe they worked more, that they had to work constantly to sustain themselves and had little free time.

 

[phinds]

Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans? Apparently consensus is that they worked less. There are those who believe they worked more, that they had to work constantly to sustain themselves and had little free time.

What do you think and why?

 

[Choppy]

This might be one of those topics that would benefit from some specific literature citations as a basis for discussion.

Otherwise, I think the answer will come down to how one interprets "work" in this context, (as well was "modern humans" for that matter).

 

[Evo]

Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans? Apparently consensus is that they worked less.

Where are you getting this? Please post the link to the scientific study that supports this. I've never heard that they had an easy life.

 

[Drakkith]

Where are you getting this? Please post the link to the scientific study that supports this. I've never heard that they had an easy life.

Sounds like it might have come from something like the following article: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

From a ways down in the article:

Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week.

I found similar information everywhere I looked in the first page or two of google results when I searched for "how hard did hunter-gatherers work".

 

[Jarfi]

Work at that time was Warfare, Hunting, foraging for food, scouting and toolmaking/creating things with your hands. All expend massive amounts of energy, so I would assume they worked as little as possible to save energy. Laziness would definitely pay off as an evolutionary advantage in that regard. And they'd need pretty big portions of food to be basically taking 8 hour+ hikes daily.
I have worked a 10 hour manual labour job when I was younger, and I was absolutely done. I could not afford to do anything when I came home, and unless I ate a lot more than usually I was moving slow and thinking slow. I even started "moving" differently, in order to conserve energy I'd behave in a different way, sit down differently and walk differently, like a zombie. I do hope they didn't have to exert themselves so much their whole lives, for their sake.

 

[Drakkith]

Work at that time was Warfare, Hunting, foraging for food, scouting and toolmaking/creating things with your hands. All expend massive amounts of energy, so I would assume they worked as little as possible to save energy. Laziness would definitely pay off as an evolutionary advantage in that regard. And they'd need pretty big portions of food to be basically taking 8 hour+ hikes daily.

I don't think foraging and building hand-tools are as energy intensive or as hard on the body as a manual labor job. And I highly doubt laziness has a direct evolutionary link. If that were true, and if it was being selected for and not against, that would mean there would tend to be more lazy people over time, which is highly detrimental to a species like ours. In any case, a lazy individual in a small hunter-gatherer community is likely to be noticed and subjected to societal pressure and stigma.

 

[phinds]

Well, all of our opinions have been entertaining but I'm still waiting for the OP to answer my question, else we're just talking to ourselves.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Sahlins concludes that the hunter-gatherer only works three to five hours per adult worker each day in food production.[6][7] Using data gathered from various foraging societies and quantitative surveys done among the Arhem Landers of Australia and quantitative materials cataloged by Richard Lee on the Dobe Bushmen of the Kalahari, Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer tribes are able to meet their needs through working roughly 15-20 hours per week or less.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

This is basically the same theory discussed by the link @Drakkith provided.

 

[Jupiter60]

What do you think and why?

I think they worked more or thought so. Work was hard with those primitive tools and took longer and they needed to work a lot to sustain themselves. However I recently read where it was stated that they worked less.

 

[phinds]

I think they worked more or thought so. Work was hard with those primitive tools and took longer and they needed to work a lot to sustain themselves. However I recently read where it was stated that they worked less.

My expectation would have been the same as yours. I see from the various posts here that apparently we didn't think it through fully. I knew there had to be at least some leisure time else where would things like cave drawings have come from but apparently there was more than we would have expected.

 

[Bystander]

Need to crank in the "seven fat years followed by seven lean;" it ain't going to be all "beer and skittles."

 

[Evo]

When we're talking ancient hunter gatherers the time and place you pick to look at drastically changes the scenario.

