For millions of years, and in some places still today, hunter-gatherers raise competent and capable children. They do this while navigating challenging environments, with predators, dangerous tools, and most notably: without any school. Contemporary societies have created learning environments that are a mismatch with the expectations of our genetic evolution: we weren’t meant to sit in boxes all day. The system of compulsory education that spans the globe and shapes our perception of education was designed in the 1700’s specifically to create dutiful factory workers for rising nationalism. They were not designed based on human evolution or human needs, but the needs of capitalist entrepreneurs looking to increase obedience and efficient producers of wealth for them. So then, if not in schools, how are we best adapted to learn? What does learning look like in societies without schools? If hunter-gatherers represent the way of life most closely to that which humans evolved in, what do they do to educate their children and prepare them for life as an adult? What can we learn about ourselves by studying these societies? To talk with me about this topic is Dr. Gul Deniz Salali.

Dr. Salali is a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology. Since 2013, she has been conducting anthropological fieldwork with the Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Congo rainforest, studying their social learning, cooperative childcare practices, and the cultural evolution of their plant knowledge. Her research projects explore the learning of ecological knowledge, childhood and childcare, and cultural evolution in hunter-gatherer communities.

Notes:
Dr. Gul Deniz Salali Website

Raising Tomorrow- BaYaka Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods and Global Perspectives on Child Development

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

Hunt, Gather, Parent

Making by Tim Ingold

Mothers and Others by Sarah Hrdy

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For millions of years, evidence suggests that humans lived in relatively equal societies, where food acquisition and child raising were shared activities among community members both men and women, together. It is apparent that our environments of evolutionary adaptation, selected for humans with evermore prosocial traits. Domination and competition were minimized in favor of collaboration and partnerships of mutual aid. The idea that any human was superior to another would have been an absurdity. Contemporary forager societies also exhibit collective regulation of resources and power, diminishing anyone who may try to take more than their fair share or exhibit dominance over others. Only within that last 10,000 years or so, does the evidence show that a small number of societies turned to systems of domination, who then conquered the world and created hierarchies of rank, class, and everything else. Rewilding is an endeavor to live more closely to how we evolved to live, and in order to do so we must dismantle the mismatched environment that these dominating societies have created. How and when did this switch to domination happen, why did it happen, and is it possible to work our way back to egalitarianism? These are central questions to the rewilding movement, and they also happen to be the life’s work of anthropologist Douglas Fry, who has come on the podcast to discuss this with me.

Douglas P. Fry is a researcher at AC4 at Columbia University and Prof Emeritus at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University in 1986. Dr. Fry has written extensively on aggression, conflict resolution, and war and peace. He is currently researching how clusters of neighboring societies, peace systems, manage to live without war. He has authored countless academic journal articles on the subjects as has written many books, such as Beyond War and The Human Potential for Peace, as well as serving as co-editor of Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies Around the World and Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution: Alternatives to Violence. His most recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity, is co-authored with Riane Eisler. Eisler and Fry argue that the path to human survival and well-being in the 21st century hinges on our human capacities to cooperate and promote social equality, including gender equality.

Notes:

Douglas Fry UNC Greensboro Faculty Page

Douglas Fry @ Research Gate

Nurturing Our Humanity at Bookshop.org

Sustaining Peace Project

Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships

Mentions:

Brian Ferguson’s “Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric Mortality”

The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler

Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm

Bringing Down a Dictator

Blueprint for Revolution

Global Nonviolent Action Database

Why Civil Resistance Works by Erica Chenoweth

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Creating ancestral skills communities is central to rewilding. We need people sharing skills together, we need people tending land together. These communities don’t form over night. It takes time to build them. I spoke with Lucy O’Hagan in February of 2020, in one of my first episodes of the Rewilding Podcast. Now it’s February of 2025 and a lot has changed in the last five years. Their community has grown, our friendship has deepened, and I continue to be deeply inspired by their work. Last August I traveled to Ireland to attend the first ancestral skills gathering on the island, facilitated by Lucy through their organization, Wild Awake Ireland. It was a life-changing experience for me, which was something I really didn’t expect. If you haven’t listened to our first podcast together, I would recommend going back and listening to it before you listen to this one. In this episode, I hope to pick up the conversation from where we left off five years ago, ask Lucy to share insights from the last five years of building a rewilding community in Ireland, and share my own stories of visiting Ireland.

NOTES:

The Rewilding Podcast, Episode 4: Complex Contexts w/ Lucy O'Hagan

Wild Awake Ireland

Language Movement: an dream dearg

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Wisdom Sits in Places

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One of the key aspects of wildness is adaptation. Being able to change and adapt to different needs, in different environments, is a cornerstone of resilience. While a large part of this involves getting to know the land where you dwell, it helps to know multiple landscapes. It can teach you how to think on your toes and figure out how to do things in new ways. While rewilding leans more toward longer term ancestral living within a culture, and survival is more about meeting immediate needs in a context removed from culture, survival skills are a necessary base that culture builds on top of. In this way, people into rewilding should consider practicing survival skills in multiple environments, as a way of building the foundations of resilience. To talk with me about this today, is Tom McElroy from Wild Survival Skills.

Tom McElroy has taught Survival and Primitive Skills to more than 15,000 students worldwide over the past 23 years. During his twenties Tom spent an entire year living 'off the land'. He built and lived in a shelter made from forest material, rubbed sticks together to make fire, purified water naturally and hunted, fished and gathered his own food. Tom has taught at various schools around the world, including Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School. He holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Geography from Rutgers University and a Master's in International Policy related to Indigenous Peoples from the University of Connecticut and has studied with indigenous people all over the world.

Notes:

Instagram

YouTube

Wild Skills Survival

Desert Island Survival

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I’m fond of saying, “There’s no one right way to rewild.” A friend once asked me, “Sure, Peter. But is there a wrong way?” I wanted to do something fun for this episode that I haven’t delved into much before in this space, so I invited my friend on to talk about the “wrong” ways to rewild. Don’t be fooled by the candy bar image, I love elements of contemporary society that are in some ways more aligned with ancient ways… But what I abhor is when people water down rewilding to make it less about escaping from the captivity of civilization, and instead, focus simply on making captivity more comfortable while the world burns.

Notes:

Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subcultural Evolution

Rewilding, Dispatched

"Urban Hunter-Gatherers" Chapter excerpt

Cambodian genocide

After the Revolution

Ecotopia

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When some human societies made the shift from wild, procured foods to domesticated, produced foods there is a corresponding decline in the health of those people in the archaeological record. Today, the majority of people eat domesticated staples, and our health has taken a huge decline on a global scale. Wild foods are an important nutritional component to the human diet. Rewilding can mean rekindling the relationship to wild foods that humans have historically had. To talk with me about this on the Rewilding Podcast, is Monica Wilde.

Monica Wilde, known as Mo, is an ethnobotanist and research herbalist. She lives in Scotland in a self-built wooden house where she's created a wild, teaching garden on 4 organic acres, encouraging edible and medicinal species to make their home. Mo holds a Masters degree in Herbal Medicine, is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the Association of Foragers, which she helped to found in 2015. She has been teaching foraging and herbal medicine for several decades. Mo wrote the award-winning book The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World, in 2022, that imparts what she learned from her year of living on only wild foods. Afterwards she started the Wildbiome® Project - a citizen science study tracking the health changes seen on wild food diets. The next arm of the study is in April 2025.

Monica’s Instagram

Wild Biome Project Instagram

The Wildbiome™️ Project Results

The Wilderness Cure

The Ethnobiology of Contemporary British Foragers: Foods They Teach, Their Sources of Inspiration and Impact

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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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