A Hadza woman digs for edible tubers. The Hadzabe are one of the few societies in the world that still earn a living from wild resources.

1

HUMANS AT WORK, 700,000–12,000 YEARS AGO

Roughly 700,000 years ago, modern humans and Neanderthals went their separate ways. That is where this book starts – but not without considering the similarities and differences between the work of humans and of other living beings. For most of our history, work consisted of hunting and gathering; then, eventually, 45,000 years ago, the emergence of the specialization of a few artisans led to a greater variety of social relations according to gender and age.

Animals and humans at work

The American pioneer of time and motion studies Frank Bunker Gilbreth remarked, somewhat provocatively, in 1911: ‘a human being or a work animal is a power plant, and is subject to nearly all the laws that govern and limit the power plant’.1 In order to define work more precisely, we must start by interrogating exactly what the difference is between a human at work, a working animal and a working machine.

Satisfied with a newly purchased or recently repaired device, we do not hesitate to say, ‘it works’. Apparently, machines work, and of course they do, but only because humans make them work and only after they have been switched on. Barring the realm of science fiction, machines do not work without human intervention. While this question may have a relatively easy answer, the next one – ‘do animals work?’ – is less straightforward.

Firstly, we must re-frame the question. What we should be asking is, what is the difference between working modern humans and our closest relations, working primates?2 The reflexive answer is that, analogous to machines, animals cannot work without us. Bears would not dance, donkeys would not pull carts and Lipizzaners would not perform without the coerced training or commands of a human being.

Nevertheless, there are several reasons why animals’ activities, and in particular those of bonobos and chimpanzees, resemble humans’ work more than the work of machines does. Hence, the first sensible step in our narrative must be to study the basics of the work of these primates; it will surely teach us a lot about ourselves. Firstly, our sole activity before the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago was the daily procurement of food by hunting and gathering. It was the same for most animals. Consequently, if human hunting and gathering is work, then we must accept that animals work as well – independently of human action. Secondly, the compensation of slaves in the form of food, shelter and medical care is comparable to our treatment of draught animals. Slaves and horses work under similar conditions. Reason enough, then, not to dismiss too quickly commonalities between animal and human activities. Let us therefore examine the life of animals in more detail, and in particular that of bonobos and chimpanzees, with a view to understanding the origins and specificities of the work of the first human beings.

While the procurement of food is not only the most necessary but also the most basic type of work that every individual must perform from the age of independence, among primates it is not a strictly individual activity; indeed, it implies the division of labour. The most famous example, of course, is that of honeybees, who live in colonies with a queen, drones and workers.³ Given the vast evolutionary distance between bees and humans, there is little value in pursuing this example any further. But for the primordial stages of humans, however, we can consult ethology and socio-biology, which study the social behaviour of great apes and especially that of bonobos and the chimpanzees, who, 7 to 10 million years ago, shared the same ancestors as us.4

What, then, do we know about the division of labour and, specifically, the distribution of tasks between adult male and female primates? Firstly, in most species there is a difference between male and female tasks, the latter being exclusively responsible for raising young, since only they can suckle. Crucially, others do not take on the not-strictly-biological care tasks from the mother either.⁵ Put differently, among most primates, the specifically female task of caring for young does not lead to reciprocity, such as groupmates taking on other tasks, in particular the gathering of food, for mothers.

Among a few species of primates, however, things are a bit more complicated and reciprocal division of labour does indeed occur, especially in hunting. While the, in principle, relatively straightforward supply of plant-based food is a constant concern for every individual, hunting is a laborious and unpredictable activity for great apes.⁶ As a rule, hunters are adult males (among apes, in any case, they are much bigger and more powerfully built than the females), with the most skilful and the strongest individuals at the forefront. With efficient cooperation and the necessary luck, these individuals are capable, from time to time, of securing highly prized meat. Once in possession of such food – which is invariably in one piece, susceptible to decay, and too much for the hunter or hunters to consume alone – chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys apparently voluntarily distribute it to other members of the group, on the basis of reciprocity. Who receives what may be based on generosity during previous distributions, or on sexual and emotional services (as in the case of defleaing among monkeys). Fortunate recipients are not exclusively close relatives (this is in contrast to birds, who feed each other during the breeding season).⁷

The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal takes the leap from social behaviour among apes to that of humans by pointing to parallels between omnivorous, hunting non-human primates and hunting peoples in Paraguay, Southern Africa and Brazil. In the latter case, he follows the American anthropologist and primatologist Katharine Milton, who states:

Unlike our economic system, in which each person typically tries to secure and control as large a share of the available resources as possible, the hunter-gatherer economic system rests on a set of highly formalized expectations regarding cooperation and sharing. . . . For instance, no hunter fortunate enough to kill a large game animal assumes that all this food is his or belongs only to his immediate family.8

The principle that meat must be shared by everyone in the camp and that it cannot be reserved by the hunter and his family is illustrated in the many monographs about hunter-gatherers.⁹

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, whose pioneering work Mothers and Others (2009) helped modernize our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behaviour in both non-human and human primates, points to another form of cooperation that emerged later in evolution, long before modern humans – the ability of mothers to entrust the care of their precious, slow-growing children to others, so-called alloparents (including the father). According to her, this could have happened already between 1.8 and 1.5 million years ago.¹⁰ Perhaps a key element in this regard is that humans have a higher birth rate and a longer reproductive lifespan than other large great apes. Humans also have a much shorter weaning period. Consequently, their offspring grow up with more siblings, which, in turn, enhances their social and cognitive abilities. In addition, the use of fire to heat and cook food enables humans’ pre- or extra-somatic digestion and contributes to improving their nutrition and health.¹¹

Moreover, humans’ distinctive menopause led to the ‘grandmother hypothesis’: ‘having an extra pair of hands would have meant that daughters and daughters-in-law could reproduce more quickly’.¹² We see the same pattern among certain African hunter-gatherers, for example the Hadza in modern-day Tanzania. During their first four years, Hadza children spend 31 per cent of their contact hours with individuals other than their mothers. It is unthinkable that the great apes would permit this from their conspecifics or even the mother’s male siblings – hence the long interval of four to eight years between births among great apes.¹³ This important evolutionary step may have coincided with the emergence of the first human speech. And with speech came a revolutionary improvement in the first stone tools, something only possible when the necessary technical tricks could be transmitted by the earliest forms of language (‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘here’, ‘there’).¹⁴

The paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello has shown that the appearance of the genus Homo 2 million years ago, with its larger brain and larger body size, notably among females, greatly influenced female reproduction costs, both during gestation and lactation.15 She states that ‘the resulting high energy costs per offspring could have been considerably reduced by decreasing the interbirth interval’. Clearly, this would have been advantageous early in the evolution of the genus Homo, who, at that time, moved to a more dangerous, open environment with, as a consequence, higher numbers of accidental deaths. But, because of the shorter birth interval, a mother would be responsible for dependent weanlings while gestating or nursing a subsequent child. What are the social implications of this? After considering a number of possibilities, Aiello posits the following scenario for solving the problem of high female reproduction costs:

