Civilization starts in the year 4,000 BC with one Settler unit ready to find your first city, and you know it because you've ever been hooked on the game. That is how real-life human civilization got its start.
It might as well be true, as far as most history books are concerned. The divergence from other hominid species in Africa was more than 300,000 years ago. The estimate keeps getting pushed back as we find more fossils, and we also appear to have arrived across all of Africa at once. The rise of agriculture and cities in the so-called "fertile crescent" of the Middle East is what starts the clock with the most epic meta-history books. They want to focus on all the kings, wars and technology that happened in the last one percent of human history. Let's play a game.
What happened to the other 99 percent? The answers to that question became a hugely readable, highly entertaining book in November of 2021, co-written by the guy who co-created the "we are the 99 percent" slogan for the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. The author of Bullshit Jobs and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, was ousted from Yale and had to write it all on his own.
The pair finished The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in 2020, months before the death of Graeber. It changes everything we thought we knew about history, as the first 99 percent is known, and it also starts an academic catfight from beyond the grave. "This is going to be a mess!" His girlfriend told New York that Graeber chuckled as he wrote. He got his wish and brought the receipts with him.
The man was a prehistoric Burning Man.
Credit: Gorodenkoff
If we think about prehistoric people, it's likely to be a static picture of fur, spears, and wooly mammoths. We hunted, we gathered, we sat around the fire carving stone tools, and that was pretty much it. Wrong. Dawn of Everything uses the latest archeological findings and a lot of ignored evidence from indigenous cultures around the world to blow that static picture apart.
"We are projects of self-creation," they wrote. What if we approached human history in a different way? What if we treat people from the beginning as intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood?
The picture that emerged reminded me of Burning Man. We built cities earlier than we knew, but only lived in them during the season. Festivals were held that upended the social order with temporary monarchs. We had cultures that bartered and we had cultures that prized bestowing gifts. We played games and orgies in the dark days. Tribal leaders were responsible for the care of the sick and elderly in their homes. We seem to have elevated eccentric, unusual members of our societies, and often accorded elaborate burials to people with dwarfism or physical deformities like a hunchback.
The examples in The Dawn of Everything show that we were as weird and weird as we are now. We could more easily imagine different ways of living back then because we switched them so frequently. The distant past is more interesting than we thought. "When we simply guess what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky, and far less human than what was likely going on," the authors note.
The "likely" in that sentence is doing a lot of work, given that the two men are making a lot of guesses of their own. They are educated based on wider sets of evidence than the average person would. The pair have definitely hit on something, but they are not above stretching a point for political purposes. Dawn of Everything is a political gift for a history-obsessed conservative uncle.
The Davids want to suggest that encounters with North America's indigenous cultures started the Enlightenment in Europe. They spent a lot of time suggesting that an influential 1703 book by a French aristocrat was based on debates with a famous orator called Kondiaronk. It is highly unlikely that this will happen, and it will open them up to charges of sloppy thinking. Kondiaronk slammed the French for being slaves to their King, so why not celebrate his debating skills? The colonizers should be allowed to have their own Enlightenment, while pointing out that it took them a long time.
Women changed the world.
The figurine is 25,000 years old. Credit: Helmut Fohringer
White men have been the focus of history for so long that any attempt to change that is understandable. The Dawn of Everything tells us that women contributed more to the societies of prehistory than we might think. Archaeologists used to think that fertility goddesses were more likely to have been Barbie dolls than clay models of Venus, but the models were more likely to have been aspirational toys. The authors call it "play farming." They say women were the main drivers. We used to grow crops occasionally, but instead of building entire societies around them, we walked away from them for centuries at a time.
The Neolithic societies were based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Who was the first person to figure out that yeasts could be added to bread to make it rise? We don't know if she was a woman or a white woman, but we are pretty sure she would not be considered white if she tried to migrate to Europe today.
"play farming" complicates the historical narrative put forward by theJared Diamonds and Steven Pinkers of the world. The point of no return was supposed to be the invention of agriculture in the fertile crescent. Diamond says it's our greatest mistake because crops tied us to the land and ended the free-roaming utopia of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Pinker says that it was the first of many positive technocratic changes that pulled us out of the nightmare of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The debate has raged for hundreds of years. In the 18th century, Rousseau suggested prehistoric people were better off than us, and a century earlier, Thomas Hobbes said the natural life of humanity was "nasty, brutish and short" until the state came along to save us. Diamond and Pinker are the latest in a long line of Rousseau and Hobbes stans. Either the tribe sat around the campfire and sang kumbaya, or they passed the time throwing spears at the next tribe.
The oldest city in the world, atalhyk in Turkey, was founded as early as 7,100 BC. The residents walked on the roofs. The De Agostini Picture Library has credit.
But what if all of that was false? What if humans were inherently brilliant, messed up, and without agriculture, all at the same time? The Dawn of Everything may elevate indigenous narratives, but it isn't shy about pointing out that some prehistoric societies were dystopias. Smoking salmon was so easy to steal that the tribes of the Pacific Northwest 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 being eaten, so they were less attractive to thieves. They were able to build a more equal society.
The two Pacific cultures defined themselves in opposition to each other in a process called "schismogenesis" after they were in place. Think of Hatfields vs. McCoys or Rousseau vs. Hobbes. Human groups have always had a tendency to cohere around the idea of "whoever we are, we're definitely not those guys."
The future is not the same as the past.
If The Dawn of Everything has one main lesson, it's that we're pretty good at changing our minds when we feel like it. Humans are contrarians. We might prefer to live in a city under a festival king one season, then go out into the countryside and play in small leaderless bands the next. We build cities like Teotihuacan, the largest in the pre-Columbian Americas and an inspiration to the Aztecs, and then fill them with public housing that is the same size as each other. We settle down and farm cereals, like the ancient Britons did before they traveled to Europe, then abandon them in favor of a more mobile society that likes to move large herds of animals and build giant stone circles around the country. We can change all the things that seem unchanging about our world, especially its rapacious capitalism and crushing bureaucracy.
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 contrarians.
The authors don't seem to realize that they too display the same blinkered schismogenesis that they are writing about. They are so clear in their opposition to Pinker and Diamond that they risk looking silly. Is it really necessary to deride Diamond, a respected geographer and ecologist, as the holder of a PhD on the physiology of the gall bladder? He is allowed to change and learn new things, like all humans in The Dawn of Everything. 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. The 20th century had fewer conflicts than its predecessors. The logic behind the idea that it doesn't make sense to anyone who spends a lot of time watching the news is a strange one.
The ongoing narrative might have become more tolerant if Graeber had lived to finish the sequel to Dawn of Everything. One day, a non-white or non-male historian may be able to combine this epic work with the ones that play in the Civilization sandbox and find value in both. Now that our minds have been opened to the possibilities of the other 99 percent of history, maybe a future developer will build a game that covers it all.
