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Subsistence agriculture

Science

Efficiency leads to leisure Humans are animals—merely another lineage of great apes. However, we have diverged in significant ways from our ape cousins and we are perennially interested in how this happened. Kraft et al . looked at energy intake and expenditure in modern hunter-gatherer societies and great apes. They found that we do not spend less energy while foraging or farming, but we do acquire more energy and at a faster rate than our ape cousins. This difference may have allowed our ancestors to spend more time in contexts that facilitated social learning and cultural development. —SNV

The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies