Stone Age vs You: Who Had More Free Time?

Think your 40-hour work week is the natural price of modern progress? The archaeological data reveals Stone Age hunter-gatherers worked barely 15 hours a week—and spent the rest playing music, rolling dice, and watching torchlit cave cinema. 0:00 Intro 1:00 The 15-Hour Work Week 2:47 The Boredom Problem 4:30 Prehistoric Cinema and Dice 6:12 The 10,000-Year Trap 8:01 Quality vs Quantity Sources: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651 Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society", Man the Hunter Symposium, 1966 / Stone Age Economics, 1972 Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, 1979 Gallup Work and Workplace Survey, 2014 US Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Commuting Characteristics, 2021 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, 2023 Marcus E. Raichle & Debra A. Gusnard, "Appraising the Brain's Energy Budget", PNAS, 2002 John D. Eastwood et al., "The Unengaged Mind", Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012 Nicholas J. Conard et al., "A Paleolithic Flute from the Hohle Fels Cave", Nature, 2009 Bronwyn Tarr et al., "Synchrony and Social Connection in Group Dance and Music", Evolution and Human Behavior, 2014 Gil Chabot, "Knucklebones and Early Gaming", Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2018 Luke Clark, "The Psychology of Gambling", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2010 Marc Azéma & Florent Rivère, "Animation in Paleolithic Art: A Prehistoric Cinema?", Antiquity, 2012 Iégor Reznikoff, "Sound Resonance and Prehistoric Rock Art", Acoustical Society of America, 2008 Clark Spencer Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, 2015 Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization, 1989 James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2014 Penny Spikins, How Compassion Made Us Human, 2015 Anthony D. Volk & Jeremy A. Atkinson, "Infant and Child Mortality in Pre-Modern Human History", Human Nature, 2013 David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 Subscribe to The Hidden Way to uncover the hidden systems, history, and science running your everyday life. humanhistory #anthropology #productivity