The topic of our origins and how our ancestors lived can spark a lot of debate in people. Religions and science has tried its best to come up with accurate theories on how they lived, but unless you have a time machine you don't know for sure. I believe there was some sort of intervention that started about a few million years ago that caused our slowly evolving ancestors to have increased brain power in a rapid rate to what we are today. Evolution is a slow and gradual process and it should have taken much more time for our ancestors to evolve into beings with similar brain capacities as ours. For some reason conventional teachers say that our ancestors lived a primitive lifestyle throughout history, yet we see evidence of great ancient structures and cities built around the planet. The evidence shows communities of people living together in ancient times and with a large community agriculture is the cornerstone for their survival. I think it dependeds on where a group lived and how large the group was to answer what they ate. Small nomadic groups were probably better at hunting, fishing, and foraging, larger ones probably survived from farming and raising livestock. I think it would be wrong to say our ancestors didn't master farming, it was needed for survival. The brewing of alcohols was also equally important. With the lack of sanitation and sewage systems in some places, alcohol was needed to detoxify contaminated drinking water. I don't know why we are taught that our ancestors didn't have some of the basic skills for survival that we have today. We cant even move some of the larger stones, that they cut and built structures with, the same distances that they did, even with our best construction equipment we have now. I think there is to many variables to answer your question. The planet was a different place around 20,000 years ago and humans are great at adapting to their environments.