What Did Ancient Humans Actually Do All Day?

What Did Ancient Humans Do All Day? All research and sources are linked below. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ Richard Lee's work-hours study — "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources" (1968, in Man the Hunter, Aldine Publishing). Lee's fieldwork with the Ju/'hoansi beginning in 1963 recorded roughly 17 hours a week spent acquiring food. ▸ The Original Affluent Society — "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins (1972, Aldine-Atherton). The essay that reframed hunter-gatherers as the first affluent society. ▸ Skeletal health decline with farming — "Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture" edited by Mark Nathan Cohen & George Armelagos (1984, Academic Press). Shorter stature, more cavities, more joint disease among early farmers compared to the hunter-gatherers before them. ▸ Endurance running & persistence hunting — "Endurance running and the evolution of Homo" (2004, Nature) https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03052 — sweating and heat dissipation let humans outlast faster prey. ▸ Blombos Cave shell beads, South Africa — "Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa" (2004, Science) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1095905 — perforated sea snail shells worn as ornaments over 70,000 years ago. ▸ Hohle Fels flute, Germany — "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany" (2009, Nature) https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08169 — a bird-bone flute with five finger holes, roughly 40,000 years old, excavated in 2008. ▸ Polly Wiessner — "Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen" (2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404212111 — 81% of firelight conversation turned to stories. ▸ Social time among the Ju/'hoansi — "Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen" by James Suzman (2017, Bloomsbury). Roughly six hours a day spent on pure social time. ▸ Biphasic sleep — "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isle