Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything keeps coming up in my life—especially as I dip an amateur toe into trying to understand human prehistory—so I thought I had better take a look. The title sounded promising, and I had heard that the book offers many pieces of interpreted evidence from humanity’s distant past. I like data.
I elected to “preview” the book as an audiobook borrowed from the library, jotting 32 pages of notes as I went along. 24 audio-hours later, I am ready to report. A key point from the authors is: it didn’t have to be this way. To which I say: but it is. Making a convincing case that it could have gone much differently is a tall order given a single—seemingly conclusive—global experimental run. But we’ll get to all that.
I will say up front that I am unqualified to supply a scholarly critique of the book. I can’t argue about any of the archeological evidence, but do find that I have a few bones to pick when it comes to logic and interpretation.
Before I got very far into the book, I wrote down some things I wanted to learn from it.
- Is my basic understanding correct: that agriculture leads straight to modernity, in time?
- Will the book provide insight into the emergence of human supremacy—a false sense of separateness or transcendence above nature that drives much of modernity?
- Does the book talk about animist belief systems and how languages embodied different ways of thinking?
- Does the book present our history in the context of one-time inheritance spending of, e.g., fossil fuels and ecological health?
- Is the “Everything” in the title broader than an anthropocentric focus on the last 10,000 years as civilizations arose?
I can say that the answer to all these questions is, disappointingly, no. But I’ll be a bit slippery on the first point, in due time.
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