History isn't just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,

and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

Work defines who we are. It determines our status and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time, and for the most part, it gives us our class position. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hardwired to work as hard as we do? Is the way we work something in our genetics, or is it just a byproduct of the particular time we find ourselves in human history?

More specifically, did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live like we do?

And what might a world look like where work plays a far less important role than it does?

To answer these questions,

today's guest is James Sousman. He's the author of the new book, Work, a deep history from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. He challenges some of the assumptions that we have about who we are

and draws insights from anthropology and archaeology, biology, biology, zoology, physics, and economics,

and argues that while we have evolved to find joy, biology, physics, and economics, and argues that while we

have evolved to find joy, meaning, and purpose, and work, for most of human history, our

ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. Your work week

in a Neolithic tribe, based on what anthropologists have been able to study from tribes

living in the Neo-theidic conditions in the 20th century, is that you only really worked about 15 based on what anthropologists have been able to study from tribes living and yield the conditions

in the 20th century, is that you only really worked about 15 hours a week, and it was in short

creative bursts. It wasn't 40 hours a week. That's just something that corporations the side of

the 19th and 20th century was the proper amount of time to expect someone to show up into an office

so they could earn what they thought

would deserve full-time wages. Sussman argues that our contemporary culture of work has its roots

in the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed

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