Africa's ancient hunter gatherers struggle for survival

Northern Tanzania (CNN) -- One could classify the Hadza people as a throwback. Numbering a mere 1,300, they represent one of the last communities of hunter-gatherers in the world. Their language -- which includes click consonants -- is unrelated to any other on Earth, and is possibly one of the oldest spoken languages in existence.

Their DNA, too, suggests an ancient heritage, easily 100,000 years old (and possibly a primary root for mankind's family tree). Their home, near Northern Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, has been dubbed the "Cradle of Mankind," partly because it has unearthed some of the oldest known human remains.

An ancient way of life

Many of the Hadza live in a remote stretch of Tanzania, where much of their day is given over to foraging and hunting. The techniques they use for finding sustenance are passed down generation to generation. The men favor handmade bows and arrows, while the women dig up roots and gather berries.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/18/world/africa/africas-ancient-hunter-gatherers-hadza/

It also seems that warfare was a big time activity. With deaths from killing parties equated to equal to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

http://www.economist.com/node/10278703

 

[Bystander]

Ian Morris, War, What Is It Good For?, an unapologetic re-hash/resurrection of Leviathan at first reading; hate to think that's coming back into fashion, but the cited homicide rates among "primitives" being equivalent to two billion per century (20 million per year) might make me take another look at it.

 

[Fervent Freyja]

You should remember that the amount of work a hunter-gatherer society did had been heavily dependent on the seasons, as they determined the existence of resources. The hours 'working' would vary considerably, depending upon the time of year and the patterns of emerging resources that would have been unique to a certain area.

 

[Chronos]

I doubt our ancient ancestors had much capability to prepare for hard times. Prior to the emergence of food preservation, gathering or hunting more than your clan could eat before it spoiled was pretty pointless - unless scavengers were a dietary staple [I can just hear the kids, 'mom, not vulture soup again!']. While agriculture was often an option, meat was still a feast or famine proposition. Until the development of effective food preservation and storage practices, I am guessing our ancient ancestors worked like dogs and ate like pigs.

 

[jim mcnamara]

There a some really old examples of preservation - pit houses in the Southwest US from circa 200 AD had ceramic vessels with evidence stored dried seeds.
So-called Anasazi Beans ( Pinto bean relative with very distinctive splotchy seed coat ) are derived from some seeds found sealed in a vessel dated from ~1000 AD. On a lark one of the researchers planted some of them. They grew... Seeds were then used to generate seed stock. And are now grown extensively in NW New Mexico and SE Colorado. It turns out some settlers in the Dove Creek area did the same thing earlier about 1900. Nobody paid much attention back then I guess.

Picture with some problematic hype:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/425054-the-nutritional-value-of-anasazi-beans-compared-to-pinto/

The point here is that preservation methods using drying arose in a completely geographically isolated culture arose way back in time. People many thousands of years ago are us. They liked eating too, and did things, smart things, to stave off starvation. Homo sapiens sapiens arose circa 100K+ years ago. Since we are still here, maybe very early modern humans figured out lots of things way earlier than us internet denizens want to give them credit for.

 

[Chronos]

Preservation methods obviously arose early for our species, otherwise it is unlikely we would be here now munching on trail mix and discussing the issue. But if is equally obvious human civilization could not florish until such practices were well refined. Undoubtedly trial and error was a vital and often unfortunate price to pay for this knowledge. Our ancestors were undoubtedly extremely bright, probably our equals, but, advanced slowly because access to unambiguous knowledge of the collective experiences of their ancestors before writing emerged was very limited. In fact, the principle reason we are not more advanced is probably because literacy was a jealously guarded secret to power even as recently as a few centuries ago. It was meted out by priests to accolytes, then to priveleged members of society before heretics perceived a benefit in allowing it to spread to the unwashed masses.

 

[Dr_Zinj]

"Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans?"

