alt Hacker NewsA small nitpick that doesn't take away from the rest of your comment: staying alive and fed was not necessarily a laborious activity for hunter-gatherers living in good climates [0]. It's our expansion into less hospitable environments that made it so.
> Woodburn offers this “very rough approximation” of subsistence-labor requirements: “Over the year as a whole, probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food.”
> 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.
[0] https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...
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The anthropological research that came up with 2-3 hours of work per day only looked at time spent away from camp gathering, hunting, and fishing. When you account for food processing, cooking, water collection, firewood gathering, tool making, shelter maintenance, and textile production the numbers go way up.
So if we go back much further life was super chill and romantic? I dont buy it tbh, it feels to me just as unrealistic.
I believe the reasons we "regressed" into agriculture from hunting and gathering are much more complicated than "we moved into more marginal land".
It does appear that the median hunter gatherer life was better than the median farmer life. But I'd wager that to be true in most areas.
The "original affluent society" theory is based on several false premises and is fundamentally outdated, but people keep it alive because it fits certain Rousseauean assumptions we have. I recommend reading this:
https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
There are so many things wrong with those time estimates.