Where the hunting success of males is sporadic, but success produces large returns, the desired group size would be one that assured a reasonably constant supply of a limited resource. In this context, it does not matter why or how food provided by the male is distributed, as long as it is distributed in the group and the size of that group is such as to insure that male-provided resources supplement those provided by the females to the degree required to support their reproductive energy requirements.¹⁶

We must add another important element to this: that of the three-generational transfer of food (energy) and knowledge.¹⁷ Because – compared to non-human primates – human foragers, with their diet of nutrient-dense and difficult-to-acquire high-quality food, are characterized by large bodies and brains and, in particular, longevity, they have a specific life pattern. Until the age of 14, they not only produce less energy than they consume, but their net production of energy becomes increasingly negative. Only after the age of 20 does a positive increase in production occur. Between the ages of 30 and 45, they reach the ‘overproduction’ stage, with human net production peaking at about 1,750 calories per day at roughly 45 years old. Between 60 and 65, they are back in the negative range. This tells us two things: humans need a lot of time to produce energy as efficiently as possible, and, during this period of apprenticeship, they are dependent on older group members – men and women in different age groups. In this period, young people gain knowledge from their elders, codified in myths and rituals (the so-called tribal encyclopaedia).¹⁸ Whereas chimpanzees reach maturity around the age of 12, among Homo erectus this was 14, among Neanderthals 15–16 and for Homo sapiens around 18–19.¹⁹ The argumentation of Aiello and others therefore supports both human cooperation, as posited by De Waal, and the notion of alloparenting by Hrdy.20

In fact, this approach involves comparing the social behaviour of three groups: that of animals alive now, specifically primates (and within this order especially bonobos and chimpanzees); that of hunters/food gatherers now or in the recent past; and that of the whole of humanity prior to the Neolithic Revolution. By starting from a standpoint of comparability, De Waal and Hrdy adopt a position in the historical debate that the theory of evolution is anachronistic.²¹ De Waal, especially, speaks out loudly against the nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley, and their countless followers, who embraced the adage ‘survival of the fittest’ as the sole basis of society.²²

Indisputably, humans, like all primates, are capable of competitive and aggressive behaviour, but this is only half the story.²³ Just as important for the evolutionary success of the species is the human capacity for cooperation. This is a direct result of the vulnerability of primates, including man, to predators: ‘Security is the first and foremost reason for social life. . . . We very much rely on one another for survival. It is this reality that ought to be taken as a starting point for any discussion about human society, not the reveries of centuries past, which depicted our ancestors as being as free as birds and lacking any social obligations.’²⁴

In terms of the development of human work, it is important to note that the essential principle of reciprocity, and with it the sharing of childcare tasks, has probably been a human quality from the outset. This observation is consistent with the definitional issues raised above. If, prior to the existence of Homo sapiens, not only the supply of food – to be defined as ‘real’ work – but also mutual emotional and sexual services are fixed elements of the behaviour of our species, then the boundary between ‘real’ work and social obligations is blurred. Consequently, Chris and Charles Tilly’s broad definition of ‘work’ (see Introduction, p. 2) is a good departure point for the whole of world history. The fitness of the individual, and of their descendants, for survival is based not only on a long period of dependency for sustenance, but also on the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge transfer in the broadest sense and in the long term determines the survival chances of foragers.²⁵

Humans are a species that can be understood not only through competition but also and especially through the prism of cooperation. Furthermore, the females of our species do not have to take care of their children exclusively; we allow others, especially grandmothers, to take on this role too. This provides two important starting points for the history of the work of hunter-gatherers, and perhaps also for what we have done since: not only subordination but, crucially, also cooperation.26 In sum, work by modern humans during at least the first 95 per cent of their existence has been a form of ‘reciprocal altruism’.²⁷

Hunter-gatherers at work

How did human work develop before the Neolithic? In order to answer this question, we must first reflect on a few million years of human history.²⁸ Since chimp–human divergence about 7–10 million years ago, hominins have known 2 major evolutionary developments, both occurring in Africa. From 2–2.5 million years ago, we find the genus Homo, represented for the last 2 million years by Homo erectus. The 2 best-known species within this genus are Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), who lived until 39,000 years ago, and the separate branch of Homo sapiens (modern humans). These 2 branches split some 700,000 years ago. We all belong to the species Homo sapiens, although to a lesser extent a mixing of non-African modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans (a branch that split off from the Neanderthals 400,000 years ago) occurred.²⁹ This rather dull list of human species in fact represents something very exciting: the tripling of brain size; the reduction of height differences between women and men (until then, women were smaller); a substantial reduction in colon capacity in favour of the small intestine; and, related to this, a varied and high-quality diet and a longer lifespan. The end product of all these developments is Homo sapiens, with – and this is important for the theme of work – the most varied diet of all.³⁰

Like other hominins before them, modern humans migrated from Africa to other continents.³¹ Slowly but surely, they replaced all archaic conspecifics in the Old World. We are not talking here about large numbers; indeed, our lineage was at the edge of extinction 70,000 years ago, and between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago – the moment when the first hunter-gatherers began their successful experiments with agriculture – the world was populated by some 8 million humans.³²

The definitive crossing of modern humans from Africa to Eurasia took place roughly 50,000 years ago (after a number of ingresses into the Levant from about 160,000 years ago). This was followed by a rapid dispersal across the whole of Eurasia all the way to Australia.33 South East Asia, reached via the coasts of South Asia, was formed much later (14,000 years ago) when, due to a much higher sea level, a large land mass (‘Sunda’) became separated from New Guinea and Australia (together the continent ‘Sahul’) by an island area with straits (‘Wallacea’: the Philippines, Sulawesi and the Lesser Sundas). Modern humans had certainly reached Australia 47,000 years ago, but onward migration to the Pacific was not yet possible due to a lack of suitable crafts. A little later, the dispersal across temperate Eurasia occurred, both north and north-westwards to Europe and from South Asia eastwards to China. About 19,000 years ago, humans moved from north-east Asia, via the Bering Strait, towards the Americas, where, within the same coastal Pacific biotope, the south of Chile was reached relatively quickly. Thus, our species spread throughout the whole world, with the exception of most of the islands of Oceania. These, then, are the headlines according to current archaeological and genetic insights, which are being adjusted and redefined almost daily.

Figure 2. Modern humans as hunter-gatherers until 10,000 years ago.

Map 1. Spread of modern hunter-gatherers from 70,000 years ago.

Throughout the world – and during by far the largest part of their history – modern humans, like their non-human primate ancestors, were almost exclusively engaged with gathering food by picking or digging out plants and their fruits, the gathering of shells, fishing and hunting. Thus, around 700,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans in Africa (and the same is also true for Neanderthals in Eurasia) had already undergone a considerable technological evolution in comparison with other primates.³⁴

The mode of existence of great apes, and particularly chimpanzees, consists of collecting a diet of predominantly plant foods, sporadically supplemented with communally organized hunting of smaller or young apes and other animals. This often involves both males and females, with strong males doing the actual killing. The appearance of the genus Homo, 2.5 million years ago, coincided with the collecting of roots and tubers using digging implements as well as scavenging from the kills of large predators with the help of stone tools for crushing leg bones to extract marrow or skulls to extract the brain. Already 2 million years ago, Homo erectus was able to fabricate hand-axes and cleavers.³⁵ Half a million years ago, hominins developed the skills to hunt living animals, larger in size than the hunters themselves. This implies a good knowledge of animal behaviour. Helpful, if not requisite for that change, around 300,000 years ago, were wooden thrusting and throwing spears and trapping techniques. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the hunt changed dramatically at the end of this period, in the millennia preceding the Neolithic Revolution. But first, we must address the question: what exactly is meant by hunting as a means of subsistence?

