Name: Anthropologist debunks Darwin’s most abused idea | James Suzman
Uploaded: 2022-11-26T17:50:49.000Z
Duration: 8 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- In many ways humans are kind of, evolutionary freaks.

We are much more capable of learning skills

than let's say, our Australopithecus ancestors

I bizarrely ended up getting an internship

You know, it's a dog eat dog world out there.

Life is a continuous process of competition."

Actually, most animals spend as much time

This idea that everything is continuously battling

of the last 25 years documenting hunter-gatherers,

of their perceptions of work and our perceptions of work.

of my latest book is called "Work: A Deep History,

from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots."

When one thinks about hunter-gatherer society,

in which we endure this horrendous struggle

for survival in an eat or be eaten world.

Nature was red and tooth and claw, and life was hard,

and we learned to accumulate and grab resources.

But it seems fairly clear, we enjoyed quite a lot

to the Kalahari to start working with a group

hunter-gatherer society that were really studied to

in the way we organize our lives can be very different,

In the Ju/'hoansi world, those are all considered work.

most of those things are considered leisure activities now.

engage with the land with consummate skill

The Kalahari desert where the Ju/'hoansi live

It's the kind of place where, most of us,

without any prior knowledge of how to do things,

The Ju/'hoansi, on the other hand, are able somehow

out of this seemingly desolate place to pluck

- They're able to hunt 15 or 20 animal species.

to that environment that they're able to do so

on the basis of, really, a marginal amount of effort.

Even in the toughest times of year, you're looking

at not spending more than four or five hours a day

of year, people are able to simply pluck things.

It's almost a bit like a, a magical kind of 7/11.

Now, of course it sounds a little bit idyllic,

and hunter-gatherers went through intensely difficult times,

periods of climatic change. But for the most part,

living off the land seemed a very straightforward way

and we are supremely adapted to making a living

and I haven't found a better way to describe it.

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Anthropologist debunks Darwin’s most abused idea | James Suzman

incredibly

instinct

engage

reveal