Humans evolved in social, cooperative bands, using this cooperation as an evolutionary advantage. These days, rugged individualism still seems to dominate many outdoor activities from regular camping to bushcraft and even to rewilding. When people think of ancestral skills, they think mostly of the hand crafts like basket weaving, pottery, or archery, and not the invisible, social technologies like conflict resolution, mentoring, or practices of sharing. This is a challenge that many skills practitioners and leaders of schools and other community organizations often come across. If rewilding is returning to our human roots, then community building works as the primary ancestral skill. Everything else stems from this. Today to talk about this with me, is Luke McLaughlin.

Luke is the founder and director of Holistic Survival School in North Carolina. His work centers around connecting people to the natural world through ancestral living skills, to help remember how humans lived in balance with their environments in times past. He learned his skills working at a wilderness therapy program in the deserts of Utah. After spending hundreds of hours on the trail and helping hundreds of people, he witnessed firsthand how important these skills are for life lessons and personal growth. He has demonstrated his skills on the Discovery Channel’s show Naked and Afraid and their offshoots, Naked and Afraid XL and Naked and Afraid: Alone. Luke’s main focus is making deep connections and providing a life-changing experience through the Deep Remembering immersion program.

NOTES:

Venmo Luke, 6788

Holistic Survival School

Luke's Instagram

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To attain the level of resilience that cultural rewilding calls for, requires moving away from an economy based on extraction for profit that lays waste to local ecosystems and destroys ancient ways that people have lived from the land. To move away we need alternatives, and examples of how other people have found and maintained sustainability. How have humans lived in a myriad of ways for millennia without destroying their land and not living in greatly unequal societies? What is a subsistence economy and what makes them so resilient? To talk with me about this today is Dr. Helga Vierich

Dr. Vierich was born in Bremen, west Germany and immigrated with her parents to Canada, growing up in North Bay, Ontario. She began her studies at the University of Toronto in 1969. From 1977-1980, as part of her research, she lived in the Kalahari among hunter-gatherers in the Kweneng district with Richard B. Lee supervising. During this time she worked as a consultant on the effects of the extreme drought in Botswana. She was awarded her Ph.D. by the University of Toronto in 1981 and went to work as a Principal Scientist at the West African Economics Research Program, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (headquarters in Hyderabad, India). She worked as a visiting professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky from 1985 to 1987, then as an adjunct professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta from 1989 to 1997. From 1999-2022 she worked as an instructor at the Yellowhead Tribal College in Alberta. Now retired, she spends her time on a rural farm with her husband.

Notes:

• Dr. Vierich’s Website
• Why they matter: hunter-gatherers today
• Before farming and after globalization: the future of hunter-gatherers may be brighter than you think
• Changes in West African Savanna agriculture in response to growing population and continuing low rainfall

Photo by Vasilina Sirotina

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Rewilding is about seeking a reciprocal relationship to the environment and to one another. Material and cultural conditions kept humans in relative check with their ecologies for potentially millions of years, so what were they? If we are to understand this, we must hold up a lens and look at the diversity of hunter-gatherers (both past and present) to fully realize what their cultural and environmental limitations were–and are–today. Why did some abandon that way of life while others have fought to the death to defend it? What led humans to switch from one subsistence strategy to another, and what were the social and ecological effects of these changes? Is it possible to fully know? What do we know? To talk about these core rewilding questions with me, is Dr. Robert Kelly.

Dr. Kelly first became involved in archaeology in 1973, as a high school student. He received his BA from Cornell University in anthropology in 1978, his MA from the University of New Mexico in 1980, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1985. He has taught at various Colleges since 1986; from 1997 until retirement in 2023 he taught at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly is the author of over 100 articles, books, and reviews, including The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, The Fifth Beginning, and Archaeology, the most widely used college textbook in the field. He is a past president of the Society for American Archaeology, past editor of American Antiquity, North America’s primary archaeological journal, and past secretary of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. He has been a distinguished lecturer at many universities around the country and the world, including Argentina, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Japan, and China, and he has worked on archaeological projects in Nevada, California, New Mexico, Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Chile and, for the past 25 years, Wyoming and Montana. He has received over two million dollars in funding, with multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. Since 1973, the archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography of foraging peoples has been at the center of his research.

Notes:

Robert Kelly, Professor Archaeology at University of Wyoming

The Fifth Beginning

The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum (Revised)

CARTA: Violence in Human Evolution – Robert Kelly: Do Hunter-Gatherers Tell Us About Human Nature?

ANTHRO, ART, (CLOVIS) and the APOCALYPSE: Live from the field with Dr. ROBERT KELLY | DIH Podcast #1

Human Behavioral Ecology (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology, Series Number 92) 1st Edition

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