Archaeologist Robert Kelly: Six Million Years of Human History May Foreshadow Our Future | Interviews

Kelly believes we will witness the end of the nation-state as a sacred identity, the disappearance of war, the death of capitalism, and the beginning of a new era of global cooperation.

For 45 years, Robert L. Kelly has wanted to spend every summer in the field.

"What I love most is hunting for sites among high mountains, or digging head-down for nothing but a fragment of bone or a broken arrowhead. I enjoy being covered in dust, crouching to dig under a scorching sun, bathing in icy mountain springs, mapping sites in bitter wind and rain," Kelly wrote.

Kelly, 61, is a well-known American archaeologist. He is a former president of the Society for American Archaeology and is now a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming; for years he edited American Antiquity. He calls himself a "dirt archaeologist" and studies hunter-gatherer societies. His books include The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, The Foraging Spectrum, and Archaeology: Down to Earth (with David Thomas).

The archaeologist Brian Fagan wrote: "Robert Kelly is an outstanding North American archaeologist and an accomplished writer. He modestly calls himself a 'dirt archaeologist,' but he is not only deeply learned — he truly has a global perspective."

Becoming an archaeologist was Kelly's dream from childhood. From an early age he loved the outdoors, camping, and the idea of living off the land and the water, and he was fascinated by Native Americans and their way of life. He read everything he could, searched caves, and collected arrowheads from neighboring ranches. "Any old object fascinated me, so I traced colonial-era roads on maps, explored the ruins of abandoned mills, and dug through historical debris looking for jars and pots. My bedroom was stuffed with arrowheads, bones, and fossils," Kelly recalled.

When Kelly was eleven or twelve, his mother gave him a copy of Sir Leonard Woolley's The Young Archaeologist. The book shaped him, and it still sits on his desk today. Around that time he was also captivated by National Geographic, drawn to articles about "primitive" peoples in far-off places and about Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees. "Although I grew up in rural New England, my heart was often with wind-swept deserts and high mountains," he said.

In 1973, 16-year-old Kelly won a place in a summer archaeology program and was sent to work with David Thomas, an archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History. That was the start of Kelly's career. Thomas was then excavating a cave in central Nevada, and Kelly stayed on as his assistant for several years, until he began the fieldwork for his own doctoral dissertation. The two later co-wrote two college archaeology textbooks.

After graduating from Cornell University in anthropology in 1978, Kelly took a master's degree at the University of New Mexico (1980) and a doctorate at the University of Michigan (1985), and then began his academic career in earnest. After a short teaching stint at Colby College in Maine, he moved in 1986 to the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Eleven years later he came to the University of Wyoming, where he has taught ever since.

In his book he looks back on that career this way: "Over the past 40-plus years I have taken part in field projects across the American West, the Southeast, New York City (I once helped excavate a site on Wall Street), Maine, and Kentucky. I have also worked at Inca sites on the edge of Chile's Atacama Desert. I have excavated 13,000-year-old 'Paleo-Indian' camps, 19th-century privies, graves, Indian villages and caves — in deserts and in humid forests, from the coast to mountain peaks 3,000 meters high. I have also done ethnographic work among the Mikea of Madagascar, a people who both garden and forage."

He has published more than 100 articles on prehistory, but most of them were specialist papers. Archaeologists often say they study the past in order to understand the future, Kelly felt, yet most of them only say it — and it was time for him to do some work "beyond talking the talk."

So in November 2016 he published The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future in the United States, hoping to help people understand the past so they could create the future.

Archaeologists, Kelly says, think differently from scholars in other fields: they look for patterns in where and when material remains appear, and use those remains to rebuild how people once lived. They assume that each new category of material — stone tools, pottery, rectangular houses, formal religious buildings, cars, electronics, printed text — signals a related change in how human life is organized.

Looking back at six million years of human history from that angle, Kelly found that the record people left behind shows four global changes in human society, four "tipping points" humanity has passed through. He calls them "beginnings," because each marks a change in the basic character of human existence and opens a new era for our species. In order, they are the beginnings of technology, of culture, of agriculture, and of the political organization we call the "state."

"I think future archaeologists will find another beginning — a fifth beginning. It started 500 years ago, and we are in the middle of it. It is marked by the arrival of technology — transport, computing — that lets us cover the whole sky, land, and water. Through global migration and global trade, the whole world is being knit into one. We will witness the end of the nation-state as a sacred identity, the disappearance of war, the death of capitalism, and the beginning of a new era of global cooperation," Kelly said.

Compared with most scholars in the humanities, Kelly is unusually hopeful about the future. "Prehistory tells us that humans are good at solving problems, and that evolution often remakes us. Of course, as stockbrokers say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. We could indeed be headed for ruin. But prehistory tells me it is not inevitable; the future is still ours to make," he wrote in The Fifth Beginning.

Xu Hong, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote of the book: "In this minimalist history of humanity, the author lays out with deceptive ease the connections in human behavior across six million years, and finally poses the ultimate question of where humanity is going. It is a stirring read." Luo Xin, a professor of history at Peking University, said: "Few archaeologists look at the future this clearly, and fewer scholars who look at the future are this hopeful. By examining the whole of humanity's past, Kelly understands the present and touches the future, showing how much history is worth — because only history itself can clear away the myths of history."

In the summer of 2018, as usual, Kelly was in the field. He finished an excavation at a cave site in the Rocky Mountains of northern Wyoming, in the American West, a site with a record of continuous human use going back 12,000 years.

The place is remote, so Kelly had to make a special trip somewhere with an internet connection to answer QDaily's questions by email.

"We live in a simple camp, sleep in tents, and take turns cooking and cleaning. In the evenings we like to sit around the fire, talking and admiring the thousands of stars in a clear night sky. We bathe in the mountain streams — freezing! The site is about a kilometer from camp, so we walk there every morning. It sits at 1,700 meters, and the weather swings from cold to hot. … Tomorrow I set out again to look for new sites in another part of the mountains and to record ancient rock art. I think I'll keep doing fieldwork as long as my body lets me!" Kelly wrote in his email to QDaily.

Q = QDaily

Kelly = Robert L. Kelly

Archaeologists Understand the Future by Knowing the Past

Q: Let's start with your new book published in China, The Fifth Beginning. I'm curious why you wrote it. How did it come about?

Kelly: An archaeologist's job is to work out what happened in the past. I've published plenty of specialist papers on prehistory. But archaeologists justify their work by saying they use knowledge of the past to understand the future. A few years ago I decided I hadn't taken that responsibility seriously enough, so I did something about it. In the book I wrote about what 45 years of archaeology have taught me about global prehistory, and I also thought about the future.

Q: In the book you write, "The essential nature of humanity is about to undergo an earth-shaking change in the near future." Why do you say that? Do you mean global citizenship?

Kelly: Yes, I mean global citizenship. It is a cultural change. The Israeli author Yuval Harari argues in Sapiens that the only way is to change human genetics, or to merge humans with machines.

I disagree. Human culture can change. I expect that in the future people will take part in world culture the way they take part in local culture, treating all of humanity as neighbors who deserve respect and help when they need it. I've already seen that change in organizations like Doctors Without Borders.

I see a world in which the extreme inequality we have today in wealth, health, and opportunity becomes unimaginable — even to the people who gain most from the current political and economic systems. Whenever I say this, people tell me it can't happen. But I point out to my American audiences that not long ago most white Americans accepted slavery as legal. That was a cultural belief. Today no American thinks slavery is acceptable. So culture can change.

Q: You also write, "The challenge we face is this: how do we bring the world's people together economically, legally, and structurally, without sacrificing fairness or forcing them to change their culture?" How do you think that problem should be solved?

Kelly: I'm an archaeologist, not a political theorist, a diplomat, or a politician. So I admit I'm not really qualified to say how change happens. But I'd say the key word in the sentence you quote is "forcing." Culture is always changing. There is no way to stop it, and no reason to. What we want is a world in which people control the change rather than have it forced on them. That takes democracy, local political control, and the ability to move around the globe. Many parts of the world have none of the three.

Q: You think a world government and world citizens will emerge. Specifically, what can we do to push that along? Are there examples?

