Few books delight me more than those that seek to portray the entirety of the human adventure in broad strokes, trying to see the patterns behind the mere sequence of one event after another that sometimes seem to characterize our history. The best-known example of this genre in recent times is the ubiquitous “Sapiens” by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (now even in comics).
This and other works with a similar scope deserve to be known, no doubt, but they have the defect of painting a very one-sided picture of the trajectory of civilizations. If you’re looking for a counterbalance to this problem, “The Dawn of Everything,” written by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, is worth reading.
I used the adjective “one-sided”, but I need to add another adjective with the same prefix, which helps to typify the problems of works like “Sapiens”. The narrative of this bestselling genre tends to be too unidirectional when it comes to the evolution of human societies. Such books often emphasize how the emergence of so-called food production (agriculture and animal husbandry, to use terms that everyone will recognize) set in motion gears that would produce dense populations, strong social inequalities, states with despotic rulers and standing armies, innovation growing technology.
Nothing like this would have existed during the 99.9% of our species’ history that preceded the so-called Agricultural Revolution, just 10,000 years ago (while Homo sapiens would have emerged between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago). Before planting and raising domestic animals gained traction, all of our ancestors were content to live in small, egalitarian groups of dozens of members, hunting and gathering food. The Agricultural Revolution destroyed our original egalitarianism, but that was the only way to create large-scale, complex, and vibrant societies like ours. The chasm between billionaires and paupers is the price to pay for the existence of Shakespeare and the internet, in short.
“The Dawn of Everything” can be read as a huge “just not” opposed to the above thesis. One of the most amusing aspects of the book is to undo the aura of inevitability around the consequences of the Agricultural Revolution (taking the opportunity to make some fun of the excessive simplifications of Harari et al. ).
According to the book, the most recent archaeological data indicate that food production, although it created populous communities after a few thousand years, does not appear to have been an automatic generator of social inequality and war.
Early cities in the Near East and Eastern Europe, such as the unpronounceable Çatalhöyük in Turkey, were egalitarian in structure, without temples or palaces. Even the great Mesopotamian monarchies, which would give rise to empires like Assyria, had to give voice to an older system of “popular” municipal assemblies. And, on this side of the Atlantic, pre-Columbian cities also seem to have been able to create “republican” systems that owed nothing to the city-states of Ancient Greece.
For the pair of authors, these examples show that the ability to think about political solutions to inequality has always been present in pre-modern societies, that is, in all corners of the world. The debate sparked by the book is far from over, but it is, at the very least, an encouraging thought.
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