"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.

And, as others have said, that only works in places that have abundant food year-round. Otherwise it's way worse, with a lot more hard work just to not starve.

Also, the only defence against the outside world is to chuck spears at anyone who comes within spear-chucking distance of your island. Though, tbf, it has worked pretty well

I'm definitely going to run the risk of sounding very privileged here, but "they work hard, but there's also a lot of relaxing. They can't do much at night, so there's often singing and dancing when the sun goes down" sounds quite a lot like my job, the jobs of my friends, the jobs of my parents and of my parents' friends, and apparently the jobs of most people in my town because all of our pubs are relatively full every night.

When I'm done with work for the evening, usually between 1730 and 2000, that remaining time is mine. It's not loads of time, but it's mine. I can go out, or see friends, or hang out listening to music. I can get up early and see friends too. I understand that must be a lucky position to be in but I'm sure a lot of other people could also do this, right? Sure the budget is tight, and I have to be careful that I don't go out every night and spend too much money, but yknow... Singing and dancing and relaxing etc still happens!

Proximity to the equator made the days almost always 11-13 hours long. But yeah, no one stayed up past 9:00 or 10:00pm unless there was a big event.

Are you talking about leeches?

Carving statuettes of fat titted big booty ladies for "Ceremonial purposes"

To channel some absurdism (usually attributed to Camus, but I don't think he ever said it), "The meaning life is whatever is stopping you from killing yourself at the moment."

You are not fully employed in a country that has internet access and worried about food security in a way that resembles that of a hunter gatherer. Or even a farmer 100 years ago. Absolute drama queen.

When we talk about lack of access to enough/good quality food in the modern day we mean something pretty different. Your cell phone bill each month probably costs as much as rice and beans for a family of four.

Using those numbers for a family of 6, that means each of the parents are foraging 10.5+ hours a day to make sure everyone is fed (no, your 1-year-old isn't doing any meaningful work). And that meets only one of the basic needs for survival. More hours per day must go into meeting those other needs as well. Shelter, potable water, clothing, medicine, and heat doesn't come free. Far, far from it.

As I said, what happened most of the time was hard as fuck work to make sure you and your family survive.

Natalie: Are you afraid of frogs?

Adrian Monk: I don't know. I've never been this close to one. [A frog lands on Monk's shoe] Yes. The answer is yes. Put frogs on the list. Where's the list?

Natalie: I got it. I got it. Where does it go?

Adrian Monk: Put them between possums and, uh, soccer riots. No, no, no. Uh, after after soccer riots. And before, uh, before hailstones. Yeah, so it goes...

Natalie: I got it, I got it: Soccer riots, frogs, hailstones.

Adrian Monk: At least now we know. Information really is power.

Historically when there weren't enough women in the group they would raid another group and kidnap women in order to have enough children to continue their group. With cooperation, groups began to trade girls for goods with other groups. It is likely that this caused the decline of matriarchal households, because the new girls were foreign to the group and living in the home with her new husband and the husband's mother.

I think I need at least 100.