Hunting and gathering food in practice

For most people today, it is difficult to imagine what kind of work hunting and gathering food entails concretely. How much time does it take and who does it? How is it organized? There is no comprehensive answer to these questions covering all hunter-gatherers, simply because humans manage to survive in so many different climate zones, from sea coasts to high mountains and from deserts to rainforests.36 This global distribution and development of different types of work in diverse ecological and climate zones results in a diversification that does not occur in animals without major genetic change and the emergence of new species. In humans, it has become possible as a function of brain development, language and communication. There have been no new human species since the creation of Homo sapiens. In evolutionary terms, Homo sapiens have made no further progress in their history than a diversification in skin colour and body proportions as a consequence of their migrations to more northerly climes.

One reason why it is not easy to depict and understand the working life of early modern humans as hunter-gatherers is because archaeology can provide only partial, but fortunately increasingly powerful, evidence. Animal parallels are of no help to us here. So, we are still largely reliant on descriptions of recent and extant hunter-gatherers from the last few centuries. The problem with this is that it was not possible to study any of these groups in a ‘pure’ state, untouched by other, ‘more advanced’ means of subsistence.³⁷

Whereas until 12,000 years ago (10000 BCE) all humans shared a foraging existence, by the time Columbus sighted the Americas, 5 centuries ago, this way of life had been pushed back to Australia, most of North America, north-east Asia and large tracts of South America and Africa. An optimistic count of all pastoral nomads, reindeer herders, fishers and swidden (slash-and-burn) horticulturalists in the early twenty-first century adds up to 250 million individuals. That is 4 per cent of the world’s population, the nucleus of which consists of ‘hundreds of thousands of descendants a generation or two removed from a foraging way of life’. Only a small number of this nucleus, say a few tens of thousands, persisted in a roughly direct tradition of descent from ancient hunter-gatherers, whereas others descended from farmers or herders who turned to foraging, as seen in South America in order to escape the invading Spaniards.38

In the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (CEHG, 2004), a meagre eight groups of recent hunter-gatherers are treated in more detail. It is assumed, on historical and especially archaeological grounds, that their ancestors have always followed this way of life.³⁹ This cannot be ascertained for the dozens of other current or recent hunting and food-gathering peoples in this impressive encyclopaedia, but it is either demonstrable or probable that earlier in their existence they subsisted through farming or cattle raising, as was the case, for example, with the Mikea on Madagascar and for most current hunter-gatherers in South and South East Asia.⁴⁰

But we must proceed cautiously even in relation to the eight aforementioned ‘real’ groups that, for thousands of years, from generation to generation, have lived as groups of hunter-gatherers. They, too, have undergone demonstrable historical development, particularly in terms of contact with neighbouring farmers and, more recently, with representatives of industrialized nations, such as oil-drilling companies.⁴¹ Notwithstanding these reservations, we will try, by analogy, to reconstruct the work and associated social relationships of hunter-gatherers in prehistory.

The compilers of the CEHG use the following definition of hunter-gatherers: ‘Foraging refers to subsistence based on hunting of wild animals, gathering of wild plant food, and fishing, with no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog.’⁴² And as core social elements they add: ‘The basic unit of social organization of most (but not all) hunting and gathering peoples is the band, a small-scale nomadic group of fifteen to fifty people related by kinship.’ Their members share the following features: they are relatively egalitarian; they are mobile according to a pattern of concentration in larger groups and dispersion in smaller groups during part of the year; and their land tenure system is based on a common property regime, a kinship-based collective, ruled by reciprocity.

Egalitarianism, sharing, generosity and reciprocity are not performed indiscriminately but primarily within the band; they also do not exclude a wide range of boundary-maintaining measures. We may suppose this is as true for hominins, including early Homo sapiens, as it is for other primates and for extant hunter-gatherers, who show variations in the ways they manage access to land and resources: ‘Sharing is not a product of an evolutionary stage or a subsistence mode, it is the outcome of a decision-making process. There are costs and benefits to sharing resources and it is clear that hunter-gatherers balance these in making decisions to share food or to admit outsiders to their territory.’43

Taking these characteristics of the way of life of hunter-gatherers as our foundation, let us now examine the actual work of hunting and gathering food. Below, we will probe the possibilities for specialization in other activities, including the division of labour between men and women, the relationship between work and free time and, finally, social relationships within the group (the internal labour relations within households and the ‘band’), and those between different bands, who exchange goods, services and people (marriage candidates).

Despite the many differences between hunter-gatherers in the various ecological and climate zones, there are, nevertheless, recognizable patterns. Perhaps most striking is the need for cooperation in the hunting of large game.⁴⁴ Before humans learned to use the hunting dog, it was all about the ability to run. Thanks to our gluteal muscles and our ability to sweat, we humans are good long-distance runners, and that is useful for hunting game, as the South African anthropologist Louis Liebenberg discovered when he took part in hunting parties with the San in Botswana. The hunters he was allowed to join were not even that young, almost 40 years old, but they still managed to run behind an antelope during the hottest part of the day (42 degrees Celsius) for between 23 and 40 kilometres, and to run until the animal gave up and could be captured. Their average speed varied between 4 and 6.5 kilometres per hour, but there is a documented case of 10 kilometres per hour over a distance of 35 kilometres.⁴⁵ As mentioned, this was a hunting party with a number of men, and this cooperation is crucial.

Take the hunting of bison by nomadic bands in North America.⁴⁶ For at least 2,000 years, they employed the ‘impoundment’ method. A closer look at the Nitsitapii or Blackfoot Indians reveals concretely what kind of work this entails. From at least the fourteenth century CE, this group occupied the northern Great Plains in units of 80 to 160 persons, living in 10 to 20 tipis, each tipi housing 2 able-bodied men, as many women and 4 children or elderly. In the spring, these hunters and gatherers built a bison pound, a corral towards which a herd was enticed by a young man imitating a bleating calf. The main hunting team hid close to the pound behind lines of rocks or brush piles. As the herd entered this funnel, the whole band jumped up, waving robes and shouting, causing the herd to stampede into the corral, where the men waited to kill anything from a few dozen to two hundred bison with clubs and bows and arrows. Teams of six able-bodied adults worked on each carcass. While stomach contents and organs were eaten fresh, most of the flesh was dried in thin strips. This dried flesh and rendered fat combined with dried berries was called pemmican. Packed and stored in hide bags, it could be used by the band until the next big spring hunt, but external trade in this food has also been documented.

