The Paleolithic Work Schedule

I found it interesting how that for a long time, gathering and hunting people were viewed as "primitive," impoverished, barely eking out a living from the land, as stated in our book. But recent anthropological studies have noted that gathering and hunting people frequently worked fewer hours to meet their material needs than did people in agricultural or industrial societies and so had more "leisure time." I like how author Robert Strayer backs up those studies drawing from the work of Richard Lee, the anthropologist who studied the San groups of Southern Africa who called themselves the Ju/'hoansi in the 1950s and 1960s. Their immediate ancestors have inhabited southern Africa for at least 5,000 years. The Ju/'hoansi  are a people who still practice and ancient way of life. Richard Lee observed how the San were able to create for themselves a life that consisted of a "happy combination of an adequate diet and a short workweek." Lee calculated that the Ju/'hoansi consumed 2,355 calories on average every day, about 30 percent from meat and 70 percent from vegetables, well balanced with sufficient protein, vitamins, and mineral--and, he concluded, they "(did) not have to work very hard" to achieve this standard of living.They had plenty of leisure time for resting, visiting, endless conversation, and conducting rituals and ceremonies. These studies of the Ju/'hoansi people give some credence to our view of the Paleolithic people of the past.