It's a pretty poor question to start with. Which modern humans are you using for comparison? Wall Street Bankers? Israeli Prime Minister? Chinese factory worker? North Korean farmer? Alaskan Inuit? American millennial living in his Mom's basement? And what hunter gatherers are you talking about? Ones in arctic regions? Northern boreal forests? Sub-Saharan? South American triple canopy jungles?

The amount of time required for hunter gathers to work is dependent on the density of food resources, and environmental conditions. Pleasant environment year round, food abundantly available to simply pick it up at any time, the work is going to be maybe 2 hours a day for meal time. Extremely adverse environmental conditions with scarce, scattered, low nutritional foods, and people may have to work every available hour of light to survive.

 

[Larry Kennedy]

Sounds like it might have come from something like the following article: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

From a ways down in the article:

Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week.

I found similar information everywhere I looked in the first page or two of google results when I searched for "how hard did hunter-gatherers work".

Three to five hrs of work, 365 days a year. That just pays for food, consisting of whatever is edible and available whether or not you and I would consider it as such, and the occasional meat of the day, not counting clothing, cooking and hunting tools, etc. plus the maintenance of it all and living conditions most of us wouldn't have.

 

[SteamKing]

Did hunter gatherers work less or more than modern humans? Apparently consensus is that they worked less.

This is prolly true, if you mean total work over a lifetime. H/G probably had a life expectancy at birth of about 25 years or so, less if times were lean.

No one worked for 40 years as a H/G becuz they were dead a good while by then.

There are those who believe they worked more, that they had to work constantly to sustain themselves and had little free time.

Well, H/G certainly led more active and exciting lives than modern folk. There's nothing like herding a bunch of mammoths off a cliff before breakfast to get the juices flowing for the rest of the day.

 

[Sue Rich]

I believe they worked less. The men went hunting as a group (like you guys with your buddies), they killed and cleaned their prey, then brought it home for the women to cook or store. They had no stress (except in winter when food was getting short), and they spent the evening hours with their friends talking about the day's hunt. The women did most of the gathering and chatted with their friends while stitching hides and such. All in all, a harsh but pieceful life.

 

[Drakkith]

No one worked for 40 years as a H/G becuz they were dead a good while by then.

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.

 

[Sue Rich]

If they made it to parenthood, the life span grew. Because once their offspring became of age to hunt, they took over the 'family business'. But the longevity of life was short for the most part, any thing from an accident to a cold or pneumonia could cost them their lives. No medicine, no medical knowledge.

 

[SteamKing]

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.

Sure, modern groups of H/G which still exist may benefit from factors which allow for increased longevity among the human population at large, but in older times, you would be unlikely to find H/Gs who made it to 32, let alone 72. However, I think the OP is wondering about H/Gs as they existed long ago, before the development and practice of agriculture by human populations.

Changes in the modern environment produced by non H/G humans have made it more hospitable to those who live on the fringe. Sanitation and immunization have decreased the likelihood that large scale epidemics and pandemics will break out and ravage the populations of H/G who have no natural resistance to such infections.

The fact remains, for populations of humans from earlier times, reaching advanced age (say > 30 years) was a proposition with small odds in one's favor. As someone once noted, the human population of the planet exploded in recent times not because people bred like rabbits, but because people stopped dying like flies due to the availability of better medicine and better sanitation.

 

[Drakkith]

As far as I can tell, the paper I linked to in my earlier post disagrees with you, Steamking.

However, I think the OP is wondering about H/Gs as they existed long ago, before the development and practice of agriculture by human populations.

From the paper:

A fundamental conclusion we draw from this analysis is that extensive longevity appears to be a novel feature of Homo sapiens. Our results contradict Vallois’s (1961: 222) claim that among early humans, “few individuals passed forty years, and it is only quite exceptionally that any passed fifty,” and the more traditional Hobbesian view of a nasty, brutish, and short human life (see also King and Jukes 1969; Weiss 1981). The data show that modal adult life span is 68–78 years, and that it was not uncommon for individuals to reach these ages, suggesting that inferences based on paleodemographic reconstruction are unreliable.