Before their adoption of the horse a few centuries ago, the action radius of these bison hunters was necessarily small. After the big hunt, bands aggregated in early summer at rendezvous of several thousand people and dispersed into sheltered stream valleys in autumn. The berries in the pemmican required a different type of work from the Blackfoot – that is, the harvesting of plant foods by the women; and not only berries, but also camas bulbs and prairie turnips, which they cultivated. Women also created the tipi-camp, cooked, clothed and sheltered everyone and, importantly, women performed the rituals.

But it wasn’t just game hunting that required intensive cooperation; the same was true of fishing. The Itenm’i of the Kamchatka Peninsula, who settled there no later than 3,000 years ago, were semi-sedentary fishers, hunters and gatherers with seasonal fishing as their core subsistence activity.47 Salmon was intensively fished by all able-bodied members of a group (the size of which varied from a few dozen to over two hundred) who trekked to the river estuaries from May to October when the annual runs of fish occurred. Groups of men of the same kin built fishing weirs, where they used different sorts of nets and spears to catch the fish. Women processed and preserved the catch; assisted by the elderly and children, they hung the fish out to dry, and it was also fermented. Dried fish was the main staple, while fermented salmon was a delicacy for feasting. Fish skin was used to make footwear. In addition to these communal fishing activities, women collected molluscs, berries (raspberry, currant, dog-nose), nuts, grasses and roots. They made clothes, footwear, basketry and nets and they cared for the young. Meanwhile, men hunted furbearers like sables and foxes, as well as seals; they provided fuel, made sledges and canoes, and prepared food for humans and dogs. The important position of women is reflected in things such as the customary bride-service (a groom lived for a period with the bride’s parents prior to the wedding) and shamanism. Only women or transvestites wearing women’s clothes and doing women’s work could be shamans, who worked with drums and hallucinogens prepared from amanita mushrooms.

In both examples, and this applies to hunter-gatherers worldwide, cooperation is the keyword, and this is especially true for hunting. But how do you become a successful hunter-gatherer? You must learn it, and the apprenticeship is long.48 Above, we have already seen how long it takes for humans to achieve net productivity – only from the age of 14, and even then they are not mature. To give a brief idea of the techniques that a hunter-gatherer must learn, let us consider a common kangaroo-hunting technique in Central Australia, which takes place at midday, when the animals are ‘shading’ under brush or small trees:

The hunter observes the way the animal is facing and positions himself so that he is directly in front of the shading animal. He begins to approach the animal, standing fully erect, nude so no clothing will move in the wind, with arms rigidly positioned relative to his body. He slips one leg at a time forward so there is no change in his silhouette as seen by the animal. As the animal begins to get nervous it will jump slightly to one side or the other to get an oblique angle view. The well-practiced hunter knows this little trick and is waiting for it so that when the animal jumps, so does the hunter, so that he comes down again directly aligned with the animal’s line of sight but much closer to the animal. This deadly dance continues until the hunter is close enough to quickly use the atlatl to spear the kangaroo.

I borrow this observation from arguably the most influential archaeologist of the twentieth century, Lewis Binford, who stresses the deep and detailed knowledge necessary for successful hunting, adding: ‘With an AK47 you don’t have to know so much!’⁴⁹

A comparison of anthropological material⁵⁰ has generated the following schema for the ‘training’ of hunter-gatherer children: Observation of toolmaking and hunting, practice and listening to hunting stories are much more important than demonstration and teaching. At an early age, adults provide children with toy or small hunting weapons. Then, between the ages of 5 and 7, children begin to accompany adults on hunting trips, and around the age of 12–13 they also begin to go on hunting trips with peers, or are introduced to more hunting strategies. Late in adolescence they learn strategies to catch larger game.

The great danger of the above description is that it causes us to perceive the very long human history before 12,000 years ago as one in which little technical progress was made. That is clearly not the case. Hominins did not sit still and then suddenly become hyperactive in the Neolithic. Even before this time, major technical and organizational leaps were made. Recently, it has been shown that at least 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, off-site fire making by humans occurred in both Europe and the Near East, consequently changing and varying landscapes and their means of existence. Significantly, this occurred ‘in the same time range as the greatest increase in relative brain size documented in the hominin fossil record’.51 Even the Neanderthals, who cared for their sick and elderly, had a level of ‘cognitive sophistication’ and an appreciation of symbolism, attested by the stone circles built 180,000 years ago and jewellery made from eagle talons dated 130,000 years ago.⁵²

Two developments in East Africa matter in particular. First, the development of speech, maybe 70,000 years ago, and, subsequently, between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, what has been characterized in East Africa, the Near East and a little later in southern Europe as the ‘Great Leap Forward’.⁵³ Standardized stone tools were developed, but also what we might dub art- and showpieces, such as ‘jewels’ made from the shell of ostrich eggs. The first needles, awls, engraving tools, harpoons and rope also date from this period. The cave paintings and the statues and musical instruments in France, Spain, Indonesia and South Africa belong to this nexus as well.⁵⁴ This is also the period that the entire ancient world in the tropical and temperate zones became inhabited, initially by Homo sapiens, who would soon be the last remaining subspecies of hominins. Meanwhile, archaeology has not sat still for the past few decades, and instead of one Great Leap Forward, archaeologists now prefer to talk in terms of several leaps.⁵⁵

The invention of ballistic weapons, in particular the step from the long-established thrusting and hand-thrown spear to the atlatl or spear-thrower and the bow and arrow, was useful for the successful hunting of large game. The invention of the bow and arrow (or atlatl and arrow), sharpened with microliths, may also have played a role in the dispersal of Homo sapiens beyond Europe.

Another good example of important pre-Neolithic ‘inventions’ is the poisoning of arrows in Southern Africa and, in Asia, the training of dogs for hunting, probably between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. But less spectacular innovations also deserve our attention. The development of techniques for preserving food for longer are particularly important. The world’s leading theorist on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, James Woodburn, has introduced the distinction between hunter-gatherers who belong to ‘immediate-return’ societies, which usually obtain an immediate return on their labour, and ‘delayed-return’ societies, which manage their economies on a more long-term basis. This distinction is somewhat reminiscent of that between foragers and collectors introduced by Lewis Binford.56 Strongly guided by the landscape, foragers constantly move their base camp, while collectors have a fixed base camp (possibly varying between summer and winter) and from there move around in a large landscape (comparable with shepherds much later, see below). Regarding delayed-return societies and collectors, think of, for example, all kinds of techniques for wind-drying and smoking food in the polar and subpolar regions. A good example is the Jomon culture in Japan (14500–500 BCE), where, from early on, hunter-gatherers were making pottery (important for food storage, allowing more sedentary work arrangements) and lacquerware, grinding the edges of stone axes, eating smoked food and decorating their things. In short, these were early sedentary lives without agriculture, but with important technological advances and with the maintenance of social equality.⁵⁷

Ceramics originated earlier, and not in Japan. We know of clay figurines from some 25,000 years ago, like the famous Venuses from Central Europe, and the first fired pots in China 20,000 years ago, thus already among hunter-gatherers, who were soon shaping deer antlers into tools. These pots ‘were used for cooking during the relatively harsh conditions of the Late Glacial maximum. This method was a critical improvement over the old technique of cooking over hides over fire’. Four thousand years later, this new invention would spread to Japan and a little later also to Siberia.⁵⁸

