Of course, as always, things are a lot more complicated than we tend to assume. It turns out a lot of what we think we know about prehistory is brought to us by Hollywood and Geico commercials.

Prehistoric times are a particularly murky spot in the pool of human history. Still, we all have at least some idea of what went down back then: hulking, fur-clad cavemen bashing their prey (and each other) with massive clubs, attempting to invent essentials such as agriculture and the wheel on the side.

5 Hunter-Gatherers Lived a Life of Hard Labor and Near-Starvation

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The Myth:

Imagine that you live in an alternate reality where the concept of agriculture doesn't exist. You're feeling slightly peckish, so you walk up to the fridge to get that delicious taco you were planning to reheat for lunch. Except that there is no taco. In fact, there is no fridge. All of that "food cultivated by others so you can eat it" stuff was brought on by agriculture, which you now have no concept of. You're a hunter-gatherer: What you have is a spear, and your lunch is somewhere in that forest to your left. Bon appetit!

Yes, at the hunter-gatherer stage of human history, getting groceries sucked giant mammoth balls. You were forced to eat what you could find and/or kill, which led to an unholy amount of dangerous work, not to mention relatively poor nutrition and health. Meanwhile, the tribes that had figured out how to grow their own food were thriving and living large until everyone finally started doing it their way.

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"Not going to lie, kind of miss the killing."

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The Reality:

The dawn of farming actually made our ancestors' lives far more difficult.

We're not debating the merits of agriculture: It's what enabled humans to settle down, and by extension it's the sole reason you're able to sit in a roofed building reading this article. Still, there is some evidence that prehistoric people actually had a great time being hunter-gatherers. Their "meat and vegetables" diet was in fact very varied and healthy, and obtaining food was no biggie: Tribes living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle today only "work" around 14 hours a week. Compare this to the back-breaking labor of keeping livestock and making things grow, and you'll see why no prehistoric person in their right mind would have voluntarily touched a plow.

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Some theories indicate that farming was, in fact, invented out of desperation. The lax schedule of prehistoric hunter-gatherers left them plenty of time to sit around and bone, which in turn led to an expanding population and not enough game to feed them all. Boom! Agriculture or death by starvation, baby!