Robert L. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He has conducted archaeological research throughout the western United States for more than four decades and is an internationally recognized authority on hunter-gatherer societies. He is a past-president of the Society for American Archaeology and the editor of American Antiquity. He has authored over 100 articles and books including The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers and, with a co-author, the widely used textbooks, Archaeology and Archaeology: Down to Earth. His field projects in Wyoming include excavation of a mammoth kill site and ice patch archaeology; he is also helping build an international database of radiocarbon dates.
On the first page of The Fifth Beginning, I recount an incident from the late 1980s, early in my teaching career. I had given a closing lecture in which I tried to provide students with a reason to be optimistic about the future.One student, a young man who had been attentive all semester, disappointed me when he dejectedly stated, “this is the way things always have been, and this is the way things always will be.”An older African-American woman came to my rescue. She said, “My father was born in slavery.” She explained how that was true, and pointed out that she herself had lived through Jim Crow, KKK lynchings, and the civil rights movement. “Things do change,” she said. But my student didn’t believe her.I wrote The Fifth Beginning to convince him, and others like him, to approach the future with their eyes open, but also with enthusiasm for what it could be. It could be humanity’s finest hour.Ever since the fourth beginning, humanity has been trying to figure out how to integrate a world of cultural differences.The need to resolve that difficulty accelerated after A.D. 1500, when Europe began to “discover” the rest of the world. We tried empire, slavery, and colonialism but none of those worked (thankfully). Today we are trying nationalism, and breaking into separate entities that will madly negotiate with one another to secure an advantage. I predict this will be as successful as empires and colonialism. Why? Because archaeology, while it is hard to interpret, it doesn’t lie. And humanity’s material signature of the past 500 years points to world unification. Cables that literally tie the continents together, and material goods that circle the globe undercut any story that we are not integrated, that we don’t have to cooperate.Archaeology tells us that unification is inevitable. The only question is whether we achieve it the easy way or the hard way. Right now, it looks like we’ve chosen the hard way. We shouldn’t. We should use the past six million years of human history to see the future. As I conclude in the book, “For the first time since primates dropped out of the trees and flaked a stone into a tool, human evolution could be, should be, must be up to us.”
Robert L. Kelly The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future University of California Press141 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 0520293120
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!