Technological development did not stagnate among those peoples who clung to hunting and gathering as the main means of existence, even after the Neolithic Revolution had taken place elsewhere. In Australia, 4,000–3,000 years ago, hafted tool types and seed-grinding techniques appeared as developments of existing technologies.⁵⁹ We also know of the autonomous development of techniques for gathering plants in South America.⁶⁰ And, of course, these types of innovations also came into contact with farmers. The autonomous developments as well as contact among hunter-gatherers and farmers/shepherds in Siberia is a good example of this dynamic.⁶¹

The division of labour between women, men and children

Based on the proposition that the earliest hominins already had to share the burden of a costly reproductive system among the sexes, we must now ask ourselves what the division of labour between women, men and children would have looked like in the period under scrutiny. The answer will remain opaque as long as we rely almost exclusively on anthropological descriptions of extant or recent hunter-gatherers – the material is appealing, but difficult to project back in time.62 Currently, we have little more than a single study about skeletal activity-related morphology. Let us, therefore, venture to reconstruct the division of labour between men and women – the foundation of all labour relations.

Summarizing all the evidence on modern hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Karen Endicott concludes: ‘nowhere can it be said that women and men live in a state of perfect equality’ and cases of wife-beating and rape among hunter-gatherers have also been documented. Nevertheless, according to her, the women of hunter-gatherer societies have a higher status than women in most of the world’s contemporary societies. She underscores this general conclusion with some remarkable observations. She writes of actual hunting and gathering activities that: ‘The stereotype of man the hunter, woman the gatherer accurately describes only how many forager peoples divide daily work responsibilities. In reality, many hunter-gatherer men also gather vegetable foods and women procure animal foods, though the latter is not always called hunting.’⁶³

This would have been encouraged by regular shortages of large game due to overhunting, with the consequence that the hunting of small game and other food types became more important. Among modern humans, gathering became more central as the reproductive core than among Neanderthals. This means, on the one hand, fewer risks for food gatherers and, on the other, that a division of labour became possible whereby every member of the band could be assigned a task. The gathering of seeds, nuts and tubers also involved processing with the help of grind- and millstones and thus a further division of labour.⁶⁴

As for other, non-food-getting tasks, these are divided variously. Whereas men and women tend to perform jobs ancillary to their food-getting work, other tasks like construction work vary from society to society. Finally, although women tend to be the primary caregivers for infants and very young children, fathers help to varying degrees.

The many travel descriptions and ethnographic studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are perhaps most revealing about recent hunter-gatherers in Australia, the Aboriginal peoples. Among this group, there is often a distinct gender division of labour, in which men hunt the larger and more prestigious game, while women take care of the foraging (including the capture of small animals), food preparation and child-rearing. This can lead to inequality, as the anthropologists of that continent never tire of emphasizing.65 They also offer many exceptions to this rule. For example, the gender division of labour among the Kimberley peoples of Fitzroy Valley in Western Australia has been described as ‘complementary’:

While women more commonly foraged (e.g. bush potato, tomato, banana onion, bush honey), they also hunted small game (like the goanna lizard), and while men commonly hunted, they also foraged (bush honey). The preparation and cooking of food was sometimes shared, although senior women generally assumed responsibility for these tasks . . . [w]omen (particularly those between twenty and sixty), often accompanied by dependent children and grandchildren, spent considerable periods of time acquiring bush foods.⁶⁶

We are told that the gender-based division of labour among the Ngarrindjeri of south-eastern Australia was less marked and more equitable in relation to the collection and processing of food than elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia.⁶⁷ Men hunted and collected a great number and range of food types (especially birds, mammals, marsupials, reptiles and fish) and expended more time and energy in the food quest than did women, yet women’s gathering (for example, seeds, berries, vegetables, plants, shellfish) was more specialized and much food-getting was collaborative. Similar ‘exceptions’ to the ‘rule’ are reported from the Cape York peoples in North Queensland (Australia) where, comparatively, relations between the sexes are relatively egalitarian.⁶⁸

Strong cooperation between men and women when hunting is recorded among the Ju/’hoansi of Botswana and Namibia.⁶⁹ Two-thirds of their diet was vegetal, consisting in particular of mongongo (or manketti) nuts and fruits, gathered by women. Meat was of secondary importance, although much desired, and its procurement the result of great skill, strength and knowledge by both men and women. While men hunted, their wives often assisted them in tracking and, of course, in the final preparation and processing of the kill. This cooperation between men and women may be related to the fact that the core composition of the groups of fifteen to fifty persons tended to be several siblings of both sexes, with their ‘in-marrying’ spouses. Men often joined the wife’s family group upon marriage. This division of tasks among men and women is confirmed by women’s economic and decision-making power.

Similar cooperation was found until recently between men and women at hunt among the Mbuti Batwa of the Ituri forest in north-eastern Congo.70 Their principal subsistence activity was collective net hunting. Roughly 10 nets of 1 metre high and 30–50 metres wide were joined together in a large semicircle. Women beat the bush and chased the prey towards the nets while the men handled the nets and killed the animals entangled in them. Women then transported the animals to the camp.

Intensive cooperation between men and women hunting in the nineteenth century could still be found among the Yámana of Tierra del Fuego (or people with a Yámana-like way of life), who inhabited the Beagle Channel region from 6,200 years ago.⁷¹ Yámana people were typically sea hunters, especially in winter. Seals and porpoises were approached by boat and harpooned. Local groups usually comprised between fifteen and twenty canoes. Daily pursuits like sea hunting required intimate man–woman cooperation, since the woman manoeuvred the canoe to give her husband the best possible shot. Every activity related to the canoe except its construction was the woman’s responsibility. She gave orders to her crew. Remarriage among widows and widowers had everything to do with preserving the vital balance of the ‘canoe-holds’.⁷²

At the extreme of the recent anthropological spectrum are women who go hunting alone, like the Agta of eastern Luzon. Some Agta groups allow women to hunt the wild Philippine bearded pig, deer, monkey and smaller game. Both men and women fish in the rivers and along the Pacific shoreline, using wire spears and goggles. The fish, caught by men and women two to three times a day, provide the bulk of the protein intake. Children may begin ‘play’ fishing at the age of 4 and begin hunting with parents or older siblings around the age of 10. Recently, archaeological and historical evidence has also come to light, for example, of the women’s guild of elephant hunters in the early modern Kingdom of Dahomey, and women as big-game hunters in the Andean highlands pre-8,000 years ago and among other early populations throughout the Americas.⁷³

From all these observations of hunter-gatherers over recent centuries we can conclude that both men and women played a key role in obtaining food. Women seem to have had a more important role in the task of preparing food, and it goes without saying that they spent a great deal of time looking after their babies and toddlers, at least until they were about 4 years old. Moreover, we should not underestimate the role of ‘alloparents’, although here too women seem to be better represented than men, or at least grandmothers better than grandfathers.

