> "they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours"
Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.
we didnt eat or hunt sheep. we followed herds of nomadic ruminant animals across entire continents. simply keeping up with them on foot would be a lot of work. let alone hunting them, moving them, dressing and processing them and then you have the task of making and maintaining all the tools and equipment that were necessary. fires had to be tended… can i respectfully suggest that you are completely wrong?
OK you don't like sheep, so I Googled cows and found they graze 6 - 11 hours a day and spend much of the other time resting. They eat 60+Kg of grass per day and you aren't going to get 60Kg of blades of grass quickly. Nor are they going to cross continents anytime soon. The BBC fact file on Giraffes says "Giraffes spend most of their time eating, feeding between 16 to 20 hours a day."
Can I suggest that if you want to support the claim, you offer some actual reasoning and evidence - there should be some diaries of native Americans and how they ran so many hours a day they coverd several marathons every day, and about how many mountains of knives they amassed working 15 hours a day knife making, and so on.
Idk if you've ever seen sheep in person, but "standing near some sheep while they eat grass" is not work in the sense of effort, concentration, labour. There's a reason the Boy Who Cried Wolf was bored out of his skull, and why shepherding was a task given to a boy while the village adults were doing other things.