Hunter-Gatherer

hoo-ray for the week­end. alas for the demise of hunter-gath­er­ers. if i were a nomadic hunter gath­er­er from one thou­sand years ago i would only have to work about two hours a day to sup­ply myself with every­thing need­ed for sur­vival. this is doc­u­ment­ed. (best i could find giv­en 5 mins search­ing.) the risks of devel­op­ing a degen­er­a­tive dis­ease would be great­ly decreased and my over­all nutri­tion­al con­tent would be bet­ter although i would have less pro­tein intake than what the USRDA rec­om­mends. Nuts and berries are good for you folks. but before you go gal­li­vant­i­ng off to become a !Kung remem­ber that the rea­son we switched over from hunter/gatherer to swid­den agri­cul­ture was an increase in pop­u­la­tion that could only be sup­port­ed by cul­ti­va­tion and domes­ti­ca­tion. it takes a lot of acreage to pro­vide for even one per­son and lifes­pan is sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­er and the birth rate low­er among hunter-gath­er­er soci­eties.

all this DOES relate back to the week­end. back in the day the week­end was­n’t much dif­fer­ent than week­days. in fact if you got all of the work done in the morn­ing, the after­noon was pret­ty much equiv­a­lent to the week­end. becom­ing seden­tary changed that because it takes more work to pro­vide for more peo­ple. even­tu­al­ly through the evo­lu­tion of soci­ety we have come to have the con­cept of the week­end as our time to recu­per­ate from 5 days of work (sad­ly this too is start­ing to dis­ap­pear). The week­end is the car­rot dan­gling before our nose. Glo­ry be to the Protes­tant work eth­ic of Amer­i­cans, which cap­i­tal­ism has uti­lized to its ben­e­fit. That is why I want to move to Europe where they take things easy for sev­er­al months a year. Sure the stan­dard of liv­ing isn’t as great as it is here, but i’m sure they don’t have as many ulcers as we do either. i don’t require a high stan­dard of liv­ing any­way.

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