Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans

One of the authors of The Dawn of Everything thought the phrase "the dawn of everything" was ridiculous. It's everything. It's everything! It was too big and rich. Penguin would not like it.

Two years ago, the sudden death in Venice of American anthropologist David Graeber shocked a world of admirers, but his co-author, a British archaeologist at University College London, couldn't let it go.

The title suited the pair and they had asked for it. Their book was going to be thrown down. The ads say that it is time to change the course of human history. The foragers of Gbekli Tepe, a religious center built between 9500 and 8000 BCE, and the Indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest are some of the new discoveries made by the two men.

According to this existing research and more from a range of social scientists, the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. In prehistoric societies, everything from kinship codes to burial rites to gender relations to warfare were forever being conceived, reconceived, satirized, scrapped, and reformed. The idea of overthrowing all existing dogma about humankind was conjured up by the two men.

The people did. The book is a great read. Its dense scholarly detail, compiled from some 30,000 years of global civilization's archaeological findings, is leftned by both freewheeling jokes and innovative ideas. The Dawn takes to the open sea in order to argue that things are subject to change.

The book makes quick work of maxims by domineering thinkers. The idea that early humans, bent on nothing but survival, led short and dangerous lives chasing calories and subjugating others for sex and labor is one of the chief ones. Most premoderns didn't do this. They developed societies that were determined by artistic and political practices. The Yurok hated slavery and ate pine nuts, which they showed off by slipping through tiny

The assumption that Indigenous societies organize themselves in only rudimentary ways is questionable. The police were abolished in the off-season in order to enforce participation in buffalo hunts, but their societies were still complex. The Natchez of Mississippi pretended to revere their all-knowing dictator but in fact ran free because they were too much of a homebody to go after them. Large monuments and tombs are always proof of a system of rank. The majority of Paleolithic tombs contained people with physical anomalies such as dwarfism, giantism, and spine abnormality. Such societies don't seem to have a lot of elites.

I was overcome with a kind of Socratic ecstasy when I was halfway through the book. I felt like I was being lied to. I was told many times that it was natural to keep my offspring strapped to my chest, or that I should keep my waist small because males who look fertile, or move heaven and earth to help men, were the reason for keeping my waist small. This was not a true story. The book claimed that humans were never in a state of nature. Humans have always been ironic, sentient, self-reflective, and free from any programming from any other species. There were implications.

On September 2, 2020, after the death of Graeber, Wengrow was both grieving and rushing to finish. The grief made him lose his mind. The advantage to the hurry was the fact that the page proofs of "The Dawn of Everything" were too late for Penguin to approve. After it hit the top of the New York Times best-sellers list, the sun rose on the book.

We are moving to real life in Manhattan, where, over several espressos, we talked about The Dawn. I offered my sympathies to Graeber's family and friends. Pancreatic necrosis was the official cause which was not discussed. On October 16, 2020, the Russian artist and widow of Graeber wrote that he had bridled at wearing a mask. She wrote that she wanted to add her own theories. His death is related to Covid according to me.

Few writing partners are devoted to one another as much as the two of them are. The kind of meeting of the minds I associate with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis seems to have taken place. They have similarities in their background. When the Nazis came to power, he told me, his grandparents gave people who lost their homes and opportunities the gift of freedom. While his father was successful in the rag trade, his son was the first in his family to attend college.

It was a roundabout way to get to Oxford. After trying to become an actor for a year or two, he wrote letters to Oxford colleges to express his love for literature. When he hit a wall, he canvassed friends about fields of study that were easier to get into. He wrote a letter only to St. Hugh's, assuring the college of his lifelong passion for archaeology, despite not knowing what these disciplines were. The interviewer held up a lot of letters when he was interviewing him. He wrote a letter about his love for archaeology. He had written about his love for literature. It was awkward to hear the silence. He did get in. His DPhil came in 2001.

The second book in the What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West trilogy was published nine years later. He was lined up for passport control in New Orleans when a warm, rumpled anthropologist introduced himself. The research on Middle Eastern cylinder seals was an example of commodity branding. An anthropologist who knows what a cylinder seal is was impressed by the meeting. The Davids stayed in close touch, meeting in either Manhattan or London, and at some point decided to create a "mphlet" summarizing new findings in archaeology that undermines many of the stories told about early human societies. One man's thoughts took up where the other's left off for a decade. The pamphlet was going to be a book. They were careful to write and rewrite each other's work so thoroughly that they couldn't tell who wrote what. They were still working on a sequel to The Dawn when Graeber died.

