Hunter-Gatherers Enjoy More Free Time Than Farmers

For two years, a team that included the University of Cambridge anthropologist, Dr. Mark Dyble, lived with Agta, a small-scale population of hunter-gatherers in the northern Philippines who are increasingly involved in agriculture.

Each day, at regular intervals between 6 am and 6 pm, the researchers recorded what their hosts did and, repeating this in ten different communities, calculated how 359 people divided their time between leisure, childcare, housework and work outside the camp. While some communities of Agta are dedicated exclusively to hunting and gathering, others divide their time between feeding and growing rice.

The study, published today in Nature Human Behavior, reveals that a greater participation in agriculture and other work without foraging made Agta work harder and lose free time. On average, the team estimates that Agta is mainly engaged in agricultural work about 30 hours per week, while collectors only do it for 20 hours. They discovered that this dramatic difference was due in large part to women moving away from domestic activities to work in the fields. The study found that women who live in the communities most involved in agriculture had half the free time as the communities that only ate.

Dr. Dyble, first author of the study, says: "For a long time, it was assumed that the transition from harvesting to agriculture represented progress, which allowed people to escape from an arduous and precarious way of life.

"But as soon as the anthropologists started working with hunter-gatherers, they began to question this narrative, finding that the forrajistas really enjoy a lot of free time, and our data provides the clearest support for this idea."

The study found that, on average, adults in Agta spent about 24 hours a week working outside the camp, around 20 hours a week doing housework and around 30 hours of free time. But the researchers found that the allocation of time differed significantly among adults.

For both men and women, leisure time was lower, around 30 years of age, and increased steadily in later life. There was also a sexual division of labor where women spent less time working outside the camp and more time spent on domestic chores and caring for children than men, although men and women had a similar amount of free time. However, the study found that the adoption of agriculture had a disproportionate impact on women's lives.

Dr. Dyble says: "This could be because agricultural work is more easily shared between the sexes than hunting or fishing, or there may be other reasons why men are not prepared or cannot spend more time working. outside the camp, this needs more information. " exam."

Agriculture emerged independently in multiple parts of the world about 12,500 years ago and replaced hunting and gathering as the dominant mode of human subsistence about 5,000 years ago.

The co-author, Dr. Abigail Page, anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, adds: "We have to be very cautious when extrapolating from contemporary hunter-gatherers to different societies in prehistory, but if the first farmers really did Harder than foragers This raises an important question: why humans adopted agriculture?

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.htm