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The Dawn of Everything summary

Name: The Dawn of Everything
Rating: 4.1 (327 reviews)
Author: David Graeber & David Wengrow

David Graeber & David Wengrow

A New History of Humanity

4.1 (327 ratings)

24 mins

Table of Contents

The Dawn of Everything
summarized in 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? A deep dive into the origins of political hierarchies.

We like to think that prehistoric humans were simpler than we are. We might even think they were stupid – think cavemen and -women dragging clubs around and gnawing raw meat. Of course, these depictions are far from accurate. The Flintstones is not a documentary. But these ideas point to a deep-rooted idea, an idea long espoused by philosophers and intellectuals – that people in the past weren’t capable of abstract political thought or social organization.

We now know that this isn’t true.

New findings show that prehistoric peoples were certainly political. They not only fought about political arrangements; they discussed and debated those arrangements. The archeological and anthropological record paints a clear picture: prehistoric societies were more complex, and more interesting, than we’ve long believed.

In these blinks, you’ll learn the real story of how modern ideas about property, human rights, and the state came into existence – and why history is still being written.

Society didn’t develop in a linear fashion.

When it comes to how human society developed, there are two opposing stories.

The first one comes from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it goes like this: Once upon a time, we were all hunter-gatherers. We lived in small bands, and everyone was more or less equal. Then came the advent of agriculture. We figured out how to cultivate plants and animals, and we stopped hunting and gathering. This agricultural revolution led to more complex political structures, not to mention advancements in cultural phenomena such as the arts, philosophy, and literature. It also spawned hierarchical phenomena like patriarchy, mass execution, and interminable bureaucracy.

The other story was developed by a decidedly grumpier thinker, the English writer Thomas Hobbes. His story goes like this: Humans are, at their core, selfish creatures. In the past, life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hierarchy and domination, he believed, have always been an aspect of human society.

So which story is true? Most social scientists would anwer: a bit of both. But when you look at the evidence, including an ever-increasing archeological archive, it becomes clear that the bit-of-both answer is also unsatisfactory. You see, both stories posit linearity. That is, they both argue that, from a pre-civilized condition – be it Rousseau’s condition of equality or Hobbes’s condition of hierarchy – we evolved into our current “civilized” state. But when you examine the evidence and think carefully about it, the truth is that human society did not develop linearly. Civilization did not march forward. It marched sideways, it went backward, it stood still. And, anyway, the “marching forward” metaphor is silly and misleading, since it’s not necessarily accurate to think that our society is better than those that preceded it.

So why is it so hard for us to imagine alternatives to the stories of Rousseau and Hobbes?

Early societies were a lot more complex – and interesting – than we’re taught to believe. These blinks seek to restore our ancestors to their full humanity, showing that many more possibilities for political organization and social interaction exist.

The “indigenous critique” sparked a wave of Enlightenment theories that are still with us today.

In the 1690s, a leader from the Huron-Wendat people in North America sat down with French colonists in Montréal to debate a variety of socio-political topics. His name was Kandiaronk, and his French interlocutors loved him. They described him as both witty and singularly brilliant. A book of his ideas sold like hotcakes throughout Europe, and inspired a response from nearly every Enlightenment thinker.

To put his views very simply, Kandiaronk was curious to understand why people in Europe were so obsessed with money and private property. And – come to think of it – why did their kings have so much power, whereas everyone else had practically none. What’s all this poverty about? Why do people put up with it? He didn’t hold back: “I have spent six years reflecting on the start of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman . . .”

Pre-agricultural life was much more variable than we are led to believe.

Humans were around for more than three million years before they started writing things down. As there’s no written record, we know very little about what happened during that time.

One thing we can glean from the archeological record, though, is that humans were far more physically, and culturally, diverse than any of us are today. Human-like species coexisted alongside each other, much as giants, hobbits, and elves coexist in fantasy narratives.

Freedoms once taken for granted began eroding when ideas of the sacred and ideas of ownership emerged.

In earlier centuries, shared cultural norms and practices spanned thousands of miles, even continents. Aboriginal Australians and North Americans could travel halfway across the continent and still be among people with the same totemic designations that they had at home.

Our distant ancestors assumed three central freedoms, which are largely forgotten today.

Neighboring cultures frequently developed social institutions in reaction to each other.

Scholars often see indigenous and pre-agricultural communities not as what they were in their own right but, they saw them as what they were on their way to becoming: a proper kingdom, whose subjects paid tribute to a ruler. But some peoples, including indigenous peoples of the California region, weren’t pre-agricultural. They were actually anti-agricultural.

Take the indigenous peoples of California. The evidence suggests that they developed their society in opposition to the society of their northerly neighbors of the Northwest Pacific coast.

As communities settled into an agricultural lifestyle, their highland neighbors went in the opposite direction.

The ancient Athenians had a strange ritual. On a certain sweltering midsummer day, women would carry little gardens in baskets, planted with quick-sprouting grains and herbs, onto rooftops. There, they would be left in the sun to wilt. It was a botanical reenactment of the death of Adonis, slain in his prime.

This ritual, which had been going on from way before the ascent of agriculture, can be understood as a type of play farming. It was a game representing a foray into the world of agriculture – a game that eventually became the serious business of producing food to feed large populations.

When people began to coalesce in urban centers, hierarchies didn’t immediately form.

Given the perils of farming, and the work involved, it seems strange that humans did ultimately decide to settle together in urban environments?

Well, what’s clear is that early cities – which could have millions of inhabitants – weren’t hierarchical.

Early kings relied on spectacular displays of violence to prove their cosmic power – and necessity.

Some of the societies we’ve considered begin to resemble what we might think of as a state. A state, according to conventional definition, claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory.

Three principles form the basis of social power: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. Each of these has become the basis for institutions the modern state depends on, such as bureaucracy. Many assume that these three modes of domination were destined to come together at a certain time. But how did domination at scale first emerge?

The “indigenous critique,” which is still with us today in a number of forms, developed as a result of experimentation and reaction.

Remember the indigenous critique of European colonist political systems we mentioned back in the second blink? The critique itself didn’t just come out of nowhere. It was an amalgamation of centuries of political conflict and debate among indigenous North Americans.

From 400 to 800 CE, people began cultivating maize as a staple crop along the Mississippi River floodplain. Soon after, there was an intensification of armed conflict, finally culminating in an urban explosion at the site of Cahokia in modern-day Illinois. Cahokia soon became the greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico. Around 1050 CE, Cahokia exploded in size, ultimately totalling somewhere around 40,000 inhabitants.

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What is The Dawn of Everything about?

The Dawn of Everything (2021) is a reimagining of the history of humanity, based on new discoveries in the worlds of anthropology and archeology. According to the authors, new findings challenge what we thought we knew about hierarchies, inequality, property, and the state.

Who should read The Dawn of Everything?

Anyone who’s ever shaken their fist at bureaucracy
History lovers of all stripes
Those who want to be Indiana Jones when they grow up

About the Author

David Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist. He authored several books including Bullshit Jobs and Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

David Wengrow is a British archeologist who has written extensively about Neolithic societies and the emergence of the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

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