Their cultures are (more or less) survivors from a time when their mode of subsistence was the norm even on (most of) the best productive land. We know majority

Their cultures are (more or less) survivors from a time when their mode of subsistence was the norm even on (most of) the best productive land. We know majority hunter-gatherer lifestyles have been incredibly diverse, but almost all detailed records deal with people on very marginal land that have all been influenced by industrial societies in more or less direct ways, because those were the only ones still available when people started recording them at least semi-properly. Our window into that past is more like a single discolored piece out of a huge intricate stained-glass window. Judging by the impact that indigenous societies and indigenous philosophy from the Americas had on contemporary European thought in the 18th century, it's not a stretch to assume that we've lost a ton of hard-won and almost irreplaceable data on what makes humans function as they do when part of a society and what alternatives to our modern societies work as well or possibly even better.