He has always felt like an outsider in academia. He said that the feeling doesn't go away even when you achieve a degree of recognition. They could relate on that level. There was a sense of humor that came from the Jewish heritage. If he hadn't heard from me in a few days, he'd call and say "You don't write... you don't call."

The author of Debt and Bullshit Jobs, as well as an architect of various anti- capitalist uprisings, was the subject of impromptu speeches by Wengrow. He suggested that the spectre of his brilliant friend may still be present. The funeral was framed as an intergalactic memorial carnival. The absence of Graeber was a spirited one. He was between a guardian angel and a poltergeist.

I went to Dublin in April to get a bite at a restaurant that I'd seen before. There is a disco attached to a hot-dog stand that sold out of hot dogs. The man was notbothered. He and his wife shared a burger. After dinner, we had a discussion about Irish politics, as well as the vexing matter of Facebook and Google using Ireland as a tax haven.

The host of the gathering was an Irish sci-fi writer who was a champion of the 1950s board game Diplomacy. Kostick was so enamored by The Dawn that he invited him to speak to a small group at Wynn's, an old Victorian hotel and pub on Abbey Street. Some chutzpah was shown by Kostick. The extravagant victory lap that had been his book tour in the US would have to be broken if he were to take it up. He was going to come to Dublin by way of Canada, where he was going to give a speech on a docket with Musk.

The man said yes without wavering. Imagine if Darwin came to Dublin to talk about his new book. That is how I feel about hearing Davidwengrow speak next Thursday. He told me that the invitation was necessary to keep mind and soul together.

Ted was both cultlike and fascinating. Reflecting on the experience with Kostick and me, he spoke about the chess champion and Russian dissident who had kicked off the conference with a speech about the war in Ukraine. Anicka Yi, a conceptual artist who works mostly in fragrance, and Jeanette Winterson, a feminist author, joined forces with a man who had no contact with Musk. They reminded me of what I was there for, which was to get the message of my work with David Graeber out there in a place where you would least expect to find it. He still seemed confused by the fact that it costs $25,000 to attend the TED conference. Kostick, who has a ponytail, did not want to be associated with that. Irish laborers get an average annual salary of about 35,000.

A few weeks later, I watched a speech by Wengrow. He wore khakis and an Oxford-cloth shirt while debunking the myth that a cultural revolution ruined humanity by creating stationary societies, private property, armies, and terrible social inequality. It's not the case on the contrary. The early farming societies rejected these traps for 4,000 years and spread innovations from potter's wheels to leavened bread across the Middle East and North Africa. There was no evidence of kings or queens, no aggrandizing architecture, and high-quality egalitarian housing in the cities of the Indus Valley.

The hardest punch thrown by The Dawn was its implicit rejection of Margaret Thatcher's famous assertion that "there is no alternative" to capitalism. The Dawn opens a kaleidoscope of human possibilities and suggests that the current arrangements might one day be remembered as a fad.

The upstairs lecture room at the hotel looked like it came from a pub scene. Young radicals weredecked in buttons of symbolism. A socialist and anti-fascist representing Unite stood up to encourage people to join. It's 65 cents a week. We were not part of the same group of people.

He was surrounded by students and lefties. I inquired about The Dawn of Everything from a Covid-masked anarchist, who goes by the mononymShane. He said that the book was a hopeful one. It's easy to get stuck in the thought that nothing will change. It is going to be the same thing for the rest of time. A lot of the book says we can change. We have been doing that for a long time. The Spanish Civil War was commemorated by the buttons of a Portuguese anarchist named Liv. We have to do something. It will kill us all if we don't speed it up. I heard this from other people. Some readers of the book think that human exploitation is not inevitable.

I wondered why we felt defeated. As I sat down, a plaintive passage from the book popped into my head: "How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients but as inescapable elements of the human condition?" The poltergeist wanted to know why we were putting up with this.

He asked that there be no recording. He likes to speak with people in person or by phone. They built arguments to the tune of their own voices, interruption, enthusiasm, dissent, doubt, and rapturous agreement.

