A bold, provocative history of our species finds the roots of civilization’s success and failure in our evolutionary biology.We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet people are more listless, divided and miserable than ever. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our political landscape grows ever more toxic, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these t...

A provocative exploration of the tension between our evolutionary history and our modern woes—and what we can do about it.We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet we are listless, divided, and miserable. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, but our political landscape is unmoored, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these truths? And how should we respond?

In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female rel...

In the vast anthropological literature devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of hunter-gatherer children. Children often represent 40 percent of hunter-gatherer populations, thus nearly half the population is omitted from most hunter-gatherer ethnographies and research. This volume is designed to bridge the gap in our understanding of the daily lives, knowledge, and development of hunter-gatherer children.The twenty-six contributors ...

When a vengeful person kidnaps two princesses, it is up to two hunter-gathers that are forced to work together to rescue and bring them back to their homes. One is known as the greatest for his own father was a legend. The other is the first female to take on the role as a hunter-gather. They both learn about friendship and companionship through the ordeal as well.

Australians' understanding of Aboriginal society prior to the British invasion from 1788 has been transformed since the publication of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu in 2014. It argued that classical Aboriginal society was more sophisticated than Australians had been led to believe because it resembled more closely the farming communities of Europe. In Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe ask why Australians have been so receptive to the notion that farming...

Regaining oneness with the Earth through the practice of ecstatic trance• Explains how the shamanic techniques of ecstatic trance allow us to connect with animal spirit guides, shape-shift, and discover ways to help heal the Earth• Shows how to create personal rituals to maintain oneness with the Earth and all life• Illustrates trance postures and rituals from a variety of hunter-gatherer societies, including ancient Celtic, Norse, Native American, and South America...

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for gr...

A major global climate event called the Younger Dryas dramatically affected local environments and human populations at the end of the Pleistocene. This volume is the first book in fifteen years to comprehensively address key questions regarding the extent of this event and how hunter-gatherer populations adapted behaviorally and technologically in the face of major climatic change. An integrated set of theoretical articles and important case studies, written by well-known archaeologists, ...

This book provides a basic introduction to key debates in the study of hunter-gatherers, specifically from an anthropological perspective, but designed for an archaeological audience. Hunter-gatherers have been the focus of intense anthropological research and discussion over the last hundred years, and as such there is an enormous literature on communities all over the world. Yet, among the diverse range of peoples studied, there are a number of recurrent themes, including not only the wa...

This book provides a quantitative characterisation of the distribution of archaeological evidence at the La Primavera locality in Argentina, shedding light on ancient Patagonian societies by taking a multidimensional landscape-based approach. It also establishes a technical foundation for the replication of its methodology in other regions, and for studying other mobile hunter-gatherer societies.

Hunter-gatherers are often portrayed as 'others' standing outside the main trajectory of human social evolution. But even after eleven millennia of agriculture and two centuries of widespread industrialization, hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist. This volume, using the lens of language, offers us a window into the inner workings of twenty-first-century hunter-gatherer societies - how they survive and how they interface with societies that produce more. It challenges long-held assu...