Kelly: We already have a rudimentary world government in the United Nations. Unfortunately it has plenty of problems. It is tangled in bureaucracy, which stops it from responding quickly in many situations. Each of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council holds a veto, which is plainly undemocratic. All countries, especially the major powers, including China and the United States, should give the UN their full support so it becomes a powerful force in the world, and should change its structure so it becomes a force for good. In Collective Security Within Reach, Sovaida Ma'ani Ewing discusses many changes that would improve the UN.

Q: You write, "Each time, humanity reached a starting point through a number of processes, but the sharpening competition brought by population growth was the main driver." Do you think population will keep growing after the fifth beginning, and bring on a sixth?

Kelly: Demographers think the human population will keep growing through the 21st century, possibly reaching 11 billion by 2100. Population could also fall, because in recent history the birth rates of many countries have dropped as they developed — the United States, Europe, Japan.

So yes, I think population growth will keep pushing humanity toward a new level of organization. Many people ask me what the sixth beginning will look like. I tell them, let's see whether we can get through the fifth! But in fact I think the fifth beginning will require a somewhat reluctant reorganization of the world into a more cooperative order. The sixth beginning will be the peak of that trend, a truly global civil society. These beginnings come at shorter and shorter intervals. So the sixth will arrive fairly soon after the year 2100.

A World Without Cooperation Among Nations Won't Work Forever

Q: In your preface for Chinese readers you mention, "I visited an archaeological excavation near Shanghai, the imperial tombs around Xi'an and the spectacular Terracotta Army pits, and the Zhoukoudian site in Beijing." What did you make of those sites?

Kelly: First, the United States has nothing like them. America had no prehistoric states and no large empires. People have lived on the new continent for only about 14,000 years, so there is nothing as old as Zhoukoudian. For most of the trip I was simply amazed.

I was also struck by what China has done with these sites. China has spent the money needed to protect these archaeological resources and to pass information about them on to the public. There is an enormous structure over the Terracotta Army site, designed as a museum, where people can watch the digging continue. Zhoukoudian has an elevator inside it — no archaeological site in the United States has an elevator! At the excavation I saw near Shanghai, 1,000 people were at work. When I dig in the United States there are probably never more than 25, and I've never heard of a project with 1,000 staff. Think how much work I'd have to do!

Q: You believe the future should hold more and deeper cooperation among nations. But in recent years, Brexit, Trump's election, and the friction between China and the US have all sent less hopeful signals. How do you feel about that?

Kelly: My book came out a week after Mr. Trump was elected president of the United States. I was unhappy not only with the election but with Mr. Trump and his administration. His conduct is the exact opposite of how a world leader should behave. Brexit, and the rise of nationalist governments in the United States, Europe, Russia, and even China, worry me a great deal. War is still far too common, though it happens less often than it did, and kills fewer people. People around the world are pushing back against globalization, because globalization has widened inequality, driven mass migration, and required people from different cultures to live as neighbors.

None of this leaves much room for optimism. But I believe a world without cooperation among nations won't work forever. People will resist it. I can tell you that most Americans do not in fact approve of Mr. Trump and his administration, and I hope we can change the makeup of the government in this November's election.

As I wrote in The Fifth Beginning, populism, war, and nationalism are exactly what you would expect from globalism, from an increasingly integrated world, from a world in which people of different cultures must live together. But I also point out that these trends produce a counterforce: a growing global culture. It travels easily around the world through sports, music, and film.

There is also the fact that more and more people cannot accept a war that kills large numbers of innocent civilians, or large numbers of a nation's own troops. That is a cultural change. The example I often use is the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944. Allied commanders calculated that about 10,000 people would be killed or wounded in the first 24 hours. They were right: about 5,000 died in the end. Even more died on the German side, and many innocent civilians were killed. All of it was expected. Today such an operation would be politically impossible for the United States, because the American public would not tolerate so great a loss of life, and would vote the party responsible out at the next election. Nuclear weapons have also stopped wars between major powers. I've told American audiences that even if the US could win a war against a nuclear power, we know a hostile nation could still destroy a city with a single bomb. If that city were London, New York, or Hong Kong, it would destroy world order too. Which means neither the US nor any other country can actually use its powerful military. War simply cannot solve problems anymore. In fact it pulls resources away from other needs, and so creates problems of its own.

