The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

By: David Graeber, David Wengrow

Narrated by: Mark Williams

"An all-encompassing treatise on modern civilization, offering bold revisions to canonical understandings in sociology, anthropology, archaeology and political philosophy that led to where we are today." - The New York Times

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

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, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles 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 all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization 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 full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

excellent

This is a thought provoking and surprisingly readable/listenable! I wish there were more books like this!

Buy the Kindle book; Poor audiobook choice for me

This audible book is not in a form that is readily assimilated by the lay listener. I found the audiobook to be a meandering, poorly organized, poorly read set of chapters in need of an editor to make it intelligible to someone who is not an anthropologist or other academic.
After struggling with the audiobook for several hours, I bought the Kindle version. Skimming chapters and reading sections of greatest interest was a much better experience for me. Listening to the “voice over” version of the text in sections of greatest interest on my iPhone was infinitely better than listening to Mark Williams drone on and on.
Your experience may vary.

Could benefit from a lighter approach

Overall, I am satisfied with The Dawn of Everything. The authors make compelling arguments in reconsidering the collective myth for the creation of society. They do a deep dive into the archeological foundations for the rise of “the state”. Their observations take the same factual basis, but ask new questions that arrive at novel conclusions.

Personally, it feels at times like the old saying, “if you can’t convince them, confuse them”. The chapters often feel a bit mired in dense information, esoteric references, and jumping too often between time and place. I am sure if I had years of study in this topic, I wouldn’t be as lost in connecting the myriad historical references.

I want to add that it’s worth giving this audiobook a dedicated listen and really contemplate their points. I’ve been hearing old refrains of our oft-repeated history of inequality permeate political podcasts and discussion of even recent historical events. I’m now careful to assume that I should just accept society as it is because this is the logical progression of human society. Dominant societies today were derived from just a few branches of a much larger tree of societal development. Who knows what prehistoric societies were truly like, but the authors offer a compelling interpretation that’s different than anything you’ve ever heard.

Engrossing though tendentious

The wealth of examples and ideas is dizzying. The book has added several meaty new phrases to my vocabulary -- schismogenesis being a notable one. (Read the book!). Many strong points and lots of new (to me) facts to support the thesis, but I remain unconvinced by several sweeping conclusions. That said, it was fun listening to and sometimes arguing with the reader.

Guaranteed to expand your thinking

The authors successfully dismantle the social evolutionary theories that support our current misconception of "progress."