The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Reading The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious undertaking, especially for those of us who are not scholars of ancient civilizations. The writing itself is often academic, with scholarly cliches and insider quips. But stick with it!! The overall quality of the work will transform the way you think about history. Instead of reading entire chapters in a single sitting, try tackling small sections within each chapter that are clearly marked by large sub-headers. Often the sub-headers pose questions and are a clever way of prompting the book’s readers to re-imagine human history. Is the narrative that we have been led to believe about human history true or accurate? Yes and No. What we have been taught about history according to the conventional line of thinking contains false narrative. Plenty of credence has been given to the transformation humanity made when it transitioned from being a hunter-gatherer society to becoming an agricultural, food-producing society. This assumption is both right and wrong. In many instances, there is no clear demarcation as to when this transformation took place. Furthermore, there were many ancient societies who adopted agriculture as a fledgling practice, only to later reject it and revert back to the immediacy and efficiency of a hunter-gatherer way of life. Consider the following: Whole parts or entire centuries of human history have never been recorded. And when human history has been recorded, the task was often done by the victors of war, not the vanquished. Winners and losers notwithstanding, it is time for us to find out what is true and what is not. Here is one bonafide truism: from the beginning of human history, there has always been an ongoing tension between communities who wanted to be self-governing (egalitarian) and those who wanted to rule top-down (authoritarian) by exerting their control over communities in order to amass power, wealth, or perhaps even to court the favors of the gods. Interestingly, these two divergent forms of cultures coexisted concurrently during the same period in time, and in some cases lived not far apart geographically. For example, the indigenous people of California had markedly different values than the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. The California indigenous people—Yurok—had values similar to the early Puritans with a cultural emphasis on stoicism and simplicity, decrying wastefulness or excess. The Northwest indigenous peoples enjoyed loud, large-scale grand celebrations, replete with gluttonous feasting and messianic dancing that went on for days, and were fond of acquiring slaves, a practice that was an anathema to the Yurok. The two societies, who were in contact with one another, defined themselves by their differences in the same way the Greek societies of Athens and Sparta defined their identities by one being the polar opposite of the other. Schismogenesis is the term coined by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson to define how two very different cultures are able to form a solid identity because of the existence of the other. Think of how the alt-right and GOP define their beliefs that are precisely so unlike what liberals and progressives believe. Consider how the authoritarian state of Russia is driven to conquer and subsume the democratic nation of Ukraine. Here is another bonafide truism: from the beginning of history, the self-governing (egalitarian) and top-down rulers (authoritarian) have been able to successfully manage the dynamic tension between them to live in a guarded but peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, the two cultures have erupted into warfare, destruction, and the immolation of one culture at the expense of another. Aside from having better weapons or more advanced technology, the chief factor in predicting which type of community ultimately flourished—either the self-governing or the top-down—is by examining who left behind the better narrative. Who recorded history? The victors or the vanquished? There has always been a commonly held belief among historians and teachers of history that the origins of self-governing societies came about due to the influence of men like Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, John Locke, (Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne conspicuously known as Turgot), Charles Montesquieu, and half a dozen other political philosophers whose brilliant thinking shaped the democracy that we know and enjoy today. Conventional notions about the history of humanity have been derived from western thinkers and are the backbone, or backstory, of what we learn in school; it’s what our high school history teachers taught us to believe. So, it might come to a surprise to those of us who were taught by staid history teachers to learn that many indigenous cultures were indeed the first egalitarian cultures who supported individual freedom. It might come as a further surprise to learn that some of the fundamental tenets of our American democracy originated with indigenous peoples and not with the litany of great western thinkers. The western thinkers who wrote a trove of essays and treatises about democracy did not give credit where credit was due—to indigenous peoples, but they did indeed leave behind the better narrative. Take Charles Montesquieu; there is no question that Montesquieu had a profound influence on the formation of democracy. Montesquieu’s theories were put into practice by founding fathers of the United States when they framed the U.S. Constitution. His theory of creating a system of checks and balances, and the separation of powers