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.

Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.” He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

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.

Where foragers stoically accepted occasional hardships, farmers persuaded themselves that things could always be better if they worked a little harder. Farmers who put in the extra hours would, over time, usually do better than lazier ones who only ever made contingency for the one or two risks they considered to be the most likely. Thus among the Ju/’hoansi’s farming neighbors along the Kavango River the wealthiest ones were usually the most risk-averse—those who worked hardest to build good enclosures to protect their cattle and goats from predators at night; who spent long summer days diligently chasing birds, monkeys, and others drawn to their fields; who planted their seeds a little deeper; who went to the trouble of dragging bucketloads of water from the river to irrigate their crops just in case, as occasionally happened, the rains arrived late.

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over.