exactly.
i remember in class, age 12, we were discussing 'the future' and the teacher convinced us that technological and scientific development would ensure, we'd all be working four hour days with three day weekends by the time we were of working age. instead we're working longer. the potential is there but of course its never going to happen as long as we arrange ourselves in such a way. ie an unsustainable system and wildly complicated arrangement of buying and selling. its ludicrous. if we were working just feed, clothe and shelter ourselves its been posited that we'd only need 2-4 hours of graft a day. and we'd probably be saner.
here's a link to the Hazda story. this was in Natl Geographic not some Radical Anarcho-Primitivist Journal
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-textObviously they are not totally untainted by civilization but it gives us a sense of what we were before we started storing surplus food, began trading for profit, established hierarchies, governments, 'culture,' religion and so on.
For more than 99 percent of the time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago, everyone lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, once plants and animals were domesticated, the discovery sparked a complete reorganization of the globe. Food production marched in lockstep with greater population densities, which allowed farm-based societies to displace or destroy hunter-gatherer groups. Villages were formed, then cities, then nations. And in a relatively brief period, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was all but extinguished. Today only a handful of scattered peoples—some in the Amazon, a couple in the Arctic, a few in Papua New Guinea, and a tiny number of African groups—maintain a primarily hunter-gatherer existence. Agriculture's sudden rise, however, came with a price. It introduced infectious-disease epidemics, social stratification, intermittent famines, and large-scale war. Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than "the worst mistake in human history"—a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.