We are much more capable of learning skills

than let's say, our Australopithecus ancestors

a few million years ago.

When I was 19,

I bizarrely ended up getting an internship

at a merchant bank.

And in that bank, we had a manager,

and he would pepper his talks with us

with this kind of Darwinian language.

"Banking is a survival of the fittest.

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

Life is a continuous process of competition."

The truth is, evolutionary history just

isn't a constant competition.

Actually, most animals spend as much time

as they can relaxing, taking it easy

or playing and enjoying themselves.

This idea that everything is continuously battling

for energy is nonsense.

I spent most

of the last 25 years documenting hunter-gatherers,

as they took their worldview

and tried to engage with our worldview

in very uneven terms,

and to try and make sense

of their perceptions of work and our perceptions of work.

And what it did was it revealed

an entirely different way of thinking,

an entirely different way of being.

My name's James Suzman,

I'm an anthropologist, and the title

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,

they have have imagined a world

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.

It was a great competition for life.

But it seems fairly clear, we enjoyed quite a lot

of leisure time as hunter-gatherers.

20 years ago I went off

to the Kalahari to start working with a group

of people called the Ju/'hoansi.

The Ju/'hoansi were the first

hunter-gatherer society that were really studied to

see how hard they actually worked,

and it was revealed

that they worked 15 hours in a week,

and a very different work ethos

to what we do here in the West.

The idea of what constitutes work

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

and very contextual-based:

Hunting, gathering, fishing, hiking.

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

In the western world,

where I come from at the moment,

most of those things are considered leisure activities now.

The Inuit and the Arctic,

the Aboriginals in Australia,

and then of course people

like the Ju/'hoansi

engage with the land with consummate skill

and consummate, in some ways, ease.

The Kalahari desert where the Ju/'hoansi live

is an incredibly tough environment.

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

if we're dumped there

without any prior knowledge of how to do things,

we would be dead within several days.

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

out of this seemingly desolate place to pluck

out 130 or so different plant species.

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

They are so skilled and so attuned

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

on the food quest.

And you're looking at the best times

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

of making a living,

and we are supremely adapted to making a living

as hunters and gatherers.

Hunter-gatherer societies,

they are typically highly egalitarian.

Richard Lee, an anthropologist

who worked with the Ju/'hoansi,

he used the word "fiercely egalitarian,"

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

There are no hierarchies whatsoever.

Age does not convey any authority to anybody.

Gender does not convey any authority to anybody.

It's incredibly open and tolerant.

People don't force things on children

but they also realize that there's an instinct.

In particular, they say not among women, but among men.

Young men who go out hunting and they bring in

their first big animal, they'll strut in and show off,

they'll say that potentially risks upsetting their

egalitarian balance that makes the society function.

Rather than praise a successful hunter, they mock them.

Somebody shows up if they've killed a giraffe-

which is something huge, and it's enough to feed everybody

for ages, and the meat's growing from the branches-

they'll say, "Ah, this giraffe, a bit of a scrawny giraffe,

and it stinks a little bit."

And there's this great ritual

of humility and insult that goes on,

and the hunter will be expected to behave

with great humility and the way it was described by one man,

he said, "We use it to gentle young mens' paths."

To enable leadership to be based purely

on context and competence.

Voluntarily given and voluntarily accepted resources

which are shared openly and evenly

and done through a system of demand sharing.

In the system of demand sharing,

it is in the right of pretty much anybody to go

and ask anybody else for a share of what they have.

And it is considered extremely rude to turn that person

down under any circumstances.

Stops any kind of authority.

This enabled food and resources to flow very evenly

and very quickly through society.

The truth is now, very few zoologists,

in fact, no zoologist or ecologist will think

of an ecosystem as governed by competition,

instead it would be governed

by webs of intricate engagements

some of which are cooperative, some of which are less.

This idea that nature is a constant competition

for life is nonsense.

Hunter-gatherers, like the Ju/'hoansi,

described their environment

as a kind of continuous flow of give and take

between species and interactions.

There's absolutely no denying that

the extraordinary attitudes that evolved

during the hunter-gatherer era

have now brought us incredible benefits.

We are both incredibly adaptable

and culturally intransigent.

When change is forced upon us,

we're really good at adapting to it.

We are amazingly good at doing it,

but only when we have no choice.

And I think what we might see is a restructuring

and reorganization of our society.

Identities now which are far more hybridized.

We certainly have a work identity through our Zoom channel.

But for many people, I think, there'll be an opportunity to

reengage themselves in physical space that they are in,

and I think it's going to profoundly reorganize the way

we think about community, identity, belonging, and self.

Economists say, 'We are all universally

this kind of selfish beast.'

Anthropologists, on the other hand,

take the very starting point of their experience, is based

on generally going up and living somewhere where

all your most fundamental and basic ideas about how

the world works are often turned on their heads.

It's a fundamental transition.

It upsets your sense of the world.

Then anthropologists, I think, are based

on having this double perspective of

being in one world and from another,

and then being able to look back

in the world that they're from.

And frankly, I think it would be good

if we still lived in a world where people

could experience another way

of living and being to the point

that it makes the strange familiar,

and the familiar strange.