Joshua Verburg-sachs

“While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats – such as the Kalahari Desert – work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“11 It is my sense—and I do not insist that you agree—that at this particular moment, and on these particular questions, the peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great. The “critical thinkers” of our present age increasingly reject the possibility that history can tell us anything vital about many of the questions that seem most pressing to us. Particularly on the questions with which this book is concerned, many see the mere invocation of the past as a symptom of special pleading (as, for example, when histories of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust are invoked to silence criticism of the State of Israel).”
― David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition