When people daydream about not having to work for a living, they usually envision being super wealthy. They don’t usually imagine living alongside their ancestors thousands of years ago.

But the reality is that jobs as we know them—working hours, salaries and paychecks, work-life balance, paid or unpaid time off, overtime, etc.—are super recent on the human timeline. Even specialized jobs, which have been around for thousands of years, are still new compared to the roughly 290,000 years of human evolution that preceded anything resembling what we think of as “employment.”

How much time did basic survival take? Less than you might think.

A YouTube video from Axen explores what humans did all day before they had to work for a living, and it’s quite fascinating. The obvious answer is “survive,” but that didn’t actually take up as much time as people might think.

The video points out that modern humans spend about 90,000 hours of their lives working, roughly a third of their waking existence. However, anthropologists have studied pre-agricultural peoples across different continents. The general consensus is that basic survival activities took between 15 and 20 hours per week. That’s a part-time job in terms of hours.

What did people do the rest of the time? Whatever they wanted, basically. It might be easy to assume that prehistoric humans were solely focused on not dying, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Our super ancient ancestors were creative

As the video explains, people actually spent time on creative hobbies. Here are a few examples:

“In 1994, explorers discovered Chauvet Cave in southern France. Inside were paintings created roughly 30,000 years ago: horses, lions, and rhinoceroses rendered with perspective, shading, and........

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