The big question, of course, is whether we can simply transpose all these observations onto their peers from 12,000 plus years ago. Archaeological evidence for gendered task differentiation is not easily available.74 Excavations of hunter-gatherer settlements from 8,000–5,000 years ago at La Paloma, on the central Peruvian coast, indicate that men and women did the same kind of heavy work: ‘both men and women developed larger upper body muscles, possibly from hauling nets. Both had lower arthritis from carrying heavy loads’.⁷⁵ These findings appear to undermine the antiquated and simplistic opposition of man the hunter and woman the gatherer. Nevertheless, old skeletal material from hunter-gatherers shows that men experienced much more damage to their elbow tendons than women, suggesting that they mainly did the throwing during the hunt and thus were vulnerable to ‘thrower’s elbow’.⁷⁶

Beyond hunting and gathering

Although hunting and gathering were indispensable and, therefore, the most important activities undertaken by our ancestors, that is not to say that they did nothing else before the introduction of agriculture. Other activities presented themselves, and there was also room for free time. Finally, then, we must delve deeper into social relationships, insofar as they are directly significant for a better understanding of the work of hunter-gatherers.

Professional specialization

Initially, the spread of modern humans across the globe was extensive: the constant colonizing of new areas and crossing of climate zones led to work other than gathering and preparing food and defending against natural enemies. In order to survive in the colder Northern Hemisphere, which humans moved into from 45,000 years ago, fire, clothing⁷⁷ (which animals don’t have) and housing78 (which some animals have but not generally outside the natural protection of caves) were necessary.

As we have seen, the use of fire was important not just on-site for heating the body and food preparation and off-site for increasing variegation and thus the productivity of landscapes, but it also had social implications.⁷⁹ Fire is ‘cosy’ and improves sociability. It also extends the duration of the day and opens up opportunities to tell and transfer stories, myths and rituals. This is in contrast to daytime conversations, which are more practical in nature.

Whereas, as far as we know, the use of fire had no consequences for professional specialization, the production of clothing and shelter probably did. The oldest eyed needles, used for sewing animal skins, date from 37,000 years ago, and the use of strings and hence of weaving from 26,000 years ago. It is remarkable that the Venus figurines that date from the same period clearly wear woven hats and have fibre accoutrements. It is possible to conclude from this that weaving was invented and originally practised by women.⁸⁰

We can assume, however, that we are not talking here about full-time occupations. To the extent that these specialists were not able to take care of their own nutrition, they could easily obtain food via redistribution.⁸¹ If we follow the famous American anthropologist Marshall D. Sahlins, then there are other reasons why there was little space for specialization among the earliest hunter-gatherers, not least because this mode of existence involved people constantly running around after their food, making possessions a burden. In Sahlins’ highly classical formulation: ‘Mobility and property are in contradiction.’⁸²

He does, nevertheless, take into account that modern ethnography overlooks another, perhaps unexpected form of specialization: artistry.⁸³ Although already advanced, the visual arts appear to have developed to an almost perfect level of technology some 35,000–40,000 years ago. This is apparent from the special skills that are visible from the oldest cave paintings from this time, which were found in French and Spanish caves, such as those of Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira, but also now in Indonesia, and not much later South Africa. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that these skills have been maintained for hundreds of consecutive generations. Underlying this persistent level of high artistic skill must have been ‘a compelling form of teaching’.⁸⁴ Others point to the crucial importance of coexistence in sufficiently large numbers of several generations.⁸⁵ Patrick Manning calls this ‘basic format’ in institutional evolution the emergence of ‘workshops’.⁸⁶

Some groups will also have been involved in the exchange of valuable goods, however tenuous these flows may have been by our standards. We are talking primarily in this period about the transport of exotics as a consequence of group mobility rather than trade in our sense of the word, which only developed late in the Neolithic.87 We can turn again to the Ngarrindjeri of south-eastern Australia and their well-developed material culture for an example of this type of ‘exchange’.⁸⁸ They practised a greater degree of specialization in economic activities than elsewhere on the continent, linked to both seasonal preservation of vegetables, fish and meat and to regional variations in resource availability, and sometimes associated with particular clans. There was no full-time specialization, but key roles included those of song composer, sorcerer, healer, fur and cloak preparer and basket maker. Well-established trade routes brought red ochre and native tobacco from afar. No wonder that a lively exchange system operated within and beyond Ngarrindjeri territory, featuring cloaks, rugs, nets, lines and animal and fish oils. This involved trading expeditions and barter and more formalized, enduring, culturally important ritual exchange partnerships between individuals and their families.

Interregional exchange in prehistory derives from finds of flint objects outside their natural area of origin. They will have initially got there through ‘down-the-line exchange’ via social networks. This does not necessarily indicate a certain form of division of labour between different population groups. The extent to which this had a profound influence on the total pattern of activities of these people is not known, let alone whether it led to other social relationships. What do we know, for example, about the division of labour that must have existed among the people or peoples who lived at the factory sites of the Rohri Hills in Sind in the south of what today is Pakistan? These sites indicate specialized procurement of high-quality flint, used until as late as the first millennium BCE.⁸⁹

Also relevant in this regard is the mutual barter between hunter-gatherer communities. Among the Andaman Islanders, internal exchange was conducted between bands of forest dwellers, each consisting of twenty to fifty persons, hunting pigs with bows during the wet season, and coastal dwellers, hunting sea turtles with either nets or harpoons. The ‘pig hunters’ exchanged clay paint, ceramic clay, honey, bow and arrow wood, canoe logs and betel nuts for the ‘turtle hunters’’ metal (gathered along the shore), shells for ornaments, ropes and string and edible wild lime. The bands took turns hosting exchange ceremonies. Moreover, marriages were arranged by elders (married women often collectively influenced major camp decisions) between turtle hunters and pig hunters. Apart from hunting, both men and women performed all other daily activities, including childcare, cooking and gathering most foodstuffs and materials.90

Work and leisure: The original affluent society?

Our ideas about the relationship between work and leisure time are based almost exclusively on anthropological observations of the few remaining representatives of this mode of existence from the second and third quarters of the previous century. Hence, Sahlins thought that, though strenuous at times, the way of life of hunter-gatherers involved plenty of leisure time as their adults provided the group’s food by working two or three days a week. In a provocative article, originally published in 1968, Sahlins dubbed these and other hunter-gatherers ‘the original affluent society’ and their history as ‘the Zen road to affluence’ before market economies. Then, means were ‘unchanging but on the whole adequate’, while human material wants were finite and few and thus easily satisfied by desiring little. Of course, the standard of living was low in comparison to later periods. Market economies are the opposite; consequently, Sahlins says, ‘man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful’.⁹¹ The latter is a reference to John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous interpretation of post-war American society, entitled The Affluent Society, which had been published ten years earlier.

