But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs. Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

When it came to matters like hunting, some important knowledge could be transmitted using words—like where one might find some diamphidia larvae to poison an arrowhead, or which animal sinews made the best bowstrings. But the most important forms of knowledge could not. This kind of knowledge, they insisted, could not be taught because it resided not just in their minds but also in their bodies, and because it found expression in skills that could never be reduced to mere words.

Ju/’hoansi hunters experience the desert as a vast interactive canvas animated by the tales of different animals who inscribe their comings and goings in the sand. Like poetry, tracks have a grammar, a meter, and a vocabulary. But also like poetry, interpreting them is far more complex and nuanced than simply reading sequences of letters and following them where they lead. To unpack the layers of meaning in any individual set of tracks and establish who made it and when, what the animal was doing, where it was going and why, hunters must perceive the world from the perspective of the animal.

Busy minds would entertain and be distracted by stories, ceremonies, songs, and shamanic journeys. Agile fingers would have found purpose in developing and mastering new skills. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the efflorescence of artwork in Europe and Asia that archaeologists and anthropologists once assumed indicated Homo sapiens crossing a crucial cognitive threshold may well have been the progeny of long winter months. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that much of this art, like the 32,000-year-old frescoes of mammoths, wild horses, cave bears, rhinos, lions, and deer that decorate the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, was painted in the light of fires illuminating the interior of weatherproof caves, while most rock in places like Africa and Australia tended to be on more exposed surfaces.

To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.