Excerpts: “And we are not adapted only to being hunter-gatherers—we also adapted, long ago, to being fish; more recently, to being primates; and most recently, to being primates, and most recently to being postindustrialists” (p. xv).

“A prehistoric world populated by millions of hunter-gatherers transformed within a period of ten thousand years into a world of one billion people consuming traditionally farmed food, and within the last two hundred years, we have transformed it further into a population of seven billion people surviving on intensive and unsustainable fossil-fueled farming, with which only a small percentage of the population has any direct contact” (p. 85).

“Yet the transformations that occur, most intensively as we move from childhood to adulthood, mean that we are not the same beings as we were, and that if we try to hold ourselves to a previous identity, we will restrict our future” (p. 162).

“When people are too comfortable with what they know, and the world does not look as they have been led to expect, they are at considerable risk—of being gamed, of getting angry, of becoming incoherent” (p. 178).

“Trying to explain away the past, rather than learning from it and moving on, is a poor use of time and intellectual resources” (p. 197).

“There is a tension between conforming and disagreeing in the face of apparent inconsistency. This tension is a hidden strength of humans—the push and pull between wisdom and innovation, between culture and consciousness” (p. 215).

“Now, though, three things conspire to make the inclinations that brought us to this moment an existential threat to our future: the scale of the human population; the unprecedented power of tools at our disposal; and the interconnectedness of the systems on which we depend (global economy, ecology, and reach of technology)” (p. 243).

Heying, Heather and Weinstein, Bret (2021). A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Random House, LLC+.