Open any world history book and you’ll read that the Neolithic Revolution was a turning point for humanity, when hunter gatherers gave up roving in small egalitarian groups and settled down to farm. Out of that, civilization was born, with all the benefits and ills connected to it: the rise of cities, the emergence of the state, inequality, and class society. But, according to the late anthropologist David Graeber, that tale is not based on fact. In one of the only interviews that Graeber gave about what was to be titled “The Dawn of Everything,” he interrogated this chronicle of paradise lost.
Resources:
“The Dawn of Everything Part 1: An Interview with David Wengrow”
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021