The innumerable technical and societal changes that have taken place in the long human history before the Neolithic Revolution – indeed, the logic of the Neolithic Revolution itself – seem to contradict Sahlins’ opposition of unchanging and improvable technical means. He also seems to forget the necessity of spreading risk by means of the dominant sharing norm and by maintaining extensive networks, both patrilineal and matrilineal.⁹² The American anthropologist Robert L. Kelly’s criticism of Sahlins’ basic idea that finite wants and few desires equated to ‘plenty of leisure time’ for hunter-gatherers is fundamental. He attacks the prevailing ‘generalized foraging model’ of Sahlins and his peers by contrasting it with the great variation within hunter-gatherer economies – and with that, the great variation in the amount of time spent foraging, depending on the environment. Simply put, ‘Zen economy has an ecological master’.93

One of the problems when reconstructing the time spent on leisure is the definition of work. Kelly points out, for example, that definitions of work – in essence, what people do away from home – were often unintentionally derived from the situation in the West. Or, when studying hunter-gatherers, that what was considered work was ‘only the time spent in the bush searching for and procuring food, not the labor needed to process food resources in camp’.⁹⁴

Perhaps Sahlins’ idea applied most to children and adolescents. A word, then, about the term ‘adult’. The anthropological literature reports almost unanimously that hunter-gatherers still enjoyed great freedom before marriage and were not supposed to cooperate as full members of the band. We can therefore assume a degree of resistance about embarking on this next life phase.⁹⁵ For girls, this might be related to the fact that their menarche occurred quite late, only around the age of 16. Consequently, they married between the ages of 15 and 20. Boys married five years later and this, in combination with relatively short workdays, could have been why so many healthy, active teenagers were found among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari, moving from camp to camp while their older relatives provided food for them. Children took on the important role of babysitter.⁹⁶

Contrast this with the hard-working elders, in particular grandmothers. After all, despite an average life expectancy of 30 years, the chance of 15-year-olds reaching 45 was 60 per cent, and 8 per cent of the population was 60 or older – some as old as 72, the age to which the body of modern humans is ‘designed to last’.⁹⁷

How much effort and time did it take for adult hunter-gatherers to scrape together their food? In the 1960s, it was calculated that, on average, !Kung San or Ju/’hoansi women from Botswana and Namibia, who performed the foraging tasks, walked 2,400 kilometres annually, or 6.6 kilometres a day.⁹⁸ At the same time, they carried equipment, 7 to 10 kilos of plant food on the return leg, and very often a child as well. The typical mother carried her child some 7,800 kilometres annually, or 5.4 kilometres a day, during the first 4 years of its life. A similar pattern arises from descriptions of the Aché of eastern Paraguay. The men engage in 7 strenuous hours of hunting per day, while the women forage a mean of 2 hours per day and, carrying heavy loads, spend an additional 2 hours per day moving camp. Women’s remaining time is expended on high-quality childcare.99 That, of course, means caring for those children who were still alive, because infant mortality was enormous, also due to the infanticide of those babies deemed as having little chance of surviving such a hard life.¹⁰⁰

Similar work hours were observed among the /Gui and //Gana, who have been living in central Botswana for possibly the last 2,000 years. Before sedentary life started in 1979, within an area of, probably, on average 300 square kilometres, these hunter-gatherers had a range of about 50 kilometres. Hunting, done by men, involved 3 to 5 days a week for anything from 5 to 12 hours. These activities yielded 20 per cent of the total food intake; the rest was composed of plant foods gathered by women, who collected tubers, nuts, berries, melons, truffles and lilies for between 1 and 5 hours almost every day.¹⁰¹

Apparently much more supportive of Sahlins is the reconstruction of the work effort of the Cuiva, who straddle the border between Colombia and Venezuela, which does not exceed 15–20 hours a week; the majority spend 15–16 hours a day in their hammocks.¹⁰² However, age-matched physical fitness, expressed as maximal oxygen uptake and analogous to strength testing, averages a full third higher for modern hunter-gatherers than for modern North Americans.¹⁰³ If this is true for hunter-gatherers in general, then the hammock-dwelling variant must definitely have been a minority among them.

More anthropologists have attempted to come up with statistics for the hours that hunter-gatherers spent working every day.¹⁰⁴ According to the more inclusive definitions, both adult men and women spent between 6 and 8 hours per day on ‘work’. Although according to Hrdy, all primates are ‘social opportunists’ and their care behaviour is highly flexible, I think we have to add 1 hour for childcare by a male ‘alloparent’ to this reckoning.¹⁰⁵ In addition to foraging and food processing and preparation, women spend time on childcare.¹⁰⁶ Recuperation in the form of sleep may have taken 7 hours or a maximum of 9 if there was the opportunity to take a nap for 2 hours during the day.¹⁰⁷

The remaining time – 9 hours for men and a few less for women – is hard to divide between social obligations and leisure, but the descriptions of the way these hours were spent points strongly to social obligations,¹⁰⁸ at least if we consider visiting and entertaining visitors, dancing and gambling as activities that individual band members could not and would not abstain from. If nothing else, this networking functioned as a kind of insurance policy. The cooperative nature of foraging, but also, to a certain extent, of childcare, would be an extra argument for this choice. The difference between the time men and women devote to social obligations is partially an illusion, as intensive childcare by mothers and other women may go hand in hand with social obligations in some cases. Even if someone else was taking care of her child, the mother was always close by. Among the Efé Batwa of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, babies spend 60 per cent of their time with other women, and it has been calculated that they change hands 8 times per hour. But they are still held most by their mother, who also breastfeeds them for years – although she is not necessarily the only woman to do this.109 Regardless of the care that babies and small children receive, they also provide constant entertainment for the whole band in which they grow up.

This division of time among humans differs substantially from that of most non-human primate species, who spend 50 to 60 per cent of their day searching for food and eating, and 30 to 40 per cent resting, leaving some 5 to 15 per cent for social activities.¹¹⁰ Converted into hours, this means that human hunter-gatherers have become much more efficient at foraging, while simultaneously depending more on social activities or obligations, which can also be seen as tools of survival.¹¹¹

Secondly, many anthropologists believe that hunter-gatherers do not experience work as a burden, but rather as a pleasurable task that is, moreover, interrupted or followed by extended rest periods. If this seems very subjective, then the fact that the Yir Yoront of North Queensland (Australia) do not have separate words for working and playing indicates an entirely different perspective than expressed by the English language, in which labour can mean both strenuous work and giving birth.¹¹²

Social relations

The very low population densities of this period – a result of the mobile character of these hunting-gathering societies and their habitation in small groups or bands – implied a particular form of society. All specialists agree that social equality is much greater within such bands of hunter-gatherers than among agriculturalists.¹¹³ This is often explained by mobility leading to a minimum of material property, small living groups, reciprocal access to food, lack of concern about storage and conflict-resolution mobility.¹¹⁴

From an evolutionary perspective, the British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar argues that, according to the ‘social brain hypothesis’, the large brain size of later hominins has enabled their transition from a ‘dispersed (or fission-fusion) social system’, characteristic of great ape societies, to strong group cohesion.115 An enlarged brain (or, more precisely, an enlarged neocortex) enables Homo sapiens in particular to live in extended communities. Dunbar defines (regional) groups or communities as a set of individuals who occupy a common range and whose relationships are known explicitly, sometimes referred to as ‘the cognitive group size’.¹¹⁶ To achieve a stable sex ratio, a sufficiently diverse gene pool (translated into incest taboos), and thus sufficiently healthy offspring, such a group must have an average of a least 500 individuals, or 20 bands each with 25 members.¹¹⁷ But opposite the biological minimum, there is a social maximum and, remarkably, the two do not differ substantially.

