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Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbours, a new study suggests, complicating the idea that agriculture represents progress. The research also shows that a shift to agriculture impacts most on the lives of women.
[...] Every day, at regular intervals between 6am and 6pm, the researchers recorded what their hosts were doing and by repeating this in ten different communities, they calculated how 359 people divided their time between leisure, childcare, domestic chores and out-of-camp work. While some Agta communities engage exclusively in hunting and gathering, others divide their time between foraging and rice farming.
The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals that increased engagement in farming and other non-foraging work resulted in the Agta working harder and losing leisure time. On average, the team estimate that Agta engaged primarily in farming work around 30 hours per week while foragers only do so for 20 hours. They found that this dramatic difference was largely due to women being drawn away from domestic activities to working in the fields. The study found that women living in the communities most involved in farming had half as much leisure time as those in communities which only foraged.
Also, hunting comes with beer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:47AM (5 children)
Not entirely true. Let's reduce what you 'need' to just food, travel/shelter and clothing. As the average earning goes up in a given area, so does the rent. Someone has to pay for the landlord's luxurious lifestyle. Same applies to food in a given region - food prices will float to what the market has established, and those spending at the market are mostly working 40 hour+ weeks. Travel is relative to how close you live to work. If you're lucky it might be walking distance, but in most cases, being able to live that close to where you work/shop usually costs more, offsetting any monetary advantage that would be required for travel. Most clothing can be had for free or close to nothing since people give/throw it away chasing the latest fashion, so I'll give you that.
Rent (share house / single room in a multi room apartment/house) alone generally costs a typical low wage worker (ie. someone close to minimum wage) approximately 2 to 3 days of work per week. The rest of the week provides food, bus fare (or gas) to get to work, and essential utilities for urban living (water, gas/electricity for cooking - not for anything else). There might be a tiny bit left over to save for emergency medical, and a cheap phone with a cheap plan.
Luxuries to avoid: heating/cooling (just wear appropriate clothing indoors), internet (no expensive cell phone, cable TV, etc), hot showers (don't want to impact on the electricity/gas bill and cold showers are liveable), owning a car (maintenance and registration costs can be high even for old/cheap cars), electronic entertainment (even a free TV from a junk pile uses electricity, and a computer generally requires internet for anything useful), and of course children (yeah, they cost a lot of money to raise properly). You don't want to use too much 'space' either - tiny room (or share a single room with someone else), and no back yard that isn't the local park.
Things to do to keep sanity that don't cost much if anything: press the flesh with friends, take a nice walk in the local park, read a book at the library, and maybe meditation.
So in the end, unless you're on some insane salary (probably built up over years of working normal/long hours to build experience/reputation) or mooching off someone else, there's no way you can contract/pair down to a couple of hours a week for the same standard of living as a hunter gather culture. Those guys live fulfilled lives with friends, self made entertainment, and low stress. To even come close to that in modern society, you're dealing with lots of external costs, and therefore lots more hours of work.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:57AM (4 children)
Actually all you really need is a warm dry place to sleep and access to water and food. Anything else is luxury.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:02AM (1 child)
And for the sake of everyone else, somewhere to shit and shower.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:13PM
In my dorm in Beijing the toilet was a hole in the floor of the shower.
Yes, I can hear your 'Ewwwwwww!' from here.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:47AM
Some company is nice as well, especially of the opposite sex. Hunter-Gatherers spent a lot of time sitting around the fire telling stories, and had no ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:26AM
[1] In some less civilized places prison labor is common so YMMV.
[2] Some people are so tied to their jobs they actually don't really have that much freedom when compared to prisoners in more civilized countries.