They're talking about pre-agricultural societies, which is exactly what the OP was asking about.

Changes in the modern environment produced by non H/G humans have made it more hospitable to those who live on the fringe. Sanitation and immunization have decreased the likelihood that large scale epidemics and pandemics will break out and ravage the populations of H/G who have no natural resistance to such infections.

Most of which is irrelevant for bands of early human, as their small population size and low population density doesn't support the development of epidemic diseases and also helps inhibit their spread as far as I understand. Indeed it is actually contact with agricultural societies that commonly results in catastrophic epidemics. While disease is absolutely a primary cause of death among hunter-gatherers, to the best of my knowledge these are not epidemic diseases. Indeed the paper itself appears to support this:

Infectious disease is unlikely to reach epidemic proportions in small, isolated populations (Black 1975). In our sample, widespread lethal infectious disease was most common in groups that had been interacting with large populations of outsiders.

Interestingly, you can find an analysis of mortality rates for several hunter-gatherer populations during pre-contact and post-contact with developed societies in the paper as well.

The fact remains, for populations of humans from earlier times, reaching advanced age (say > 30 years) was a proposition with small odds in one's favor. As someone once noted, the human population of the planet exploded in recent times not because people bred like rabbits, but because people stopped dying like flies due to the availability of better medicine and better sanitation.

The average age is low because mortality during infancy and childhood is so high. Again from the paper:

In Table 2, we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45.

43% of studied hunter-gatherers died before the age of 15, but if you live to that age then you have better odds of surviving to 45 than you do of landing on black during a game of roulette. So while an individual may have had less than a 50% chance of making it to age 45, it was by no means a rarity and not something I'd call "small odds".

 

[SteamKing]

As far as I can tell, the paper I linked to in my earlier post disagrees with you, Steamking.
From the paper:

A fundamental conclusion we draw from this analysis is that extensive longevity appears to be a novel feature of Homo sapiens. Our results contradict Vallois’s (1961: 222) claim that among early humans, “few individuals passed forty years, and it is only quite exceptionally that any passed fifty,” and the more traditional Hobbesian view of a nasty, brutish, and short human life (see also King and Jukes 1969; Weiss 1981). The data show that modal adult life span is 68–78 years, and that it was not uncommon for individuals to reach these ages, suggesting that inferences based on paleodemographic reconstruction are unreliable.

They're talking about pre-agricultural societies, which is exactly what the OP was asking about.
Most of which is irrelevant for bands of early human, as their small population size and low population density doesn't support the development of epidemic diseases and also helps inhibit their spread as far as I understand. Indeed it is actually contact with agricultural societies that commonly results in catastrophic epidemics. While disease is absolutely a primary cause of death among hunter-gatherers, to the best of my knowledge these are not epidemic diseases. Indeed the paper itself appears to support this:

Infectious disease is unlikely to reach epidemic proportions in small, isolated populations (Black 1975). In our sample, widespread lethal infectious disease was most common in groups that had been interacting with large populations of outsiders.

Interestingly, you can find an analysis of mortality rates for several hunter-gatherer populations during pre-contact and post-contact with developed societies in the paper as well.
The average age is low because mortality during infancy and childhood is so high. Again from the paper:

In Table 2, we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45.

43% of studied hunter-gatherers died before the age of 15, but if you live to that age then you have better odds of surviving to 45 than you do of landing on black during a game of roulette. So while an individual may have had less than a 50% chance of making it to age 45, it was by no means a rarity and not something I'd call "small odds".

The fact remains, however, that human civilization, except in a few instances, has abandoned the H/G model in favor of agriculture in order to provide a wider variety of food sources and a greater supply of same. The proportion of the population involved in procuring food in a H/G group would have been quite high, IMO, while the fraction of the population involved in food production in modern societies is well below 5% in the most productive societies. This allows 95% of the population to do something else than to find eats for the table every day. H/G groups must remain relatively small and highly mobile in order to go where the food is, while agriculture allows for a more stable and rooted society, one which can grow in size as the means of feeding itself increases, rather than having to abandon its living space.

