Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

So in case y'all haven't been able to tell, I've been enjoying the heck out of our series

on prehistory and the Deep Human Past.

It's like entering a whole new world every week, it's populated by people who are both

just like us and deeply different at the same time.

One of the ways we try to understand the lives of people we find in the archaeological record

is through parallels with more recent societies, particularly foragers.

But this is an approach that's full of pitfalls and potentially misleading comparisons,

ones that can obscure as much as they actually tell us.

That's one of the reasons why I'm so excited to talk to our guest today.

He's one of the world's leading experts on recent and contemporary hunter-gatherers and

a really experienced archaeologist, so he can speak to both of those fields in really

compelling ways.

He's a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and the author of numerous

papers and books, most recently the fifth beginning, what six million years of human history

can tell us about our future, which is really fascinating and insightful, and the life

ways of hunter-gatherers, the foraging spectrum.

Professor Robert Kelly, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thanks for having me.

So I wanted to start by asking you about contemporary hunter-gatherers.

At a really basic level, your work is predicated on the idea that foragers do things that make

sense, they make calculations about what foods together, what technologies they used to

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