Nine to five for 700,000 years: two books show that working life is all about cooperation, whether hunting prey or a pay rise
Hunting is hard. You have to run fast, for miles, often in the heat of the day. You have to keep your eyes fixed firmly on your prey. You have to cooperate with your fellow hunters, because if you don’t, you won’t eat. The apprenticeship, says Jan Lucassen in The Story of Work, is long. “With an AK47,” he says, quoting the influential archaeologist Lewis Binford, “you don’t have to know so much!” But most humans have had to. For 98% of human history, hunting and gathering has been our work. Work was never a picnic and it isn’t now.
Writing this book certainly can’t have been. Lucassen, a Dutch historian and author of a number of books on globalisation and migration, has set himself a task that makes stalking mammoths look quite simple. He has set out to chronicle the history of human work, from our first strides as Homo sapiens 700,000 years ago to the rise of the robot now. The result is an encyclopedic survey that’s also a whistle-stop tour of human history – and it is absolutely fascinating.
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