The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

I expected to love this book.  I expected to want to write about it in some detail.  I began enthusiastically,  underlining passages and taking notes as I read.

Spoiler alert:  I did not love this book. It took me a long time to finish, and my notes have been sitting unread for weeks.  I also feel very unmotivated to revisit them and to write this review.

But waste not, want not.  Given that I went to the effort, I might as well share a few thoughts.

To start with, don't get me wrong.  The Dawn of Everything is eye-opening!  It may well change the way you understand human prehistory.  You will certainly learn a lot, even if you already have some interest in prehistory and/or have visited some of the archeological sites referenced in the text.  Not to mention that the authors are frequently amusing.  Graeber and Wengrow bring a sly sense of humour to what is literally 'ancient history'.

My fundamental problem is that the book failed to answer the question it set for itself -- not the question that they began their journey with ("what are the roots of inequality in today's societies?") -- but the question they circle through all 500+ pages of their text "are the kinds of deeply unequal societies we live in today inevitable?"

To be fair, it's a lot to expect an answer to that question and I probably shouldn't have expected one, despite the frequent promises in the text itself.  I might have been overall more satisfied with my reading if I had expected exactly what this book delivers: a re-examination of the evidence we have about human societies throughout history and prehistory, and a thorough debunking of the mythology of "human progress" that we are all familiar with. You know the one: "Humans started as hunter-gatherers, living in an idyllic state of nature in small groups.  Then we invented agriculture and settled down, developing task specialization, cities, and kings and armies along the way."  Or possibly the more Hobbesian view (shared by Stephen Pinker) -- "We developed civilization to protect ourselves from the unending 'war of all against all'".  

As it turns out, neither perspective offers much value as a description of human prehistory. 

As Graeber and Wengrow point out, it's easy to forget that human prehistory is very very very long.  Biologically modern humans have existed for somewhere north of 150,000 years, while our oldest written records date back only about 5000 years.  That means that there is time enough for human prehistory to be far stranger, more complex, and more various than we generally imagine.

For example, the more we learn, the more we discover that prehistory abounds with examples of settled groups of hunter-gatherers (Haida, people of Çatalhöyük),  peoples who adopted agriculture and then abandoned it (notably, the builders of Stonehenge), and even non-hierarchical cities (Teotihuacan does not contain the kinds of images of warrior-kings found in other MesoAmerican ruins, instead featuring vast complexes of apartment buildings that housed peoples of all social classes.  There are ancient large circular settlements in Eastern Europe that seem to be designed that way on the 'Arthur's round table' principle -- in other words, they seem deliberately designed to prevent any subgroup from claiming undue significance or prestige due to their location within the larger group.)

Which brings us to one of the other main points that Graeber and Wengrow are at pains to make: we have no reason to believe that ancient peoples were any less clever than we are, or any less deliberate in making choices about how, where, and with whom they lived.  Just because a people did not have a written language (or a written language that we still have evidence of or that we can still read), does not mean that those people somehow lived 'in a state of nature' dictated by their predetermined stage of 'cultural evolution'.   

So read this book if you're interested in learning more about recent discoveries about human prehistory, and if you're interested in a contrarian view about what those discoveries show and mean.  Also read this book for the many interesting perspectives and asides that the authors provide about human culture and cultural influences.  

One example: Wengrow and Graeber  examine the possibility that North American First Nation's way of life influenced and inspired the European Enlightenment.

After all,  how was it that European thinkers like Rousseau developed their ideas around liberty, equality, individualism, toleration, and rationality in the first place? There was literally no precedent for these ideas in the religiously rigid, hierarchical societies of late medieval Europe.  Could the rise of these ideas have anything to do with the contemporaneous contact that French society had with egalitarian North American cultures like that of the Wendat (Huron) people?  

The Wendat viewed with something between horror and disdain the idea that anyone had the right to compel obedience from another. Instead they chose to govern themselves via councils that featured endless articulate and philosphic debate.   

Sounds like a stretch to think that the Wendat helped to inspire the Enlightenment?  One of the most popular books in early 18th century Europe was a book written by a French priest (Lahontan) who had recently returned from what is now modern Canada.  The book is a scathing critique of French society written in the form of a dialog between Kandiaronk (a notable Wendat) and the priest.  

The book has traditionally been interpreted as being a liberal critique of French society that simply uses a mythical Wendat as an interlocutor.  Perhaps -- but Kandiaronk was a real person.  His existence is documented in First Nation's oral history, and in multiple contemporary European historical accounts.   Moreover, these historical accounts (letters, journals, church reports) are uniformly admiring of Kandiaronk's intellect -- one Jesuit calls him 'surely the most intelligent man who ever lived'.  And remember, Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic Church. 

So why shouldn't we believe that the critiques of European society attributed to Kandiaronk were his own?   Particularly given that Lahontan knew Kandiaronk, and there is a plausible argument to be made that Kandiaronk himself actually visited France as part of an Indigenous delegation that visited the French court in 1691.  So why shouldn't we believe that a book that was widely read and widely translated affected the intellectual climate of its time? 

That argument gives you a taste for the kind of information and analysis that Graeber and Wengrow provide throughout the thoroughly entertaining (and well-referenced) pages of The Dawn of Everything.  Just don't expect their discussions to come to the conclusions that they claim to be pursuing.