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.

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.

In the summer of 1957, James Woodburn scrambled up the Serengeti Plateau to reach the shores of Lake Eyasi, where he became the first social anthropologist to develop a long-term relationship with the Hadzabe. In the 1960s, he was also was one of the most influential among the cohort of young anthropologists who spearheaded the resurgence in hunter-gatherer studies. And just like Richard Lee, he was struck by how little effort it took for the bow-hunting Hadzabe to feed themselves. In the early 1960s, he described the Hadzabe as irrepressible small-stakes gamblers who were far more preoccupied with winning and losing arrows from one another in games of chance than with wondering about where their next meal would come from. He also noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, they met nutritional needs easily, “without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organization.

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.