The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity

What is left to be said about David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything (hereafter, TDoE)? Reviews of it have appeared in a great many mass-media publications. Although many trend to the hyperbolic (e.g., “What If Everything You Learned about Human History Is Wrong?” New York Times, October 31, 2021), the amount of conversation the book has generated within and beyond the discipline is impressive. This review is written by an archaeologist and for archaeologists, and it is informed by a semester’s worth of conversations among faculty members and graduate students in archaeology and history at the University of Georgia. TDoE is a sweeping ideological and intellectual project that has both swagger and heft. With nearly 700 pages including notes and references, its goal is nothing less than a fundamental transformation of how we think about the human past. The book was written to be public facing. It will be best enjoyed by archaeologists who can avoid getting caught up in the dog-whistle critiques that inevitably emerge when the authors play fast and loose with archaeological data. TDoE will sit comfortably alongside other public-facing grand narratives: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997); Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011); James Scott’s Against the Grain (2017); and Graeber’s own Debt (2011). However, it will also find company among more radical scholarship that seeks to deconstruct teleological narratives about social evolution and inequality. The late David Graeber was an iconic activist, thought leader, and prolific intellectual, who moved seamlessly between public and academic realms. It is sad that Graeber did not live to see this book’s reception. David Wengrow is an archaeologist with a strong background in African and Middle Eastern archaeology, and a publication catalog that reflects a history of grappling with concepts central to the project (i.e., origins, civilization). Wengrow’s foreword explains that this book was the outcome of 10 years of dialogue between him and Graeber and was intended to be the first of multiple creative collaborations. The first chapter introduces the central premise: narratives about human history that forefront inequality and a step-wise history of human evolution are dangerously wrong. They have made seem natural a modern global political system in which inequality is understood as the natural outcome of social evolution. Where did we go wrong? And how did we get stuck there? The second chapter takes a deep dive into a core element of their thesis: the “Indigenous critique” of European society. The proponent of the Indigenous critique is Kandiaronk, a Huron-Wendat statesman whose purported views on religion, law, politics, personal freedom, and the refusal of arbitrary power formed the basis of Lahontan’s Dialogues and in turn profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinking in France and beyond. Although Kandiaronk was certainly a real person, there is a question about whether the Dialogues represent his actual thoughts or whether he was crafted as an archetypical “noble savage”; Graeber and Wengrow come down firmly on the side of the former. For the Huron-Wendat Nation of Canada, the elevation of a Wendat philosopher and political leader in this way represents a much-desired recognition of one of their own (Louis Lesage, personal communication 2022). Chapters 3–10 take the reader on a head-snapping journey through world prehistory, from the Ice Age through the origins of farming, cities, and premodern states. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the origins of inequality lie in the Paleolithic, and that as soon as such imbalances in power and/or wealth manifested themselves, humans developed flexible and selfconscious political strategies for subverting them. In exploring the heterarchical-to-hierarchical dynamics of human collectives among foragers, farmers, city