 

[Drakkith]

The fact remains, however, that human civilization, except in a few instances, has abandoned the H/G model in favor of agriculture in order to provide a wider variety of food sources and a greater supply of same. The proportion of the population involved in procuring food in a H/G group would have been quite high, IMO, while the fraction of the population involved in food production in modern societies is well below 5% in the most productive societies. This allows 95% of the population to do something else than to find eats for the table every day. H/G groups must remain relatively small and highly mobile in order to go where the food is, while agriculture allows for a more stable and rooted society, one which can grow in size as the means of feeding itself increases, rather than having to abandon its living space.

I don't believe any of that was ever in dispute.

 

[analogue]

There a some really old examples of preservation - pit houses in the Southwest US from circa 200 AD had ceramic vessels with evidence stored dried seeds.
So-called Anasazi Beans ( Pinto bean relative with very distinctive splotchy seed coat ) are derived from some seeds found sealed in a vessel dated from ~1000 AD. On a lark one of the researchers planted some of them. They grew... Seeds were then used to generate seed stock. And are now grown extensively in NW New Mexico and SE Colorado. It turns out some settlers in the Dove Creek area did the same thing earlier about 1900. Nobody paid much attention back then I guess.

Picture with some problematic hype:
http://www.livestrong.com/article/425054-the-nutritional-value-of-anasazi-beans-compared-to-pinto/

The point here is that preservation methods using drying arose in a completely geographically isolated culture arose way back in time. People many thousands of years ago are us. They liked eating too, and did things, smart things, to stave off starvation. Homo sapiens sapiens arose circa 100K+ years ago. Since we are still here, maybe very early modern humans figured out lots of things way earlier than us internet denizens want to give them credit for.

If today's man of the same specie were able to put a man on the moon, and create lifesaving medicines from coal tar, then the same man with the same brain could figure out a way to make life easier. to think we ran around going "ugh, ugh!" and wondering in stupefied astonishment at the sight of a wheel make me cringe. I agree with you is what I am saying. We weren't so stupid. Now, there are quite a few examples of savages doing dumb things (and when I use the word savage, I mean it in it's real literal sense, as in uncivilized, because that is the proper word) and doing things that would be considered anti-progressive, out of sheer ignorance or in superstitious beliefs. The native Americans didn't attend to injuries as they believed it wasn't very macho, now is that "stupidity" or belief? The latter.
But to think ALL hunter gatherers had it rough or easy is not only a subjective argument, it is rather useless, as in some areas maybe they had it easier, and in some areas really rough! It would all depend on where they lived, and whether there were a lot of edible plants and foods to pick from. To ask the question if they had it not as bad as we think, is like asking if the American slaves "had it rough" or not. (Some DID, some DIDN'T, and there is proof of this to any who wish to look for it)

there IS not one answer to this query, that is all.

 

[votingmachine]

Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week.

Three to five hrs of work, 365 days a year. That just pays for food, consisting of whatever is edible and available whether or not you and I would consider it as such, and the occasional meat of the day, not counting clothing, cooking and hunting tools, etc. plus the maintenance of it all and living conditions most of us wouldn't have.

I've done a lot of backpacking and I can say that just because food acquisition tasks took 21-35 hours per week, that does not mean that there is no other work. There is still gathering firewood. Maintaining and moving shelters. Collecting and making tools (eg, pots). Making clothes. Making weapons. Creating security systems against human and animal intrusion. Finding potable water. Keeping the rain out. Keeping warm. Keeping cool. Tribes also had to settle disagreements and determine leadership roles.

I don't know what the complete list of tasks for a primitive hunter-gatherer tribes-person is, but it has to be larger than the food production work.