The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Original title: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow reassemble the puzzle of human history, challenging the dominant notions of social development as a movement from egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers – through the agricultural revolution and urbanization – to the creation of hierarchical states. According to the authors, this traditional narrative has nothing to do with the facts; it merely reproduces myths entrenched in historical science. Humanity may be following an entirely different path. Based on data from archaeology, anthropology, and related disciplines acquired over the past decades, along with the opinions of indigenous thinkers, Graeber and Wengrow propose looking at social history from outside the Western canon. The authors objectively assess the ambition of their task – the understanding of a new picture and its acceptance by science will take years, making it even more important to produce a conceptual shift now. “The Dawn of Everything” began as a kind of game and transformed into an exciting intellectual journey.