Enlarged group size has both benefits and costs. The benefits are the capacity for mutual assistance, for specialization, for teaching and learning and for more extensive trading or exchange networks in ecologically more risky habitats. The costs of bonding or of the maintenance of group size with social cohesiveness through time should not be underestimated. As Dunbar eloquently explains:

Living in groups (sociality) creates tensions and frustrations simply by virtue of the fact that individuals are forced together in a relatively confined space where they must inevitably get in each other’s way. In addition, as group size increases, individuals are forced to forage further afield in order to meet their daily nutrient requirements, thereby imposing real ecological costs measured in terms of travel time and the additional food intake required to fuel the extra travel. Increased group size may also result in a significant increase in the opportunity for harassment and aggression that may add further centrifugal forces.

In short, social skills ‘can be used for exploitative, as well as cohesive functions’.¹¹⁸ Exploiting one’s fellow group members is called ‘free riding’. This taking of the long-term benefits of sociality without paying all the short-term costs threatens the implicit social contract and may, ultimately, threaten the persistence of social groups. In order to control free riders, they must be prevented from finding new naïve individuals. This problem of free riding is more serious in large, dispersed communities, and that is why Homo sapiens resorted to religion as ‘a very powerful stick to use in enforcing social conformity (and hence the war against free-riders)’.119

As we have seen, in reality, hunter-gatherer bands form the primary working unit most of the time, and do not meet members of other bands belonging to the same group. On the rare occasions they do, it is to exchange marriage partners or precious goods. In fact, this exchange of brides and grooms between bands is important for our theme of ‘work’, because it means that one working party loses an able-bodied member while another gains one. Especially interesting is the new member’s process of adaptation, both as part of the couple and of the band. Anthropologists have pain­stakingly described and analysed marriage patterns, post-marital residence, and descent and inheritance rules. Since at least the 1930s, scholars thought that patrilineal/patrilocal bands were the rule also in prehistory, which means that sons stay with their parents and that after marriage their bride must leave her parents’ family and band and join his.¹²⁰ This means not only a transfer of workforce, but also of labour relations, as henceforth the groom’s parents and eventually the groom himself could tell the newcomer what to do. This would be the result of the ‘natural’ dominance of men, and it would permit men to be familiar with their own area, of which they have a mental map of resource geography, to ensure success in hunting.

On the basis of the variety of hunting roles of men and women, described above, but also of detailed statistics made more recently of extant marriage patterns among hunter-gatherers, alternative theories have been proposed. Some, like Hrdy, are radical and tend to invert things, but her statistical basis is inconsistent with the much more extensive and meticulous data of Robert L. Kelly.¹²¹ Fortunately, we do not have to rely on anthropological research alone. As discussed above, it is clear that alloparenting must have developed much earlier in the evolution of hominins. It cannot be excluded that a matrilinear society also prevailed at the time.¹²²

It remains interesting, therefore, to reflect on Hrdy’s idea that, initially, matrilocality would have fostered fatherly care behaviour. All men have the aptitude for this, she says, but it can only really develop in an immediate, biological way through actual contact with the newborn. In her own environment, the mother would feel safe enough to give the father access to his newborn, much sooner than in a strange patrilocal environment where she is de facto under the authority of her mother-in-law. In a hybrid system, in which, when children are born, matrilocality is followed by patrilocality (for example, because the bridegroom first has to pay bridewealth by working for his parents-in-law for a while), then previous care experience will make it easier for the man to continue even after the grandmother and other maternal relatives are no longer there.123

The current reconstruction of the social relationships that influence the distribution and organization of work in the period in which the world only knew hunter-gatherers (that is, 12,000 years ago and earlier) does not mean, of course, that all hunter-gatherers have responded to this ever since. Where, subsequently, they were able to accumulate wealth as a result of extremely favourable natural resources and partly through the exchange of goods and services with horticulturalists and agriculturalists, very different societies were created. For example, certain hunter-gatherers were able to become more or less sedentary for large parts of the year as a result of the abundance of fish (salmon and trout migrations provided a regular food source), and thus also to develop hierarchical societies. Think of the indigenous peoples of the north-west coast of America, the prosperous maritime economies of the Aleut of Alaska and the Calusa of Florida and, in comparable areas in Asia, the Siberian Yupik.

Some of these peoples and their prehistoric predecessors (we are talking here of centuries-long enduring habitation) lived from about 500 BCE in large semi-sedentary settlements with chiefs, commoners and slaves, albeit on a small scale, yet were entirely dependent on wild food. In their complex social and material culture with large cedar-plank houses, some chiefs practised polygyny. Occasionally, they could also afford a bartered slave for status or childcare. Only families that failed to repay feasting debts lost status.¹²⁴

More importantly, we should not forget that labour relations may also be unequal within families, simply because of age differences or because of specific characters. As a Dogrib (caribou hunters and fishers in Canada) man told an anthropologist half a century ago: ‘With your dad, you kill yourself doing all the work. Going with your [elder] brother is just like going with your dad. He won’t work hard. He expects you to do most of the work. So, you don’t take your own brother very often [as a work partner]. You take your brother-in-law most of the time.’¹²⁵

For most of the hundreds of thousands of years that modern humans have existed, up to 12,000 years ago, they provided for their existence solely by hunting and gathering food. Even now, a handful of people, the descendants of these humans, still live this way. By combining the latest insights from archaeology, primatology, anthropology and palaeogenetics, we can form a certain idea about the origins of human work and labour relations.

In any case, from the beginning of modern humans, we can assume a gradual development of a knowledge-intensive mode of existence, characterized by a long youth during which people could learn a lot from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. This process led to the acquisition of more varied and higher-quality food and the use of on-site and off-site fire and landscape management. Low interbirth intervals, in turn, made it possible for youngsters to grow up among a larger group of siblings and peers.

The emphasis in modern research is on the high degree of interdependence in work and the cooperation that resulted from it. Another key component of daily work, the care of vulnerable babies and children, was primarily down to mothers, but band members also took responsibility for an important part of it. Defining work broadly, as is advocated in this book (that is, inclusive of care for family members and children), adult men spent 8 and adult women 10 hours a day engaged in it. Although this involved a considerable time investment, it is probably fewer work hours than the way of life that developed later. Social hierarchies were poorly developed, and subordination, other than that of children in respect of the elderly, was rare, let alone slavery. Internal labour relations within the household and the clan, consisting of a number of households, were rather characterized by reciprocity and cooperation. Life was nevertheless harsh, and predators and diseases and even aggression took their toll, so we cannot speak of a golden age. But this long period of time, when all humans were hunter-gatherers, still occupies a unique place in the history of work. Many of these elements, characteristic of the work of hunter-gatherers, would change with the further development of agriculture in the subsequent periods, and especially after 5000 BCE; at the same time, we can assume that a number of basics, acquired over such a long period, also continued to play a role. In particular, the satisfaction, pride and pleasure found in working, and the propensity to work in a cooperative way and to strive for equality in remuneration for effort. This will be explored in subsequent chapters.