What will the world look like after the fifth beginning? I have to admit I'm only an archaeologist, nothing more. I hope it becomes the harmonious place Confucius imagined. My task is simple: to show that prehistory tells us the world really has gone through major transformations, and that the way humans organize themselves has changed completely. The physical evidence of those transformations shows that we are in the middle of another one now.

In The Fifth Beginning I argue that people could not control the earlier beginnings. Part of the reason they couldn't even recognize them is that those transformations took a very long time (the fifth, I think, will move faster), and that until the last century we knew very little about human prehistory. This means we now have the ability to steer where the world goes during the fifth beginning. Whether we choose to use it is up to us.

Q: Your favorite object in the British Museum is the life-size black granite statue of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess. Why?

Kelly: What could be cooler than a black lion-headed goddess! I enjoy these sculptures simply as art; I find them powerful and captivating. But they are my favorites also because they set me wondering: what was ancient Egypt like? What did a lion-headed goddess mean in their world? What did she signify? Was she real to them? Imagining the ancient world is the whole point of archaeology. For me, imagining ancient Egypt is one of the hardest challenges. Those beautiful Sekhmet sculptures are a case in point.

Q: This year marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. Looking back at it, what strikes you most?

Kelly: That war was first called the Great War, because it was thought to be the war that would end all wars. Clearly it failed. But look at what it produced: the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. It also taught us that when a war ends we must help the defeated countries, a lesson we have been applying since the Second World War. Today that war should teach us how important it is to oppose nationalist governments, because it was the rise of nationalist governments after the First World War that produced imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Fascism is rising in many places now, and the lesson of the First World War is that it has to be stopped.

![An Acheulean hand axe from the Kathu Pan site in South Africa, 750,000 years old. Stone tools like this marked the first beginning.

Image courtesy of CITIC Press.](http://img.qdaily.com/uploads/20180902214551x5r4JKpuagdOH6jy.jpg-w600)

It's Not What You Find, But What You Find Out

Q: You mention in the book that for more than 40 years you have spent almost every summer in the field. Could you tell us about your most recent season?

Kelly: It's 45 years now, in fact! Just last week I finished an excavation at a cave site in the Rocky Mountains of northern Wyoming, in the American West. The site has a record of continuous human use going back 12,000 years. That's a long record for North America, though not for China!

We live in a simple camp, sleep in tents, and take turns cooking and cleaning. In the evenings we like to sit around the fire, talking and admiring the thousands of stars in a clear night sky. We bathe in the mountain streams — freezing!

The site is about a kilometer from camp, so we walk there every morning. It sits at 1,700 meters, and the weather swings from cold to hot. The students take part in every stage of the dig: first the digging (with small trowels, not big shovels!), then recording the data electronically, and finally cleaning and cataloguing the artifacts. Over the past few years students from Shanghai and Xi'an have joined this excavation too.

Tomorrow I set out again to look for new sites in another part of the mountains and to record ancient rock art. I think I'll keep doing fieldwork as long as my body lets me!

Q: You've taken part in many excavations over 40-odd years. Which one did you find most interesting or most memorable, and why? What came out of it?

Kelly: My first archaeology mentor used to say, "It's not what you find, but what you find out." I hope that survives in Chinese! My goal over the past several decades has been to understand the relationship between climate change, population size, and how hunting and gathering populations adapt. We have found that climate change has a large effect on population size: it lowers growth rates and sets off large-scale migrations. Climate change affects hunter-gatherers differently from the way it affects today's industrial societies, and understanding that difference matters, because it still affects us. We shouldn't ignore that.

Q: To help develop tourism at Wyoming's historical and archaeological sites, you helped build a website about Wyoming's cultural heritage. How do you see the relationship between tourism and archaeology? Anything you can share from experience?

Kelly: As in China, most archaeological research in the United States is supported by the public. That means we have to give what we learn back to the public. I built the site to point people to the places in Wyoming where they can learn about prehistory (and history), and to let them see how their money is being spent.

Archaeology is an important part of tourism in China (the Great Wall is itself a major attraction). I think learning about other cultures through archaeology is an excellent way to understand and appreciate them. That takes programs at museums and tourist sites, and those cost money. But if the money builds understanding between countries, it is well spent.

Q: Your project at Glacier National Park set out to find artifacts exposed in the park's ice fields by recent global warming. How did it go? What did you find and conclude?

