Michael,

> I've been told that HG's spent only one hour a day, to hunt, gather, and
> store food.

Really? I'm hardly an expert in these matters but I find that extremely
difficult to believe. In general leisure time has been increasing rather
than decreasing at least for the last few thousand years and yet the modern
human still spends about 40 hours per week at work.

It has always been my assumption that the advent of modern civilization as
we know it was due in large part to the additional free time we gained as a
result of agriculture, animal husbandry and the subsequent organized
distribution of labor. As a result of this free time we found ourselves with
the time to develop intellectual skills like reading, writing, mathematics,
architecture, etc. Am I wrong?

If I am wrong then I must wonder why humans took a million+ years to get
around to learning how to write. If we hunted and gathered only for one hour
per day then on what pursuits were we wasting all our free time? What were
we thinking about for the remaining hours of the day during which we were
awake but not looking for food? Did we spend a million years or more just
contemplating our navels? I doubt it.

-gts