The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity
David Graeber (Author), D. Wengrow (Author)
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. In this volume, Graeber and Wengrow fundamentally challenge these assumptions and recast our understanding of human history. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors reveal how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. --From publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2023
First paperback edition
Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2023