"Easier" isn't quite the word. It's generally accepted that subsistence farming takes more labor per day per person to survive. Reliable is more the draw - if you have a choice between working 10 hours a day, but with a 10% chance of starving every year; or 14 hours a day with a 2% chance of starving every year, most people will choose the 14 hours a day - and the 14 hours a day choice will end up with an exponentially larger population after a dozen generations.

iirc, around the advent of agriculture, the average agriculturalist was significantly worse off than the average hunter-gatherer. They suffered from more malnutrition/nutritional deficiencies, had stunted growth, showed various signs of enduring backbreaking labor, and died younger if they lived past childhood. But the rate at which agriculturalist women got pregnant was 0.1% greater than that of hunter gatherer women, so.... here we are.

Not really a great comparison though.

You’d have the entire weight, knowledge and land maintenance and management of generations of your ancestors to help.

A random bunch of modern Americans with guns being dropped in the middle of nowhere is not the same thing at all…

Like “before agriculture”, which we are learning more and more makes little sense, people still managed plants in large scales. The woods around your village would be kept clean, and edible plants would be incentivized to grow. Hunting trails kept and traps set. Chances are there would be robust fishing with nets, as most humans lived near water.

And also, even “before agriculture”, there was horticulture. People grew and kept small gardens in their villages with edible plants. Many fruits and perennial edible vegetables were ‘domesticated’ “before agriculture”.

Chances are, if you weren’t born in a time of wild weather events, and you lived around 30o up or down the equator, you’d be fine food wise. You’d help with food, some people might be specialized in it, and your diets are diverse and healthy. You’d do other stuff with your time, make ceremonial clothes and instruments, weave, make baskets, make stone tools, make art, train children in crafts and arts, maybe you’d be the woodsman keeping the woods clean, safe, and teeming with edible plants.

Life obviously wouldn’t be easy, because even simple disease or injury could kill the average person. And with small numbers (100-150 is more realistic), it’s easy to reach numbers too small to maintain society with one or two disasters.

But on a day to day basis, life is for sure much easier and calm than a typical “post-agriculture” society.

Some costal hunter gatherer socities got so good at fishing then really only worked a few hours a day.

For food. Human labor for survival includes much more than food.

Most of what we know about the work balance of pre historical humans is very speculative and based on very thin evidence.

In the strictest sense of pre-historical, sure.

In the sense of peoples who live in circumstances and technological constraints comparable to those pre-historical humans, we have plenty of evidence and ethnographic studies.