alt Hacker News> In days of manual labor jobs and lots of walking, people likely burned 1500-4000 calories more per day than sedentary modern lifestyles.
Hasn't this idea been studied using modern-but-primitive groups of people who still live much as they have for thousands of years? Their bodies are quite efficient and they do not burn substantially more calories than "civilized" humans in regular society do.
Studying pre agriculture societies doesn't say anything about agriculture labor in the 1940s, which is what the grandparent comment was about.
That said, modern farmworkers in my town are mostly overweight, for the same reasons as everyone else.