Subsistence hunting is more like didn’t catch anything today? Guess we starve until next time. oopsies. Hope you don’t get too hungry and weak to perform at your next hunt. Fingers crossed.
One way to look at it, how much art did they produce? Lots of art? Food was probably pretty easy to come by. Scratch a line on a log? Those folks worked _hard_ to survive.
I'm sure there were lean times for everybody. I'm not trying to say you or parent poster are wrong, I'm saying it's a big world, and all of those things and more were true for somebody, somewhere.
That's really only applicable to desert civilizations and those in colder environments where decomposition is arrested, which were unfortunately the harsher environments. Humans in the tropics are more likely to use wood and other organic materials to produce art, which don't survive for very long.
The oldest wooden art is only 9,500 years old [1] whereas the oldest stone tools are over 3 million years old [2]. The oldest wooden tools, on the other hand, are hundreds of thousands of years old for spears and tens of thousands of years old for axe handles.
Can't remember the source, sorry.
[1] My word, afraid I can't recall the right/more precise one.
One of the guests was of Italian descent and one of his ancestors moved from Sicily to Louisiana in the late 19th Century. Many of those Italians worked as laborers on the sugar plantations.
So, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host, said, Sicily was so poor that working on a Louisiana sugar plantation was better.