The Dawn of Everything

Lunch at Evelyn’s house in Fairfax and the 500-page book I have been reading for a week.

"What would we be saying about Minoan Crete, or Teotihuacan, or Çatalhöyük for that matter, were it not for the fact that their elaborate wall paintings happen to have been preserved? More than almost any other form of human activity, painting on walls is something people in virtually any cultural setting seem inclined to do. This has been true almost since the beginnings of humanity itself." (The Dawn of Everything, p. 439)

Loving murals both from the past and present, I enjoyed the many ways that ancient art provides specific evidence of the history of humankind in my current reading. Overwhelming is the only word that comes close to describing this book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors start with many unknowns and myths about history, beginning by questioning modern ideas about human equality, about the origin of civilization, and whether a sense of inevitability or progress can possibly be correct. 

To explore these questions, the authors demand evidence, and they look for this evidence in the history of many eras, describing both ancient societies and modern peoples. They study social organizations of moderns outside the mainstream like modern tribal groups. They search for early accounts of the American native people and their lives, and find some very fascinating evidence that equality in North American societies influenced the development of Enlightenment thought about equality and more universal participation of citizens in governing. I can't begin to review the many and amazing insights that these authors found in re-examining many assumptions about the dawn of history, the development of agriculture, the role of cities, practice of war, and the role of women. The authors particularly point out how male historians and anthropologists simply ignore the major participation of women in many societies where evidence shows women in quite powerful roles. You have to read the book to get the force of many many examples.

I'm simply not capable of reviewing the way that these authors, who researched their book for a decade, find evidence to contradict so many commonly held beliefs that are considered the best of both academic scholarship and popular history writing. Another example: the idea that the invention of agriculture was a bad idea because people were happier as hunters or nomads or gatherers of naturally growing food. The historic evidence they present is so much more complex (and the popular books by authors like Jarad Diamond are so simplified) that what I've thought in the past is really more of a myth than anything else: a widely held myth, that permeates our thinking. 

They especially explode the belief in an “agricultural revolution.”  Agriculture was not just one thing, and emerged far more slowly than is commonly thought. Cultivation of cereals and other plants was sometimes adopted and then rejected during very long time periods. And non-agriculturalists often raided the crops of the farming people, making the entire endeavor more complex than a simple timeline usually presented.

Whatever your concept of "the dawn of everything" you would do well to read this book and consider the masses of observations that these authors have assembled.

Review © 2021 mae sander.