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In this book, Robert L. Kelly challenges the preconceptions that hunter-gatherers were Paleolithic relics living in a raw state of nature, instead crafting a position that emphasizes their diversity, and downplays attempts to model the original foraging lifeway or to use foragers to depict human nature stripped to its core. Kelly reviews the anthropological literature for variation among living foragers in terms of diet, mobility, sharing, land tenure, technology, exchange, male-female relations, division of labor, marriage, descent and political organization. Using the paradigm of human behavioral ecology, he analyzes the diversity in these areas and seeks to explain rather than explain away variability, and argues for an approach to prehistory that uses archaeological data to test theory rather than one that uses ethnographic analogy to reconstruct the past.

Part memoir, part adventure story, part intellectual voyage, The Other Side of Eden begins in the High Arctic of the 1970s. This was where Hugh Brody first lived with hunting peoples and where, as he explains, he first encountered a way of being that would transform how he saw the world. In this marvellous new book, Brody s travels take him through exquisite landscapes of ice and snow with companions who know the land as a part of themselves. He also travels through time and space as he explores the divide between hunters and farmers that lies at the core of human history. Shaped with a compelling mix of order and intuition, The Other Side of Eden draws on the author s personal experience, on the words of the hunter-gatherers he comes to know and on the work of linguists, anthropologists and historians. Finally, Brody poses questions about the mind itself, arriving at a compelling and profoundly hopeful conclusion. Something exists, he suggests, that is neither heaven nor hell, neither modern nor ancient, neither civilized nor primitive: a place within each of us where we can be beyond the dichotomies and ultimately more fully ourselves.