Fuck AI

Also, most modern hunter gatherer groups lived lifestyles that a lot of early western anthropologists derided as 'lazy'. But they were actually practicing a highly evolved skill set attuned to their environment.

The thing about gathering is that the land has a fixed sustainable population level. With farming, you can get more food by working a bit harder. But with hunting/gathering, the land supports what the land will support. Over hunting today just leaves less game to hunt tomorrow. And if the plants and animals you're acquiring are spread thin enough, then leaving camp to gather them can actually be net calorie negative. Spend all day hunting a single mouse, and you'll burn more calories doing that than you'll get by eating it.

Over the millennia, by natural selection, early humans evolved cultural practices that forced them to live sustainably. Those groups with cultures that stripped the land bare all died of hunger.

So cultures evolved to have a lot of down time. Sitting around a fire telling jokes and stories isn't "productive," but it also doesn't burn many calories. Humans are highly productive hunters and foragers. If we work too hard at it, we strip the land and die of hunger. It's the same reason lions spend most of their time sleeping. The go-getter lions that want to max the grind all die of hunger.

So instead hunter gatherers would tend to grow their numbers to up near the carrying capacity of the land and then use a lot downtime to keep from overhunting and overforaging. Western anthropologists saw this as being lazy, but they were applying concepts of labor that only made sense in agarian and industrial societies.