The Davids celebrate dialog as the engine of philosophy early in the book. The window of consciousness tends to be open for seven seconds on average, according to scientists. Sometimes this isn't true. The exception to this is when we are talking to someone else.

A town-hall shaman who stood and delivered a mumblecore homily about something was in evidence at Wynn's. Someone else might lack eyebrows, but for an academic superstar with a theory of everything, it wasn't a problem.

The lecture touched on the controversial idea that humans need guns, monarchs, and bureaucracy if they want to function well in larger groups. A bite-size idea that is pro-cop and pro-executive in nature. But then he pointed to the evidence. According to a study published in December, early human populations lived in attenuated social networks of more than 150 people and did not have police or kings.

I left Wynn's while Wengrow was talking to a couple of Gen Z activists, holding thoughts and reflecting on problems for hours on end.

We met the same day. The event with Kostick and the 65-cents-a-week Unite membership was not as flashy as I thought. There wasn't a CEO or tattooist at the University College Dublin where the last talk was given. The audience in the lecture hall was made up of a few dozen laconic academics. The vice president of the International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research was one of the sponsors. The Wynn's gig was for "hunter-gatherers."

The social dynamics came into focus as I got my bearings. One of the men sitting alone at the edge of the audience became important. I recognized the room's suspense from my own tour in graduate school when he began to speak. Is The Dawn of Everything something he would enjoy? He seemed like he was deferential. Daniel Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, shook his head in astonishment when he offered a technical observation about the book.

The man was happy. He was delighted when Neil Carlin proposed that he had gone wrong in his analysis of Stonehenge. The Dawn was merely a re-enactment of the mainstream account of the construction of the monument. My ears perked up for a different reason. Finally, it's time. I knew of an archaeological site.

There is a big presence on my shoulder. I was told that it was Michael Parker Pearson, a colleague at the University College London and the ranking expert on the ancient world. Did he cross up his book's thesis by not questioning the orthodoxies that credit imperial powers like England with all great human achievements? The upstart was close to charging the man with sycophancy or careerism.

The man wasn't tossed. Most of the time, he is indifferent to wolf-pack dynamics. The Dawn is a preoccupation of the hierarchy. They come and go, sometimes literally with the weather, and any system of seniority and groveling is a joke. He thought that Mr. $25K-a-membership was laughable. A king who thinks he is a king is no less mad than a man who thinks he is a king.

He seemed to find full-contact dialog with the archaeologists most gratifying, even though he had received posh plaudits inVancouver and whoops of support at Wynn's. It's stimulating. The eye- opening questions, the testing of ego, the swerves in and out of accord. University management has made academia so sterile that it has become a radical act to make friends. Our relationship was going against the grain as well.

Even though it was true to form, the man made notes. The critique was given a full hearing in an email. The same could be said for the missing hot dogs.

The Dawn opens a lot more questions than it closes. The critics seem to think that the book is more ambitious than its research. The idea of the dawn of everything, which began 30,000 or so years ago, is said to be more like tea time. They shade the data because they are so eager to find anarchism and feminism in Early Civilizations.

Clouds pass overhead in the book's last chapter. The idea that we have lost the experimental spirit that makes humans human is the subject of a puzzle by the authors. It's a rhetorical move that no one wants to be stuck in, and dread of this fate makes a person want to act. Some of the schematic evolutionary folktales that the book exists to critique seem to be reinscribed by the idea that humans moved from freedom to stuckness. Isn't this a new fall-from-grace story like the ones that said humanity was ruined by agriculture or the internet?

As far as I can see, contemporary society is not stuck. It was dangerous but not stuck. The proliferation of cultlike groups that reject modernity was thrown into relief by the Pandemic. Young workers are taking to the road in record numbers. Race and gender are being looked at in a different way. None of this suggests stuckness, even if it's threatening or vertiginous.

I didn't worry a lot about my objection. Maybe I could just let it go if thestuckness concept didn't work out for me, he said. Hundreds of examples of early societies that didn't conform to evolutionary stages can be found in the book. The research is the most exciting part of the job. To act on our humanness grows out of the scholarship.

After the lecture, he talked about his book, but he already seemed to be testing new intellectual territory. Academic careers don't have to be only about disgrace. There is a lot of information to digest. Imagine worlds. The options are endless.

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