The Dawn of Everything challenges a mainstream telling of prehistory

My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publication history has a number of papers which rhyme with things in the book, like this one: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1

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History also has a strong bias towards the status quo. If a new theory is proposed which explains the available evidence with equal ability, the pre-existing idea will typically remain the accepted version of the story. The net effect is that we're prone to get stuck with versions of history originally proposed by phrenologists and worse... When common sense fills in the blanks in the story, you might get stuck with some very bad version of common sense, completely alien to the historical people it's being applied to.

We really should approach history with a bit of the spirit of Rashomon. When we look at it with a too narrow lens, we wind up underestimating the breadth of what's possible.

We know that we don't know virtually anything about ancient history, but yet we still believe that our completely flawed (and often made up) theories must be "challenged" by an insurmountable amount of indisputable evidence.

It is not necessary.

I'm reading the book right now, I'm not an English native speaker so I'm being a bit slow, but I've watched several videos about it (that's how I knew about the book, thanks YouTube) and the first thing that got me excited was that, for the first time since I remember, this theory is not patronizing towards ancient civilizations.

All our building blocks are based on the concept "they couldn't possibly be capable of", while it is now evident that not only they could, but they did.

The second thing I liked about Wengrow was that he acknowledges that questions such as "was there an advanced civilization before the Sumerians?" are legitimate questions, historians and archeologists should embrace that mentality and answer the questions, not try to disprove wild theories proposed by amateurs and sometimes plain crooks. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was the aliens of course, but, AFAICR, at school they taught me that "it was impossible", not that we don't know, but that humans were, in layman terms, "too stupid to even think about it" and in the end the unanswered questions, the fact that people see that the evidence do not add up, lead to the success of people like Graham Hancock, instead of leading people to trusting the hard work on the field of historians and archeologists. It's a vicious circle that I hope this book will break.

One of the authors dying during editing can reasonably be expected to have some effect.

> For me the biggest mystery is how and when did language progress because this is what allowed a group of humans to effectively operate as a pseudo single organism

Language evolves very early in species. Pigs are known to have ~150 words. And the 'dialects' differ from herd to herd. The words probably start from the expression of or reaction to natural states, desires, situations and motives, and then develop in complexity as the species evolve and its activities become more varied.

We also see primates and chimpanzees act in certain, superstitious ways - throwing things into a certain cave/hole in certain days of a season, arranging objects in certain ways without any utility being present etc. These are thought to be the predecessors of religious beliefs that evolve in later stages of the evolution of a species.

At this point its important to note that species learn from each other as well - some orangutans in some regions apparently have learned how to fish using spears by watching humans, and they are now doing it themselves.

This would mean many primate species likely have learned from each other and exchanged many things, concluding that the evolution of human species was not something that is clear-cut, neat and certain like how the late 19th century science told it in a way that is uncomfortably too close to the Christian dogmatism and certainty.

Its more likely that different species of primates including human ancestors have been using tools, fire and different technologies and practices by learning them from each other by seeing or through actual interaction/coexisting, and the spread of technolog was not instant like how its being implied in our existing perspective. Instead even among the same species of human ancestors its likely that different groups had differing levels of tool use, language use and other practices, whereas other groups have either did not adopt those, were slow to adopt those or outright could have rejected those.

So great variety in the levels of technology among the human ancestors' societies should have been possible. And many more things, really, because our perspective of human history still has not broken out of the late 19th century mold...

It's kinda light on evidence for some things, which isn't great when we're talking about someone they describe as an "activist" challenging mainstream history. For example, it just drops assertions like "The authors also show that the earliest cities in Ukraine and Mesopotamia of the 4th millennium BCE were egalitarian and organised without the presence of kings, temples or royal palaces."

But why are we to believe these societies were "egalitarian"? I mean, the usual understanding of that means a lot more than just living somewhere without a king or a temple. I can imagine a lot of ways for a city without any of these as such to be far less than what most people think of as "egalitarian" and they really need to flesh this idea out a lot more by going over why we should think that and to what degree, because there's a big gap between the modern understanding of the word "egalitarian" and the evidence provided.

