And yet, from OP > The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calo

And yet, from OP > The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only eleven—less than a fifth—relied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland. Now, to be sure, communities found in the 1960s that subsisted mainly from foraging can _not_ be assumed to be representative of pre-historic people, they are living in the 1960s same as everyone. But they had access to hunted game as well as foraged vegetables, if hunting is so much more efficient, why did most of them get most of their calories _not_ from hunting? Because they were choosing to inefficiently spend more labor on collecting plants, when they could have been relaxing instead, because they preferred it culturally? I guess it's possible. Because the efficiency of hunting animals vs harvesting plants isn't universal in actually existing environments humans do and have lived in, but can depend on the specifics of the given ecological location? Seems likely. Maybe the ecologiccal locations most communities the anthropologists looked at in the first half of the 20th century were not representative of pre-historic humans? Certainly could be, but it's certainly not obvious. As OP notes, where hunting seems to beat plant gathering calorically is in extreme environments not representative of African savannah where we thinks humans and their forebears did most of their evolving. But in general, _most_ of the arguments given when people talk about this topic are based on imagination and what people find plausible or seems like a good just-so story to them, not on any kind of evidence at all. It's a topic where people really are drawn to ideological explanations over clear-eyed looks at evidence, I guess because it's not _really_ just about eating and labor, but about all the cultural implications and assumptions that go along with it for people, many of them that become really tied up with gender, as the OP discusses. It is in fact not at all clear that hunting is more labor efficient than collecting plants in general, and what anthropological evidence there is from the 20th century (in which in some cases anthropologists really did do caloric input/output calculations) does not neccessarily suggest it at all. Foraging people anthropologists encountered in the 20th century definitely didn't have the kind of success you suggest at hunting -- multi-person parties went hunting, and did not succesfully kill mega-fauna on every expedition, in observed cultures; what they observed was not that a single-person could reliably bring back meat to feed 100 on a daily expedition.