Rizla,

As a bear of little brain, I'm not sure of your point. We pay taxes to support a large bureaucracy and welfare population, which hunter-gatherers, with their 40-year life-span, didn't have to do. We pay rent or rates for our homes, shelters from the weather, places of eating and sleeping, and of leisure, which gatherer-hunters didn't have to worry about, around their camp-fires on a Winter's night.

I'm not sure of your figures: I've seen other figures somewhere which suggest that women put far more hours in. At the other extreme, Marshall Sahlins once wrote that gatherer-hunters only had to work three hours a day to get all the food they wanted. This may have been so in some exceptionally productive parts of Australia, the lower Murray, western Victoria, and areas like those would have accounted for a large proportion of the entire Aboriginal population. In those areas, women seemed to do a lot less of the total work: there was so much food around, ducks, shellfish, Murray cod, bettongs, swans, wallabies, that even the men could feed themselves. But even there, it wasn't all beer and skittles.

Well, it wasn't either beer or skittles, I guess.

Joe