Maybe the book does better, if so I'd like to hear that part, but the article is a bit scant here, which is bad when the only thing it is clear on is that this was written by an activist with political motivations.

Same. I had read most of it ahead of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, a state with a strong indigenous presence and a lot of within 3000 years human archeological sites. Although Graeber was writing about a much earlier period, having read the work made it much, much easier for me to build a sociological mental model (wrong, sure, but interesting) to appreciate the sites and artifacts we saw.

I like the overarching argument and continue to recommend the book to people, but it's worth noting that the book really struggles with its factual basis. The authors aren't experts in most of the examples they discuss and their lack of familiarity really shows.

But yes, they definitely take an interesting stance that's worth reading in its own right.

All history is post-literary by definition. To go back further is to visit myths and legends. Some of which are even perhaps something like true.

Totally agree with you here.

I've got 25 pages left to read. It has taken me longer to read than any book in recent memory. It's not badly written, but particularly at the end it looses focus, and consequently I have too. I hope to finish it by the end of the month, but I've been saying that for more than 7 months.

This is a good review, on the What is Politics channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJIHWk_M398&list=PLU4FEuj4v9...

But it isn't a summary, it goes into a lot of detailed critique. I think each video description links to a bibliography and transcript too.

I think this episode of Tides of History includes effectively a good review:

https://art19.com/shows/tides-of-history/episodes/cb335af3-e...

Wyman evaluates it with both sympathy and criticism.

That's a very traditional argument in anthropology and it parallels arguments by people like Boehm. The problem is that studies have repeatedly emphasized just how much more successful we are as social organisms and that resources are not evenly distributed across the landscape. If you go look at modern foragers, what happens is exactly the opposite: if someone start acting like a jerk/despot, people stop sharing resources and make the jerk go fuck off in the forest until they're willing to be more cooperative.

No I don't think this is true.

Hierarchies are heavily part of human behavior. The concept of leaders and rank is so ingrained in behavior it's hard to think it didn't exist even in hunter and gatherer societies.

Right now we have enough wealth such that everyone can live comfortably. But a lot of people still fight tooth and nail in the rat race all for what? For wealth partly but mostly for Rank. The higher your rank the better it's a huge driving force emotionally... especially for men. Desire for high rank is an inborn biological instinct. This is confirmed in psychology across all cultures. All men are emotionally more satisfied the higher their rank.

For women it's also a huge driving force for mate selection. Women marry up. They have a strong desire to marry the highest ranking man.

I would imagine in hunter and gather societies rank is maintained by two things. Brute force and social proof. Bigger men have more brute force to maintain leadership (hence why a lot of women are attracted to height) and social proof and respect insures that other men trust you and are more likely to listen to you.

That being said coercion to build things like pyramids or grand multi-year projects of vast scale requires someone to own wealth. This type of serfdom like heirarchy is much stronger then the hierarchies that existed in hunterer gatherer societies. Definitely more stable since wages and survival required someone to stay at their hierarchical post.

Either way hierarchies DID exist in hunter gatherer societies. It's just the tribe leader doesn't have enough power to coerce all men into building a pyramid. That being said I believe the article is disputing this part of what I'm saying but I don't think hierarchies are disputed.

You miss the point.

Yes, hunter/gatherer societies routinely lack hierarchies. But settled populations, throughout prehistory and history, have very often also lacked hierarchies, including in places historians insisted otherwise. And, hunter-gatherer societies have sometimes had hierarchies despite the apparent impossibility.

> Societies that are smaller have have less stuff are obviously going to have less material inequality.

As stuff approaches zero, material inequality approaches zero.

In gilded ages like today, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich works better when there are more poor people from which to harvest wealth.

We need not pretend Graeber advanced any notion that hierarchies have never existed in undocumented populations. His point is that they were often lacking in circumstances historians routinely assume, and vociferously insist, hierarchy must have been unavoidable.

