What If You Woke Up in 10,000 BC With No Job?

This morning, an alarm told you when to get up, and somewhere a boss is already waiting. Now go back to 10,000 BC: no alarm, no boss, no job. For years scientists believed people like you lay in the grass with only a few hours of work a day. They got the hours wrong, but the freedom was real. So how would you actually spend a day before jobs existed, and was the deal that ended it really as bad as it sounds? 🔔 Subscribe and hit the bell, so you never miss the next story. 👍 Like the video if it changed how you think about your own workday. 💬 Comment below: if a stranger offered you the old deal today, the free mornings, the stories and the hungry season, would you take it? In this video: a notebook in the Kalahari in 1964 and the hours it counted; the "few hours a day" idea and what it left out; a free afternoon among the Agta; what people talked about by day and around the fire at night; the hungry season and why so many children never grew up; the stranger's offer of farming, and why almost everyone took it; what farming cost, from shorter bodies to half the free time; and the oldest surviving list of jobs, about 5,300 years old and most likely homework. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 No alarm, no boss, no job 0:55 The morning 1:37 Counting the hours 2:18 The hidden hours 3:30 The afternoon 4:40 The fire 6:12 The hungry season 7:24 The stranger's offer 8:53 The bill 10:22 The first list of jobs 11:31 Would you take the deal? 📚 SOURCES Kaplan 2000, J. Anthropological Research 56(3) (critique of the "original affluent society", with Richard Lee's 1964 Kalahari count) · Sahlins 1966, "The Original Affluent Society" (book version 1972) · Diamond 1987, Discover (farming, population and birth spacing) · Dyble et al. 2019, Nature Human Behaviour (Agta time budgets, "Engagement in agricultural work is associated with reduced leisure time among Agta hunter-gatherers") · Wiessner 2014, PNAS 111 (talk by day and stories by the fire, Ju/'hoansi) · Yetish et al. 2015, Current Biology (sleep in three societies without electricity) · Gurven & Kaplan 2007 (life expectancy of traditional foragers) · Bowles 2011, PNAS (food per hour of early farming) · Mummert et al. 2011, Economics & Human Biology 9 (height and health after farming; Cohen & Armelagos 1984: health worse in 19 of 21 societies) · Hawkes et al. 1987 (Aché at the settlement) · Stevens & Fuller 2012, Antiquity (grain farming in Britain) · Sauer, archaic cuneiform lists (DAI/Heidelberg) and Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2003:3 (Standard Professions List, Uruk). Hours, ages and shares for people who live by hunting and gathering today are measurements of particular groups (one Kalahari camp in four dry-season weeks, the Agta in the Philippines), not of everyone in 10,000 BC. The "few hours a day" idea rests on two short studies and later counts found much longer total hours. Whether farming was a "trap", and how widely Britain turned away from grain, are still argued over by researchers, and the video says so. 🔔 Enjoyed this? Subscribe to No Road Out and turn on notifications. 🔁 Share it with someone who is dreading Monday morning. ▶️ Watch next, one night in 10,000 BC:    • What If You Slept Like It's 10,000 BC?   📜 No Road Out is an animated history channel about how ideas, tools and signals travel, and what happens to the ones that stop. #history #10000bc #work