And the next day you followed an antelope for 14 hours until it couldn’t continue to run, you stabbed it with a spear, and drug it half a dozen miles back to camp.
“Picking berries and hanging out” is something that happened sometimes. What happened most of the time was hard as fuck work to make sure you and your family didn’t starve to death.
A global modeling study of foraging time found typical foraging requirements of about 3.5–5.5 hours per person per day, though this varies with environment and productivity.
Using those numbers for a family of 6, that means each of the parents are foraging 10.5+ hours a day to make sure everyone is fed (no, your 1-year-old isn’t doing any meaningful work). And that meets only one of the basic needs for survival. More hours per day must go into meeting those other needs as well. Shelter, potable water, clothing, medicine, and heat doesn’t come free. Far, far from it.
As I said, what happened most of the time was hard as fuck work to make sure you and your family survive.
And the next day you followed an antelope for 14 hours until it couldn’t continue to run, you stabbed it with a spear, and drug it half a dozen miles back to camp.
“Picking berries and hanging out” is something that happened sometimes. What happened most of the time was hard as fuck work to make sure you and your family didn’t starve to death.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7611941/
Using those numbers for a family of 6, that means each of the parents are foraging 10.5+ hours a day to make sure everyone is fed (no, your 1-year-old isn’t doing any meaningful work). And that meets only one of the basic needs for survival. More hours per day must go into meeting those other needs as well. Shelter, potable water, clothing, medicine, and heat doesn’t come free. Far, far from it.
As I said, what happened most of the time was hard as fuck work to make sure you and your family survive.
Nuclear family wasn’t a thing for hunter gatherers. Tribe was 25 people strong on the low side, and 250 people strong on the high side.