Stone Age And Hunter Gatherers Summary

Marshall Sahlins, in his book, which is incredibly important in the study and discourse of substantivist economy, argues that our whole understanding about the economics of Stone Age and hunter-gatherers have been wrong and proves that it was not that hard living under the circumstances of those so called primitive peoples’ life. If we are to refer to the earlier studies and the representation of the economics and life during the Stone Age, we can figure that life was extremely difficult. The abilities of the people were tremendously underestimated, while the hardship was overestimated, by giving images of severe and cruel life that hunter-gatherers had. It was a mere misunderstanding that the people of that age did not have any time for leisure and all what they did was a constant search of means of subsistence. However, we can examine the meaning of affluent, and that was all about having your wants and desires easily satisfied. …show more content…
When there are very big ambitions, and expecting the greatest outcomes while having the minimum inputs, and if we look from this position, then the life of the Stone Age people can seem very miserable when people had no other business than being in constant search of food that would keep them alive. It is a simple way of perceiving Paleolithic, or current hunter-gatherers as having the bourgeois desires and motives whilst having only stone tools and bows with arrows.
In actuality, if we compare the energy spent per capita, during the Neolithic it was the same as that of during the Paleolithic era, and it was even the same all the time until the industrial revolution. People actually had to spend much less energy to get the same amount of food during the earlier eras than that of later