Five stars for information…two stars for readability. This book lays out some fascinating new findings on the origins of humanity and civilization. I was taught in school that hunter-gatherers led short brutal lives; then, humanity’s ascent to agriculture, cities, and governments was a deliverance from darkness and ignorance. Well, this book pretty much turns this whole model on its head. Because Europeans wrote down their history in books and ancient civilizations didn’t, the 18th & 19th centur...

The State Has No Origin This work sits within the same category as another book; Humankind, by Rutger Bregman (released not that long ago). I say this as its clear that across both books, all three authors have taken the mantle (probably unassumingly) of becoming individuals opening doors to previously settled questions relating to gigantic topics regarding human history and behaviour. I would almost categorise them as 'Gateway' texts; which have the potential to pave the way for further work

This is something of a remarkable book. I’d learnt one of the authors had died, and having read two other of his books, and thought they were two of the best books I’ve read in quite a long time, I was very disappointed there would be no more. This couldn’t really have been too much ‘more’. It is stunningly good and has changed my understanding of early human societies.Marx and Engels begin the Manifesto by saying, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’.

Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story...

Okay—first I’ll try to say something nice about this book. I truly enjoyed reading about Kandiaronk. And about the evidence that North American Indian ideas about individual liberty and autonomy spread to and deeply affected settlers in the New World--perhaps changing the entire course of world history.But I pretty well hated the entire book.Because the authors are dressing up fanciful ideas as plausible, evidence-backed ideas. They do admit to some speculating, but the whole tone of the writing...

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? With the grandiose subtitle of “

Having read Sapiens and Guns, Germs and Steel, or various nature writers, I am familiar with the assumptions that has tended to crop up in this field of Big History. And then, having soft formed ideas that something just didn't connect, while enjoying the sweep of their logic and arguments, I shook my head with vague consternation at my instincts. This book, brilliantly elucidated, written for the general reader (ie well written) lays out in so many ways my issues with Big History books. The aut...

Graeber’s final (and most ambitious) gift to us is only the beginning…Preamble:--There’s a certain joy seeing status quo liberals frame Graeber’s social imagination as “dangerous”; suddenly, that inescapable Mark Fisher “Capitalist Realism” overcast disperses and the skies open with endless possibilities. What better time than now to revive social imagination as status quo faith propels us towards ecological collapse. --There’s also a certain relief from the Western Left internet debates (ex. “a...

David Wengrow and the late David Graeber have chosen to venture into the pitched battlefield that is the telling and retelling of the origins of human civilization. Their tome (700+ pages or 24+ hours of audio) is ostensibly provocative though discursive and predicated on a questionable methodology (a more expansive, inclusive, and wide-eyed reading of primary sources on or from primitive human groups and their related artifacts) with the grandiose title The Dawn of Everything. They position the...

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on… This is a difficult book to review. Not only is it long and extremely ambitious, it is also a beguiling mixture of strengths and weaknesses that are difficult to untangle. To begin with, this book is not, as its title promises, a history of humanity; and considering that the book only examines the past 10,000 years, it is also not about the dawn of humanity

For 350 years, it has been common knowledge that Man went from bands of hunter-gatherers, to pastoralists, to farming, to industry. In parallel, Man lived in families, in tribes, in villages and then in cities, as technology improved. Technology, the third parallel, took us from the stone age through the bronze age and the iron age to the industrial revolution. All neat, tidy and clearly separable. David Graeber and David Wengrow claim there is no evidence for this. In The Dawn of Everything, th...

The authors know there is no central overriding authoritative narrative explaining the past through fabricated “just so stories” and our understanding of our beginnings is often tainted by pernicious teleology. Charles Mann, an author cited in this book for falsely describing pre-Columbus South America in terms of Kingdoms because he could only think in terms of his own world-view. Mann wrote the Wall Street Journal book review for Homo Sapiens and it was clear he had no idea what it meant since...

I cannot recall the last time I was so disappointed by a book that seemed to promise so much!First of all, and very importantly, this work is BLOATED and desperately calls out for a good editor who would likely be able to slash at least 1/3 or more of its current bulk without losing anything of importance.The "arguments" contained are repetitious and often circular, and I hardly think it deserves the title "A New History of Humanity."Yes, we are learning -- and clearly have much yet to learn --