The Dawn of Everything

Graeber and Wengrow spent years demolishing the standard story of human prehistory — the one where small bands of happy hunter-gatherers inevitably gave way to agriculture, then cities, then states, then inequality, as if the whole thing were a natural progression nobody could have stopped. The archaeological and anthropological evidence tells a completely different story: humans have lived in every conceivable configuration, have experimented with democracy and hierarchy and everything in between, have chosen and rejected kings, have built cities without rulers. The implication is enormous — if there was no inevitable march toward the world we have, then the world we have is a choice, and choices can be unmade. The most important work of popular history of the last decade and the most liberating.