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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