among the executive, judicial and legislature branches of government, was intended to ensure a balance of power that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty. What is not commonly known is that Montesquieu’s thinking was profoundly influenced by the Osage, a Native American tribe of the Great Plains. Montesquieu’s learning derived from the Osage gave him the impetus to build an explicit theory of institutional reform in his book “The Spirit of the Laws,” which is widely hailed as a blueprint to create a government that is based on laws, not men—and that is precisely what the early framers of the U.S Constitution created. It has been further proposed that Haudenosaunee federal structures (the six nations of the Iroquois) might have also served as a model for the U.S. Constitution. According to the book’s authors, it is interesting that “any suggestion that European thinkers learned anything of moral or social value from indigenous people is met with derision to condemnation.” The Jesuits, who have traditionally been deemed as the arbiters of cogent thinking about democracy, proclaimed the abhorrence of freedom that they witnessed among indigenous peoples, calling it the “wicked liberty of the savages.” In their observation of the Wendat they fail to see how their freedom had anything to do with the Eurasian notion of “equality before the law.” Along comes Wendat philosopher statesman Kandiaronk, an elegant, erudite thinker who is as comfortable among his own indigenous people as he is interacting with the European newcomers who have made their way to North America. The Wendat and other indigenous people are astonished in their observation of the earliest European missionaries for their squabbling and backbiting over their possessions and property. These newcomers fail to offer support to one another and their submission to authority amounts to little more than blind obedience. Worse of all, the new settlers used their power over possessions and property as a way to exert control and power over other human beings. It was only a matter of time when Kandiaronk, who is cast with the slur “noble savage,” is eventually heralded by European thinkers as one of the by the great thinkers of the day. In Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s essay “The discourse on the origins of social inequality,” he asks, “How is it that Europeans are able to turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants…or to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?” The actualization of the self-governing (egalitarian) versus top-down rulers (authoritarian) becomes more than a dynamic tension between two different types of cultures, but it is at the very crux of how power and wealth came to shape the world we live in today. A very small percentage of the world’s population do control the fates of everyone else and are doing so in an increasingly disastrous fashion. A quick recap of some of the most pressing problems in the 21st Century, ranging from climate change, and grossly unfair economic practices governing energy and food production to nuclear proliferation and imperialist acts of aggression that cause great human harm and suffering, all of these issues and more provide a clear bellwether of the predicament that we find ourselves in. How did we get here? This is the proposition often asserted by authors David Graeber and David Wengrow. The answer is more complex than viewing humans as either innately self-governing (egalitarian) or innately top-down (authoritarian). The authors address seasonality among ancient communities, that is when the same society alternated, switching back and forth, between self-governing and top-down modalities depending on the time of year—harvest required a stricter division of labor, but the summer might bring about days of creative play. “If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, then maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’” Maybe a more precise question arises: Why can’t we move back and forth between self-governing (egalitarian) or innately top-down (authoritarian) based on what our society needs at a given moment? On the other hand, isn’t that what we do in post-modern democracy when we vote for new leadership during an election? The Dawn of Everything inevitably inspires readers to ask these questions. Despite the regularity of modern-day elections and the continuing dynamic tension between self-governing (egalitarian) or top-down (authoritarian) modalities, the pendulum never swings too far toward freedom. Humans have lost the flexibility and freedom to manage their own lives and are stuck being subordinate to the overwhelming domination of possessions and property, where money rules and where money makes the laws and the moral code we are required to abide by. To examine why humans get stuck, we take a journey through numerous archeological sites, many of them obscure to those of us who are not scholars of ancient civilizations: Gobekli Tepe (southeastern Turkey), Poverty Point (northeastern Louisiana), Sannai Maruyama (northern Japan), Stonehenge (southern England).We learn it is impossible to know what forms of property or ownership existed. If private property has an origin, a pattern of belief and practice as old as the idea of the sacred or divine, the question remains: how did incessant squabbling and backbiting over possessions and property take hold in so many aspects of human affairs? Going back to the dawn of everything takes us to Catalhoyuk, an ancient city in Turkey circa 7400 BC where evidence of successful Matriarchate or mother rule is deemed to be more than a way to run a society but is the foundation for the collective unconscious. Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra, also describe themselves as matriarchal. Other indigenous peoples, the Wendat, Hopi and Zuni, also qualify as matriarchies. It is no wonder that Kandiaronk, the great democratic thinker, lived among the Wendat. Matriarchal cultures are self-governing (egalitarian), and emphasize social cooperation, civic activism, hospitality and simply caring for others. Archeologist Marija Gimbutas preferred to define these societies as matric instead of as matriarchy, citing the latter as a mirror image of patriarchy. The political rule of women is further defined as Gynarchy or Gynaecocracy. For example, Minoan Crete, from 1,700 to 1450 BC offers no clear archeological evidence of a monarchy. In its art, artifacts and bones, women are found to weigh in on a larger scale than are men. Most of the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests it was self-governing (egalitarian), a theocracy governed by a college of priestesses. After exhaustive research of the matric societies in ancient history, archeologist Marija Gimbutas revealed her findings. She was shunned and dismissed by her colleagues—the male academic and scientific community. Historically, (the history we learn in school), greater emphasis is placed on Pharaonic Egypt, Han China, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Imperial Rome and Ancient Greece, all rigid rank and file societies held together by top-down (authoritarian) government, where violence was rampant, and the radical subordination of women was the norm. Why top-down authoritarian governments dominate the narrative as being the official rendering of history is, in and of itself, a topic worthy of exploration. Now here is the good news: eventually human history does tell its own story, one that is greater than the narrative spouted by the victors. The real story of human history is told through its art, artifacts and the bones it has left behind. Conventional patriarchal thinking about the dominance of a winner take all, top-down (authoritarian) modality points to our fall from the garden of Eden—the Faustian pact humans made with wheat, the domestication of large seeded grasses, marking the transition from the hunter-gather society to becoming an agricultural food-producing society. This assumption is dim and narrow, especially when there are so many other factors to consider, weighing in on everything from the personalities of would-be kings to understanding how Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units. The story of Gilgamesh and Agga, about the war between Uruk and Kish, describing a city council divided into two chambers, will keep you up at night because it is too reminiscent of the schisms between the right and the left in the U.S. Congress in our post-modern world. The Dawn of Everything was never intended to be a good read in the same vein as a pop-nonfiction page-turner. The many ancient civilizations that are explored will force you to read and reread passages to commit names, dates and circumstances to memory, and there are more footnotes than a non-academic can bear! If it’s hard to read, then why bother? The Dawn of Everything is complex and brilliant as much as it is simple and brilliant, and that puts human history into perspective. For example, the invention of the light bulb had huge ramifications for the modern world. Yet many Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of shaping everyday life as profoundly as the lightbulb: bread rising, cultivation of crops and growth cycles, ceramics, mining, all of which are still with us today. In the parade of ancient communities that are explored in The Dawn of Everything, we are able to consider the epoch transitions in history: Agriculture, Industrialization, Transportation, Energy, Technology, and how each transition impacted the ongoing dynamic tension between the self-governing (egalitarian) and top-down (authoritarian) modalities. We might find that there are no sure answers, but we can embrace the following truth: Freedom is a constant struggle. We are also left with the burning desire to ask the right question: How did our post-modern world arrive at this point and place time? This is especially important to ask in our current age, which is steeped in Kairos—an opportune moment in history, when real change is not only possible but inevitable. You can’t come to a fork in the road to make a decision, unless you have taken the journey to get there, and reading the Dawn of Everything is that journey. We are hereinafter called to ask the right questions about the true origins of history and to use our imagination instead of accepting false narrative by glossing over the parts of human history that were never recorded or intentionally omitted. There is much still to be learned and we don’t know all of the answers. The version of history that is accepted by the governing few can dictate how historians and teachers of history decide what is true. However, at the end of the day, mass graves and archeological sites do distinguish self-governing (egalitarian) societies from those that were top-down (authoritarian). One final truism: If we know where the art, the artifacts and the bodies are buried, the bones do not lie. # Note: I wrote this book review to pay tribute to David Graeber who died to due to Covid-related complications in 2020, before he could see the publication of The Dawn of Everything. What a powerful legacy! I want to extend a sincere thanks to both authors David Graeber and David Wengrow for undertaking this project. I learned to think about history in way that re-imagines the possibilities for all of us and for that I am grateful.

