This "original affluent society" hypothesis is much-promoted but much of it just isn't true.
Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging of the mongongo nuts, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more. See:
I don't understand the base of this debunk. Nowadays, food 'collecting', food processing, DIY (taking care of tools) are not counted into working time but come extra and are taken from 'free' time. And they amount to 1, perhaps 2, working day equivalent per week.
Sure: "40 hours a week" for moderns is also an underestimate.* But the figure everyone goes around repeating about hunter-gatherers is a more dramatic underestimate. The accurate !Kung estimate is 48-56 hours spent on these things: so we seem to be about the same, but with massively improved quality, cost, and nutrition for us.
The debunking applies to the claim that they had more leisure than us. Lee says: "work week... of 2.4 days per adult... [the bushmen] appeared to enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies."
I made a tiny app to solve this kind of disagreement; I was annoyed by the unjust dominance of the ENIAC over Hoelzer's 50 Jahre Computer and the Z3, but also over the Manchester Baby, which really was a massive step forward.
There are about 2304 "first" computers, by my model.
Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging of the mongongo nuts, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more. See:
http://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/01/was-the-agricultural-rev...