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.

Abandoning the idea that the economic problem is the eternal condition of the human race does more than extend the definition of work beyond how we make a living. It provides us with a new lens through which to view our deep historical relationship with work from the very beginnings of life through to our busy present. It also raises a series of new questions. Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

Turnbull’s descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First, they revealed how the “sharing” economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.

But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragers’ attitudes to work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them, one of the most important was “demand sharing.

Foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi also pose a problem for those who are convinced that material equality and individual freedom are at odds with one another and irreconcilable. This is because demand-sharing societies were simultaneously highly individualistic, where no one was subject to the coercive authority of anyone else, but at the same time were intensely egalitarian. By granting individuals the right to spontaneously tax everybody else, these societies ensured firstly that material wealth always ended up being spread pretty evenly; secondly that everyone got something to eat regardless of how productive they were; thirdly that scarce or valuable objects were circulated widely and were freely available for anyone to use; and finally that there was no reason for people to waste energy trying to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, as doing so served no practical purpose.