‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ review: Exploding myths of prehistory

An anthropologist and an archaeologist marshal reams of new evidence to produce a fresh account of the past that questions the assumptions behind an evolutionary history of humanity

Grand narratives may no longer be in fashion in the social sciences. That doesn’t mean that they are out of circulation. Epic forays into the past have continued to flourish, yielding an influential harvest of bestsellers, ranging from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2014). The diverse backgrounds of the authors notwithstanding, all these books share a common paradigm: an evolutionary approach to history.

This approach presents the social history of humanity as a linear progression through different stages, starting from the simplest (primitive) to the most complex (advanced). In this schema, after Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago, they spent the bulk of this period as small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. About 10,000 years ago, they discovered agriculture, which ushered in settled communities, a surplus, and a hierarchy to protect the surplus. As agriculture expanded, cities developed, and so did a non-farming class that specialised in arts, crafts and trade, leading eventually to state formation, because you needed state-like structures — including an administrative and warrior elite — to manage the scale and complexity of humans living together in large numbers. This story has the ring of common sense. It not only explains the past, it also makes the present, and all its ills — inequality, violence, endless toil — look inevitable, if not palatable. But this seemingly rational explanation, argue David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is only a myth, and a rather uninteresting one that holds us back from exploring our full potential as political beings.