Nah. That's just the story the partisans like to construct to make the task of straw-manning competing narratives of history easier. Everyone has some combination of biases, but there are plenty of historians who don't have a political agenda, and they tend to be the good ones, the ones who spend time researching and synthesizing an informed and informative viewpoint, rather than trying to push their ideology though the back door, treating the reader like an idiot who doesn't notice. The latter is a hallmark of both left wing and right wing politicisation of history, equally.

i guess back in those pre-resource-accumulation days, they managed to kill all the charming psycopaths before they became tyrants. Maybe it was the teenage mothers and high infant mortality rate that did it?

In addition to being unsubstantiated, the criticisms of Harari completely mischaracterize his position. The overriding point of the chapter on agriculture in Sapiens is that farming was a huge step back for humans compared to the hunter gatherer lifestyle.

I suspect the the authors of this piece really object to Harari’s framing of agriculture as a step on the path of “human progress”. It would have been more honest to stick to a purely moral and ideological critique in that case, instead of misrepresenting his factual points.

I finished the book earlier this week, and can say it does distance itself from the initial chapters pretty quickly. They are important frames of reference, and I can definitely understand the authors reasons to include those ideas so prominently. Anthropology was developed as a western oriented study, and carries along with it many of the biases and assumptions that only Europeans could have endowed.

The political climates that existed during the colonization of the Americas played an important role in the evolution of modern cultures. The book is filled with examples of different societies and how they formed, and politics has played a role in ever single instance. Regardless of if you agree with the authors’ ideologies or not, they do a pretty good job of remaining neutral when examining historical evidence. I found it a nice change of pace from the typical “westernized” explanations of how civilizations (especially Native Americans) were structured.

Overall I think it’s an excellent read, well worth the investment.

You have to understand the rationale behind the narrative. If you’re describing a period of 50 years of history, which had 49 years of peace, and 1 year of war, but you’re only focusing on the war. You’re not lying, but are you telling the truth?

And there might be a good justification, in the sense that maybe a lot of sudden changes happened during this period, but you’re still leaving a lot aside.

This view of history although it might present itself as the truth because it’s the status quo, it’s a narrative as it the ones who might succeed it. And you might not like it, but also had, has and will have political implications.

I feel that the main thing I got from the book is that it made me settle and accept that there is no truth to be had. That the main narratives are much less truthy than I expected. There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured than we can phantom, or reliably reconstruct from the evidence. That is why having a wider spectrum of narratives is more important if you want to learn from the past.

While I knew many of the points and facts in the book, somehow that realization had never stuck before.

History was written be the victors, pre-history even more so. The first chapters have a good point, which gets clearer later on in the book. Much of the historic narrative has been coloured by the way Eurasia thinks in the last 500 years.

And it is stuff I kind of knew or suspected, now I really internalised the idea because of the book. The main idea is obvious in retrospect.

Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to support his fringe political beliefs was David Graeber's whole shtick.

Full disclaimer: I didn't read Dawn of Everything and I don't intend to. My opinion is based on Debt and some of his other writings.

Isn't that always the case for any synthesis, let alone a cross-disciplinary one?

I felt this book was in need of an editor much more than it was of missing information.

> Not sure I trust a book which has activism against the current economic system as a goal.

Thinking about this, I don't know a single book that has an economical and/or political focus that doesn't in some way or another criticize the status quo or at least challenge our understanding of it. In fact I doubt such a book would be worth reading at all.

I don't believe the book is or is meant as "an attack on modern society".

> prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us

This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time. Maybe thats because it is conflating it with knowledge accumulation and never bothering to make a clear distinction.

In fact its very plausible that 30000 years ago some homo sapiens had a discussion around a campfire that was as intelligent as your average HN thread :-)

Like I said in another comment, I'm only halfway through. I'm not sure what the denouement is going to be or where they are going to take the evidence that there have been urban civilisations that were not ruled by kings or other hierarchical power arrangements and resolve it with the present, but their goal to show how the Hobbesian and Rousseauian views of human history are not supported by evidence only needs a single counter example and I feel they've supplied plenty.

I think their mission of puncturing the grand narratives of the evolution of human society is a good one, and I think they have the evidence, but I'm not sure it's going to have any effect in the long run.