‘The Dawn of Everything’ is a history book for the 99 percent … of history

If, like me, you’ve ever been hooked on the legendary computer game Civilization, you know that it starts in the year 4,000 BC with one Settler unit ready to found your first city. And of course, that’s how real-life human civilization got its start as well. 

I’m kidding, of course — but as far as most history books are concerned, it might as well be true. Homo sapiens — that’s us — diverged from other hominid species in Africa more than 300,000 years ago. (The estimate keeps getting pushed back the more fossils we find; we also appear to have arrived across all of Africa pretty much at once, not just Kenya as previously thought.) Yet even the most epic meta-history books, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel or Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, start the clock with the rise of agriculture and cities in the so-called “fertile crescent” of the Middle East around five or six millennia ago. Let’s just focus on everything that happened since then, they say — all the kings, wars and technology that arose in the last one percent of human history. Let’s play Civilization. 

So what happened in the other 99 percent? The surprising answers to that question became a hugely readable, highly entertaining bestseller in November 2021, appropriately enough in a book co-written by the guy who co-created the “we are the 99 percent” slogan for Occupy Wall Street in 2011. David Graeber, a controversial anarchist professor ousted by Yale and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), turned out to have been writing it all along in a raucous 10-year email exchange with archaeologist David Wengrow. 

The pair wrapped up The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in 2020, months before Graeber died suddenly and tragically of pancreatitis, aged 59. Not only does it change everything we thought we knew about “prehistory,” as the first 99 percent is known, it also lobs some entertaining (if unnecessary) bombs at the likes of Diamond and Pinker — effectively starting an academic catfight from beyond the grave. “This is going to mess things up!” Graeber chuckled as he wrote, his anthropologist girlfriend told New York. He certainly got his wish, and with Wengrow’s help he brought the receipts too.

Prehistoric Burning Man 

If we think about prehistoric people at all, it’s probably a static picture — like a diorama in a natural history museum involving fur pelts, spears and wooly mammoths. We hunted, we gathered, we sat around the fire carving stone tools, and that was pretty much it, right? Wrong. Dawn of Everything uses the latest archeological findings and a whole heap of oft-ignored evidence from indigenous cultures around the world, in particular the Americas pre-Columbus, to blow that static picture apart. 

“We are projects of self-creation,” Graeber and Wengrow write. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?”

The wildly diverse picture that emerges reminded me more of Burning Man than a museum diorama. We built cities earlier than we knew, but only lived in them seasonally — in fact, some of us changed our entire form of government with the seasons. We held frequent festivals that deliberately upended the social order, with temporary monarchs and “clown police.” We had cultures that prized bestowing gifts, sometimes items the recipient had literally dreamed about, as much as we had cultures that bartered. We livened up our darkest days with midwinter orgies and games, some involving stone footballs. Tribal leaders, temporary or otherwise, were personally responsible for lavish feasts and the care of the sick and elderly in their homes. Far from being fearful of anyone different, we seem to have elevated eccentric, unusual members of our societies, and often accorded elaborate burials (in prehistory, usually reserved for leaders) to people with dwarfism or physical deformities like a hunchback.

In short, The Dawn of Everything‘s eye-opening examples show we were as bizarre and creative and warm and weird then as we are now. Perhaps we were more creative then, back when we could more easily imagine different ways of living because we switched them so frequently. Either way, the distant past is clearly more interesting than those of us raised on Civilization ever suspected. “When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to,” the authors note, “we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky — in a word, far less human — than what was likely going on.”

The “likely” in that sentence is doing a lot of work, given that Graeber and Wengrow are making plenty of guesses themselves. They just happen to be educated ones based on wider sets of evidence than you’ll find in the average look at prehistory. The pair have definitely hit on something, but they’re also not above stretching a point for political purposes. (So political, in fact, that Dawn of Everything is the perfect holiday present for the history-obsessed conservative uncle you want to annoy.) 

For example, the Davids are eager to suggest that encounters with North America’s indigenous cultures kickstarted the 18th century Enlightenment in Europe. So they expend a lot of effort suggesting that an influential 1703 book by a French aristocrat was based on debates with a Huron chief and famous orator called Kondiaronk. This is highly unlikely, as other academics have observed, and it opens them up to charges of sloppy thinking. So why not just celebrate Kondiaronk’s considerable debating skills, which slammed the French for being slaves to their King? Why not just let the colonizers have their own Enlightenment, while pointing out that it took them long enough?

How women changed the world

The eyes of written history have rested on white men for so long, of course, that any attempt to redress the balance is understandable. The Dawn of Everything is on somewhat safer ground telling us that women contributed more to the societies of prehistory than we might think. The voluptuous clay models known as “Venus figurines,” found across Eurasia from as early as 35,000 years ago, were more likely to have been aspirational toys (“Neolithic Barbie dolls”) than fertility goddesses, as archaeologists used to assume. As for agriculture, women were prime drivers of what the authors call “play farming.” For many millennia, we dabbled in growing crops, using them occasionally, or walking away from them for centuries at a time, rather than building entire societies around them.   

“Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries,” Graeber and Wengrow write in a typical passage. “Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today.”

Whoever started it, “play farming” complicates the historical narrative put forward by the Jared Diamonds and Steven Pinkers of the world. The invention of agriculture in the fertile crescent was supposed to be the point of no return. Diamond calls it “our greatest mistake” because crops tied us to the land, led to granaries and cities and bureaucrats and kings and hierarchies, and ended the free-roaming utopia of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Pinker casts it as the first of many positive technocratic changes that pulled us slowly out of the warlike nightmare of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, up towards the real game-changer, the Enlightenment. 

This debate has been raging for literally hundreds of years. In the 18th century, German philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested prehistoric people were “noble savages” who were much happier than us; a century earlier, Thomas Hobbes insisted the natural life of humanity was “nasty, brutish and short” until the state came along to save us from ourselves. Diamond and Pinker are merely the latest in a long line of Rousseau and Hobbes stans, respectively. Either the static natural history diorama tribe sat around the campfire and sang kumbaya, or they passed the time hurling spears at the next tribe across the savannah. 

But what if none of that was true, or all of it at once? What if humans were inherently this brilliant, this messed up, all at the same time, with or without agriculture? The Dawn of Everything may elevate indigenous narratives, but it also isn’t shy about pointing out that some prehistoric societies were dystopias. For example, tribes of the Pacific Northwest who used fish as their main form of food seem to have given rise to a slave-owning autocracy; smoked salmon was so easy to steal that they fell under the sway of warlike leaders who promised security. Their neighbors south of the Klamath river mostly ate walnuts, which had to be processed before eating, so were less attractive to thieves. They managed to construct a more egalitarian society. 

Once they were in place, the two Pacific cultures defined themselves in opposition to each other in a process called “schismogenesis” — another underrated aspect of prehistory. Think of Red Sox vs. Yankees fans, or Republicans vs. Democrats, or Hatfields vs. McCoys, or indeed followers of Rousseau vs. Hobbes. Human groups have always had a lamentable tendency to cohere around the notion of “whoever we are, we’re definitely not those guys,” especially when those guys happen to live right next door. 

The past changes the future

But if The Dawn of Everything has one main lesson to teach us, it’s that we’re also pretty good at changing our minds when we feel like it. Humans are natural contrarians. We might prefer to live in a city under the reign of a festival king one season, then go out into the countryside and forage in small leaderless bands the next. We build cities like Teotihuacan, the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas (and an inspiration to the Aztecs) around vast aristocratic pyramids, then suddenly decide to fill it with public housing that is all roughly the same size as each other. We settle down and farm cereal crops, like the ancient Britons before Stonehenge, then abandon them in favor of a more mobile society that loves to move large herds of animals and construct giant stone circles around the country. Therefore, Graeber and Wengrow would love you to conclude, we can change all the things that seem immutable about our world, especially its rapacious capitalism and crushing bureaucracies. 

If ‘The Dawn of Everything’ has one main lesson to teach us, it’s that we’re pretty good at changing our minds when we feel like it. Humans are natural contrarians.

It’s unfortunate that, on the way to building utopia, the authors don’t seem to realize that they too display the same blinkered schismogenesis that they’re writing about. They so thoroughly define themselves in opposition to Pinker and Diamond that they risk looking petty. Was it really necessary to deride Diamond, a respected geographer and ecologist, as the holder of “a Ph.D on the physiology of the gall bladder?” Surely, like all humans in The Dawn of Everything, he is allowed to change and learn new things. Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature may be Hobbesian in origin, but it’s also a thorough and convincing study that shows how violence has declined in recent centuries. Yes, even the 20th century with its World Wars killed fewer people in conflicts than its predecessors. Graeber simply waves away Pinker’s thesis by claiming it doesn’t make sense “to anyone who spends much time watching the news,” a weird logical fallacy in which an Occupy Wall Street anarchist finds himself claiming that the news media never blows anything out of proportion.  

Perhaps if Graeber had lived to finish the sequel to Dawn of Everything (which the pair had already started writing), the ongoing narrative might have calmed down a little and become more tolerant of other viewpoints. Perhaps someday soon, another bestselling historian — a non-white or non-male one, maybe — can synthesize this epic work with the ones that play in the Civilization sandbox, and find value in both. And now that our minds have been cracked open to the possibilities inherent in that other 99 percent of history, perhaps some future developer will build a game that covers it all — the wild, weird, creative, terrifying, wonderful, fungible, nonlinear, loveable mess of the entire human experience before and after 4,000 BC.