[karaterobot]

In this case, it really does look like that's how the author is trying to incorrectly frame hunter gatherer societies. No doubt they had fun, but work was life and death. They had no way to stockpile food, so just getting enough calories for a small group required frequent work where the stakes were whether you starved or not. A lot of the remains we've found of early man portray a complex, meaningful world nonetheless full of hardship (famine, malnutrition) and violence (e.g. bones broken by accident, or crushed/chipped by weapons). Modern hunter gatherer societies are not substantively different: they have populations limited by what their proximate environment can support, not because they want it that way but because that's all that can be practically sustained.

[AlotOfReading]

There's a lot wrong here. To start, modern foragers are very different than their pleistocene counterparts. They have much more advanced technology and live in significantly more marginal environments. They're also limited to what their environments support mostly by choice and modern society. They almost always have significant contact with sedentary agriculturalists, acting as guides and selling resources in trade.

Secondly, the whole point of being a nomadic forager is that you move. If whatever region you're in runs out of food, you leave to somewhere with more. The pastoral version of this is called transhumance. It's been made more difficult in the modern era, so we see much greater reliance on local productivity today.

There was constant foraging occurring, but modern foragers definitely don't believe themselves to be on the edge of starvation and they spend enough time socializing around camp with each other that they could easily spend foraging more food if they saw a need to.

[slothtrop]

> but modern foragers definitely don't believe themselves to be on the edge of starvation

The user you replied to didn't imply they were, only that constantly being on the move was necessary.

[AlotOfReading]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the comment I responded to doesn't talk at all about moving and talks quite a bit about how they lived a life in the edge of not having enough calories and regularly suffered from famine and malnutrition.