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.

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.

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.

They also quickly learned that in foraging societies anyone who had anything worth sharing was subject to similar demands and the only reason that they received so many requests was because, even with their meager research budgets, they were immeasurably wealthier in material terms than any of their forager hosts were. In other words, in these societies the obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others. As a result, in forager societies there were always some particularly productive people who contributed more than others, and also people who (in the language of finger-pointing politicians and perplexed economists) are often referred to as “freeloaders” or “scroungers.

But there was more to the relationship between time and work in early agricultural societies than the tedious reality of being tied to an inflexible seasonal cycle. One of the most profound legacies of the transition to farming was to transform the way people experienced and understood time.