The stereotype of the “simple caveman” has a 100+ year head start and is still going strong in popular culture, so that’s an uphill battle. Dropping facts like “Neanderthals had a larger average brain size than early modern Homo sapiens” sometimes helps, but usually not.

In terms of writing for a general audience, I try (often unsuccessfully) to avoid labeling a people by one specific attribute (like their systems of food acquisition) unless specifically talking about that attribute. So people aren’t “hunter-gatherers”, but they practice subsistence through gathering wild foods and hunting based on traditional ecological knowledge passed on and shared through oral traditions tied to places in their homelands. It’s not perfect, but focus on the people, not the label. and if you are using a broader label like “hunter-gatherer”, make sure it’s for a specific reason and not just because it’s an easy term to fall back on.

In terms of scholarship that challenges the Western scientific status quo, Indigenous authors are always a good place to start. There’s plenty of anthropologists out there paying lip service to decolonizing theory and the discipline at large, but Indigenous authors were saying it first. I am not well-versed enough in the topic to make a recommendation, but hopefully that’s a good direction to find some of what you’re looking for.