lazyness
It suddenly came to me that a hunter-gather may seek to improve his/her (etc.) skill not so that he/she (ditto) may get more food, but so that he may get, merely, sufficient food whilst expending less energy. Being able to retrieve food whilst expending less energy means that during food shortages you will survive where your less efficient neighbour will not.Maybe this became a driver for the development of our internal (mental) life. Studies have shown that people can successfully train for sporting type skills (muscle strength included) merely by imagining the activity. Whilst not as effective as physical training is for a professional athlete it can, on its own, give a useful boost to the performance of an armchair athlete.
I don't imagine for a moment that a hunter gatherer would consciously "train" to become a better hunter, though certainly children train through the physical exertion of play. And for adults, social activities such as dancing displays and the like, may partly serve such a function. It is rather that, probably, no training is done, so that mental training would increase physical prowess with little energy expenditure.
Indeed, a hungry and weakened hunter may have no option but to sit and imagine how he might catch his next meal. The more he imagined carrying out his actions the more poweful his muscles became and the "luckier" he got at hunting.
This imagining of a future process I have already argued is the real process involved in the exercising of free-will. The only point of making plans is if we can carry them out. If our initiation of actions precedes conscious thought then training the unconscious "beast" through conscious rehersal is the way to have some kind of control over their timing and delivery.
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