La Garma cave reveals Paleolithic life with two-hour workdays

La Garma: Two-hour workdays and no hunger in the Paleolithic

At 130 meters deep, in total darkness, someone erected an oval tent of five square meters 16,800 years ago, propping it up with stone blocks and decorating it with paintings and engravings. It was not an emergency shelter. It was a house inside a cave, part of the Paleolithic village discovered in La Garma, eleven kilometers from Santander. The find has peine an uncomfortable question: what if life before agriculture was not the survival hell we take for granted?

What was found in La Garma cave

The team led by paleontologists Pablo Arias and Roberto Ontañón has documented huts from 16,800 years ago in the cave's lower gallery. The site was known for its rock art, and the text announcing the discovery presents it as an extension of the legend of nearby Altamira, the cave designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. Research over the last two and a half years has allowed a shift from wall art to territory, from painting to architecture. They have inventoried 300,000 remains, and researchers believe they have barely reached half of their prospecting.

The cave is an irregular space 300 meters deep, with several levels, a couple of entrances, and abundant water sources. A collapse sealed it during the Visigothic period, and conservation conditions are exceptional: "La Garma is a time capsule," Ontañón summarizes. Those inhabitants were communities of between 20 and 30 people who hunted, gathered, and went to the sea to shellfish, facing frequent temperatures of -15 ºC.

Where does the claim of working only two hours a day come from?

From the teeth of a 45-year-old woman. Her dentition shows she never experienced any type of nutritional stress: she did not go hungry nor lack any nutrient. Based on this, and the rest of the material record, the excavation leaders argue that the daily work of that community could be resolved in around two hours a day. The underlying argument is that the image of the Paleolithic as a harsh world focused solely on survival does not hold up against what lies underground.

There is a nuance the team itself highlights: the tents were narrow, five square meters, and could accommodate four seated people. This rules out the nuclear family as we understand it today. They were small groups with many kinship ties who also avoided pairing within the family. La Garma functioned as an attraction point for neighboring populations coming there to form new couples.

Mediterranean shells and conflicts resolved without fighting

The portrait includes long-distance exchanges—there is material evidence of shells arrived from the Mediterranean—and a complex symbolic world. There were domestic, productive, and transcendent subspaces, with structures at 130 meters depth decorated with paintings, engravings, and furniture. The most formidable piece is a phalanx of an aurochs, a one-ton bull, perforated with representations of human faces and animal profiles.

Regarding violence, the team's thesis is that conflicts existed, as in any society, but were resolved by fission: if coexistence turned sour, part of the group left. No permanent war. This is the point that raises the most eyebrows, because from there to the happy Arcadia is a step many are unwilling to take.

Two hours of work versus the 40-hour week

The comparison with the present is inevitable and where the issue heats up. One line of analysis argues that if obtaining food took so little time, the current 40-hour weekly workday is a historical anomaly sustained by created needs: quotas, debts, taxes, and consumption. Another responds that the data is an artifact and that infant mortality, disease, and short life expectancy made that existence perversos, regardless of how much seafood was on the coast.

A third element is added: the difficulty of judging the past with current comfort criteria. Some argue that the shepherd or hunter does not perceive himself as perversos even if his material life is worse than that of an urban beggar, and those who have closely observed societies still living outside industrialization describe their daily lives in much less poetic terms.

Neolithic or Paleolithic: the date often misstated

One of the most repeated criticisms points to the dating. The text disseminating the discovery constantly mixes the terms Neolithic and Paleolithic to refer to a settlement of 16,800 years, which corresponds to the Paleolithic. The Neolithic, with agriculture and livestock, is usually placed much later; some fix its start around 10,000 BC in Mesopotamia. The confusion is not minor: the entire thesis about work and abundance relies on a specific chronology.

The team's method is as singular as the find: they inventory and analyze without removing anything from the cave floor. The originals are not and will not be in museums, and dissemination is done with 3D recreations. The advances were presented at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (National Archaeological Museum), backed by the Fundación Palarq, which awarded the project its National Archaeology Prize in 2021.

The horizon managed by the team is eloquent: there is work for the next 100 years.