Looking at my cats play, I realized that their games revolve around seeking/hiding, chasing/feeling and attacking/defending. Those are the skills which are most important to a cat’s ability to survive and pass on its genes. Evolution has made it so that kittens get pleasure from training to become proficient at the tasks which increase their fitness.
In the human realm, we can also see this. We seem to very much like fatty meats and evolving an incentive to binge on fatty meat when it’s available makes sense; It’s easy to digest and has a lot of calories and protein. Sex is another activity which increase our fitness and which gives us pleasure.
I’m wondering what attitudes, preferences, activities and skills were most important for fitness for most of humanity’s evolution.
Taking pleasure in hunting, evading/defending against predators, vanquishing enemies and looting them, foraging/resource gathering, tool making and shelter building all seem to be skills we would have developed very long ago and that evolution would select for people who get pleasure from those activities or at least training for them. Incidentally, that’s what the game Minecraft revolves around.
Am I making a fundamental mistake here?
What other skills and activities were important for fitness for most of our evolutionary history?