But there were significant problems with how the numbers were calculated. Most notably, the Ju/’hoansi number didn’t account for the time needed to process food back at camp, to make and maintain tools, and to do housework. In 1979, Lee himself performed re-calculations to arrive at a value of nearly 40 hours per week. And in recent years, anthropologists, including myself, have taken up the task of calculating hunter-gatherer working hours. When considering time out of camp as well as in-camp food processing and housekeeping tasks, the average across all well-studied hunter-gatherer societies is 40-45 hours per week, similar to the standard eight-hour working day in industrialised societies.

And a significant problem with how numbers are used in this is the comparison to the 40 hour week without including commuting, preparation, housework, out of hours correspondence, etc. Including these would significantly increase the number of hours spent by people in industrialized societies.