What Did Cavemen Actually Do All Day? No Caves, No Boss

What did a Stone Age family actually do all day, with no clock, no boss and no commute? Among the Hadza, a hunter brought home a big animal only about one day in thirty, so on most days a grandmother with a digging stick did more to keep the camp fed. We spend one day with a family in Ice Age Europe about 14,000 years ago. From waking before sunrise to stories around the fire at night, we look at where they really lived (mostly not in caves), how they shared meat, made flint blades and kept the fire going, and how they cared for people who couldn't care for themselves. We also ask whether they really worked less than you do. The famous figure of 15 to 20 hours a week may only be part of the story, and scientists still argue over how to count their hours. The family is made up, but what they do comes from archaeology and from studies of living foragers, used as clues rather than copies. Research mentioned: Kristen Hawkes (the grandmother hypothesis), Marshall Sahlins, Richard Lee, Herman Pontzer, Polly Wiessner, a 2019 study of the Agta, a 2015 sleep study of the Hadza, San and Tsimane, and a 2023 study on women hunting and the researchers who pushed back on it. Chapters 0:00 A Day Without Clocks 1:19 Where Is the Cave? 2:24 Grandma Brings Dinner 3:29 Most Hunts Fail 4:39 Stone, Wood and Fire 5:48 So How Much Work? 7:23 Stories After Dark 8:28 Nobody Left Behind 9:48 Your Day, Their Day #History #StoneAge #HunterGatherers #Anthropology