It is likely that all world oil, both conventional and unconventional, peaked in 2018. That is good news, because if true, there isn’t enough carbon left to burn to turn the world into a hothouse extinction, get every last fish out of the ocean, cut down every (rain)forest to feed the three billion people expected by 2050, empty aquifers, and pollute land, air, and water with toxic chemicals. Fossil fuels power the damage. If the carrying capacity of humans on earth is what it was before fossil fuels, or less given the damage we’ve done to topsoil, fresh water and more, then the largest calamity to ever befall homo sapiens looms as fossils decline. Only about 450 million people were alive in 1500 before coal launched the industrial revolution. With the upside that between fewer of us and being reduced to muscle power, we’ll do far less damage. (If you think renewables will save us, please read my books Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy & When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation). And another upside is that with fewer people, it will be easier for everyone to find freedom as they flee to uninhabited land to invent new societies or escape to better ones. “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” gave me hope that we might invent much better societies in the future as we did in the past postcarbon. And invent better ways of governance today rather than descend into civil war as Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” and Marche’s “The Next Civil War” warn. This book shows how dozens of other civilizations lived with far more freedom than we have today, without autocrats, slavery, and the vast majority of people barely surviving with backbreaking agriculture. This book is also a joy to read, because in the past 30 years a great deal has been discovered in anthropology and archeology, and many ancient civilizations discovered. You may already know about some of them from Charles Mann’s “1491” or Preston’s “The Lost city of the Monkey God”, civilizations and cities every bit as complex, populated, and sophisticated as in Europe. This book will introduce you to even more new discoveries, to better ways of life and governance, and above all freedom. Agriculture is seen by many as an unfortunate path we’ve taken, just read Scott’s “Against the Grain” if you don’t see why agriculture is a calamity. But in “Dawn of Everything” you’ll see that there were societies which avoided year-round agriculture on purpose, though perhaps grew some food in addition to hunting and gathering. Many lived seasonally in one place for celebrations with thousands of others, and the rest of the year were more scattered as hunters and gatherers, each seasonal way of living having different rules and governance. The Dawn of Everything concludes with: “In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others? We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating how we view past societies, to remind us that people did actually live in other ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labor never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.” I would love to know what they would say about the role fossil fuels has had on our societies the past 500 years.

I loved this book in that it challenges the mainstream conception, both in academia and popular conceptions of sociology, that once humans went from living in small tribes to towns and eventually cities, this necessarily meant they became hierarchal and 'unequal' due to the logistical and bureaucratic needs of managing a larger population. Turns out, this popular conception is not only simplistic, it's overall wrong, as there has been numerous examples of large, complex societies taking a different path but that, for various reasons, had been ignored, minimized or taken as exceptions to the rule. And this book explores these other paths taken. Now, I'm no anthropologist or sociologist, so I suspect the author's claims are much less clear and nuanced than what the book proports. I intent to keep reading about the subject before fully embracing this new view. But as a first step in challenging an immutable conception of history and the way human societies 'should' work, this book was a very refreshing start.

Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in their childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilisation that ‘they all ran headlong to their chains’. These are two variants of the same myth because they both posit an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age. Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment. What makes Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth – what they call ‘the Myth of the Stupid Savage’. Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests. Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to assume that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between socio-political identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’ the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book. The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at UCL. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. David Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at LSE, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations. We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that ‘primitives’ only spent their time in isolated bands. Counter-intuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centres of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives. The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like ‘play farming’ across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed. In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms – first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change. The final chapters focus on the ‘state’. Or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as ‘incipient states’ because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything offers a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete – a ‘beautiful irritant for archaeology’ – where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses. There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. To assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency–determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages. Staying true to Ostrom’s law – ‘whatever works in practice must work in theory’ – Graeber and Wengrow set out a new framework for interpreting the social reality brought to light by empirical findings. Firstly, they urge us to abandon terms like ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ societies, let alone the ‘origin of the state’ or ‘origin of social complexity’. These terms already presuppose the kind of teleological thinking challenged in the book. The same goes for ‘modes of production’: whether a society relies on farming or fishing is a poor criterion for classification because it tells us almost nothing about its social dynamics. Secondly, they lay out some new descriptive categories of their own. They show, for instance, that social domination can be broken down into three elements – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – and that permutations of these elements yield consistent patterns throughout history. While the modern nation state embodies all three, most hierarchical societies of the past had only one or two, and this allowed for the people who lived under them degrees of freedom that are barely imaginable for us today. Graeber and Wengrow reflect at length on this last point. More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom – freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – that appear to have been simply assumed by our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: “The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared”, they suggest, “but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.” So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of what we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes. Potlaches, headhunting and skull portraits, stranger kings, revolutions, shamanic art, vision quests… The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that needs to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading. The Dawn of Everything intellectually dwarfs the likes of Pinker, Diamond, or Fukuyama (and Harari too). Whenever non-specialists try their hands at human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the same old myths we have grown up with. Consider Steven Pinker: for all his talk about scientific progress, his books might as well have been written at the times of Hobbes, in the 17th century, when none of the evidence unearthed recently was available. Graeber and Wengrow casually expose these popular authors’ startling incompetence at handling the anthropological record. Only a solid command of the latter – namely, of the full documented range of human possibilities – affords a credible interpretative lens over the distant past. For it supplies the researcher with a refined sense of the rhythms of human history. One of the experiences of delving into this book, at least in my case, was a gradual recognition of being in the presence of an intellectual oddity, something difficult to situate within the current landscape of social theory. By embracing once again the ‘grand narrative’, the book makes a clean break with post-structuralist and post-humanist trends widespread in contemporary academia. We know that Graeber, at least, liked to think himself as a ‘pre-humanist’, actively expecting to see humanity realise its full potential. One can certainly see this work as a contribution in that direction. One can also see The Dawn of Everything as belonging to the tradition of the Enlightenment (except that one of the other major claims in the book is that Enlightenment thought developed largely in response to indigenous intellectuals’ critiques of European society of the time). As for how it squares with current archaeological and anthropological theory, the book is of such a real sweep that I don’t think it admits easy comparisons. If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar calibre in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively. The book produces a similar decentring effect: in dethroning our self-appointed position at the pinnacle of social evolution, it deals a blow to the teleological thinking that so insidiously shape our understanding of history. With the exception that while works such as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and On the Origin of Species hinted at the relative insignificance of humans in the face of the cosmos, The Dawn of Everything explores all the possibilities we have to act within it. And if Galileo and Darwin stirred turmoil of their own, this will do even more so for precisely this reason. Ultimately, a society that accepts the story presented here as its official origin story – a story that is taught in its schools, that seeps into its public consciousness – will have to be radically different than the society we are currently living in.

I believe the authors came in a very good time, to kind of 'block' the over-edginess of the famous Yuval Harari guy. This is a much more grounded reading - in true academic research, and not glossing the current state of human affairs. I enjoyed reading it also because its very light, even considering the heavy presented research on it.

A very good book. I took longer to read this book than most, partly owing to personal circumstances but also due to the density of the subject matter. Graeber and Wengro peal back many of the assumptions we typically recieve in popular history, anthropology, and sociology. I'm looking at you History Channel (I'm kidding, please start doing history again). I and many other people look at the history books, with long descriptions of dynasties and kings, and wonder what normal people were doing. According to the Davids, most of them went about their lives forgetting there was any such thing as an autocrat and I think that is just beautiful.

good book