Kelly: We have finished the project, but unfortunately we found no artifacts connected with the park's ice fields. We did find many natural objects — wood and bone — that help us reconstruct climate change. We were also the first team to drill an ice core in the park. I believe the data confirm our guess that around 6,500 to 7,000 years ago, when the climate was very warm, this ice field vanished completely. Sadly, the climate is turning very warm again — only this time humans are the cause.

I enjoyed the fieldwork for this project enormously. Glacier National Park is beautiful. And I worked with colleagues who are lovely, cheerful, hard-working people.

Q: The dedication of The Fifth Beginning reads, "To my father, an optimist." What influence did your father have on you?

Kelly: My father was an optimist. That always surprised me, because he grew up poor, in a time and place that were unusually hard on people of Irish descent. As a young man he served in the Pacific theater of the Second World War, and later in the Korean War. He saw far too many terrible things, and still stayed hopeful — at least, that is how he was in front of me.

He never put himself first. He was a kind and generous man. He raised nine children and had a happy 60-year marriage with my mother. He was once a vice president at Sikorsky Aircraft, worked with many world leaders, and traveled to China on business many times.

He was very modest. If you met him you would never guess he knew King Hussein of Jordan. He was also a superb carpenter! Whenever I have a problem I often ask myself what my father would do. I'm sorry he died before this book came out. I would like to know what he thought of it.

Q: Besides your father, who else influenced you? Your teachers, perhaps?

Kelly: I was lucky: from the age of 16 I got to work with the archaeologist David Thomas, for many years. He gave me chances to try different kinds of archaeology and gradually trained me to lead in the field. The way I do archaeology is a product of those years with him. Today we write college textbooks together.

In graduate school I studied under Lewis Binford, one of the greatest archaeologists of the 20th century. He put enormous weight on scientific method, and on thinking through how archaeologists can pull information out of what they dig up.

I've Always Been Interested in History, and the Older I Get, the More I Love It

Q: Looking back over your life, what is your intellectual capital?

Kelly: History. I've always been interested in history, and the older I get, the more I love it. I also like reading biographies of scientists — I particularly remember reading about the life of Thomas Edison several times. And I've spent a lot of time in the woods, often walking alone. That gave me a great deal of time to think, and I count those quiet hours among my most valuable assets.

Q: What's the last genuinely good book you read?

Kelly: I've read so many good books. A recent one is Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature, a biography of Alexander von Humboldt. I read it after the German government gave me the Alexander von Humboldt Award. I realized I knew very little about Humboldt, but luckily Wulf had just published a biography of him. It is beautifully written; I couldn't put it down.

For anyone who doesn't know Humboldt's story, he was a naturalist on the same intellectual level as Darwin. He came up with the idea of ecology — that the natural world is all connected. It's hard to imagine that people once had no notion of this at all, and that is exactly what shows how important Humboldt's contribution was.

Q: What was the best thing you read as a student?

Kelly: This question deserves a long answer.

When I was very young my mother gave me a book by Sir Leonard Woolley, The Young Archaeologist. It still sits on my desk today.

When I was a student everything felt new and exciting, so each book seemed better than the last. The most influential was Man the Hunter, published in 1968. I didn't read it until almost 10 years after it came out. It collects papers from a 1966 conference, edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore. Those papers overturned much of what anthropologists had believed about hunter-gatherers, the very culture I study today. My copy is covered in notes and comments, and the cover fell off long ago! In my own book on hunter-gatherers, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (2013), I acknowledge how important Man the Hunter was.

Q: Over the years, which books have shaped your thinking most?

Kelly: Let me answer from the angle of learning to write. When I finished my undergraduate education, an archaeology professor told me my writing was bad and needed work. I took that to heart and set about learning how to write, mainly by studying nonfiction writers.

They include the paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man; Edward O. Wilson, author of The Meaning of Human Existence — I often disagree with his views, but I do admire his writing; John McPhee, especially his books on geology, such as Rising from the Plains, Basin and Range, and In Suspect Terrain — I still wish I could write as well as he does! And of course the science writer John Horgan, author of The End of War, and the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat.

I can't claim to match these writers in talent, but I keep trying!

Q: If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be? What would you want to know?

