The Fifth Beginning, And The Lifeways Of Hunter-Gatherers w/ Robert Kelly

Hello, everybody! To end the week, I have an interview with Dr. Robert Kelly for you. He is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly has shaped and contributed much to our understanding of hunter-gatherer societies. He has a deep interest in Western North American archaeology, especially in the Great Basin area. Current understanding of hunter-gatherer mobility and foraging patterns are also influenced strongly by his research, fieldwork, and ethnology. By examining the Pleistocene colonization of the Americas by examining artifacts and lithic technology, Dr. Kelly reconstructs past life-ways and compares them to current foraging societies, and examines human adaptation to climate change during different periods in the past. He’s the author of books like The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, and The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future.

In this episode, we focus for the most part on Dr. Kelly’s book, The Fifth Beginning. But first we discuss the discipline of Archaeology in its strengths and limitations. Then, we get into the meat of the book, and talk about the first four beginnings: the beginning of technology; the beginning of culture; the beginning of agriculture; the beginning of the State; and the fifth beginning, which we are going through now, starting around 1500 CE. We also tackle how we might get to solve current urgent global-scale problems, like climate change. As a final topic, we explore issues surrounding hunter-gatherers, how we think about them as a monolithic social entity, and we also refer to thinks like variability, human universals, and evolutionary psychology and “human nature”.

https://youtu.be/oiT_S2v6Gfc

Link to podcast version (Anchor): https://bit.ly/2UF5WAV