About your first tribe... did you pause your game and leave?

About your second tribe... You have to continuosly "plunk" the villager on the item you would like them to work on.

It may seem like forever when you drag them on to the research table, the bush, or anything else and they don't work, but eventually they will start.

The box at the bottom of your screen will say "This villagers has progressed in farming" or something like that. You will always need to drag a child on to a mushroom, they never do it by themselves, so keep your eyes peeled!
Hope this helps and I hope you enjoy all 3!
Thanks.

I never paused the game for that first tribe, but now I know I should have. When you set the game speed, you need to actually click Play for the setting to take effect, correct? It's that way for PT, so I assume it would be the same here.
But yeah, I left the game on normal speed and went to bed. Oops. :P "Oops" is a word I use very often, both on my computer and in real life!

I hadn't yet gotten enough tech points to buy anything, so I guess that's why they didn't bury their dead, or maybe because I didn't drag anyone to the right place. Anyway, I did learn a few things by messing up, so hopefully starting over will go smoothly. I'm almost up to 5000 tech points now, so if all goes well I'll be able to reach the next level of farming before my little dudes starve to death. I'm going to try to solve this game before starting VV2, and the same with VV3. It will be sort of like reading the chapters in a long book!