Kelly: I usually read nonfiction, but if I could meet one author it would probably be a novelist, because I'm so impressed by their ability to build worlds, characters, and stories out of nothing but imagination and experience.

I've always loved John Steinbeck's books. I think I've read all of them, including The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday. He cared about people, and understood the importance of kindness and of helping others. I'd like to give him one of my own books and then ask him what he thought!

If There's One Thing I've Learned From Prehistory, It's That Humanity Has Faced Worse Problems Before — And Solved Them All

Q: If a young person is interested in archaeology and wants to know more about the field, what would you tell them?

Kelly: First, I suspect Chinese parents don't want their children to study archaeology, because my father felt the same way. He wondered how his son could possibly find a job with an archaeology degree. I've talked with many parents of American high schoolers, and they have the same worry. It's a reasonable worry, too: people meet archaeologists far less often than they meet doctors, lawyers, or businesspeople, and nobody gets rich by becoming one. In fact only a certain kind of person can become an archaeologist and succeed at it.

That person has to enjoy both the mental and the physical demands of the work. I like sitting at a computer writing papers, analyzing data, finding new ways to interpret the artifacts we've dug up. I also like physical labor: excavating a site slowly, working under a scorching sun, bathing in freezing mountain streams, sleeping in a tent or in the back of a truck, walking many kilometers to find new sites. And I enjoy the pleasure of working with companions in the field — teaching students, and above all working alongside a crew determined to get the job done. I started doing archaeology at 16 and have never regretted it.

Archaeology repays you in other ways too. I've stood beside many digs explaining to the public or to schoolchildren what we found in this simple hole in the ground. They are always amazed, and think I'm some brilliant detective who can piece together everything that happened from very little evidence. Of course I'm not a brilliant detective; I'm just a well-trained archaeologist. I help people understand their world better. That makes them happy, and it makes me happy. With The Fifth Beginning I wanted to show everyone that archaeologists can actually help save the world! That's the best reason I can think of for anyone to study archaeology.

I don't know how it works in China, but in the United States I tell students, even high schoolers, to go find an archaeologist at a local university or museum. It may take some effort, but I promise you they're there! Ask whether you can volunteer in the archaeologist's lab, helping clean and catalogue material. If a student does well, the archaeologist may take them along into the field to do real work.

Q: What's the biggest change in you over the years?

Kelly: Compared with before, over the past five years I've been lucky enough to spend more time lecturing in other countries — the UK, France, Norway, Finland, Japan, and China. I hope to do more of it!

Q: What questions have you been thinking about lately?

Kelly: One project I'm working on uses radiocarbon dating to track how population changed across time and across regions. Several research teams around the world, including in China, use this method. Radiocarbon dating is the basic way to date archaeological remains from the past 45,000 years — it can date almost any organic material up to 45,000 years old. Archaeologists have already produced tens of thousands of such dates. We're building a large database of them for North America.

Put simply, we track relative changes in population size through how the number of dates changes over time. That lets us look into all kinds of questions. What was the relationship between past climate change and population? When did populations move from one place to another? How did technology change as population size changed? Did past populations decline, and if so, why?

The math needed to answer those questions with radiocarbon dates is not simple, and we're still working on it. But the method has opened up an entirely new field, and I'm grateful to be part of it. I think this project may turn out to be the most meaningful part of my career.

Q: What will your next book be?

Kelly: I'm writing a book about 15,000 years of American history. Many archaeologists who write this kind of book stop around 1500 CE, when Europeans began colonizing the New World. My aim is to write all the way to the present. I'm still working out how to do it, and I've only just started — it will probably take another year or so.

Q: Do you have worries about our society?

Kelly: Too many to count. Apart from my optimism about the fifth beginning, I'm generally a pessimist. I'm constantly fighting against optimism. The next few decades will be crucial: how the world handles climate change, globalization, and the rise of fascist forces. It will take the United States years to repair the damage Trump has left behind. But if there's one thing I've learned from prehistory, it's that humanity has faced worse problems before, and we solved them all. That gives us hope of solving the ones we face now.

Cover image: Robert Kelly excavating a 250-year-old gaming token in Wyoming (photo by Madeline Mackie), and the 2017 excavation at a high-altitude wickiup site in Wyoming. Images courtesy of CITIC Press.