Discussion of "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"

Presenters: Noel Z and Karen W

This 700-page tome by David Graeber and David Wengrow, professors at the London School of Economics and University College London respectively, was begun in 2011 after the Occupy Wall Street Movement as a study of inequality. Over the next ten years it drew on the latest anthropological and archeological scholarship to grow into a total reconsideration of human prehistory. The authors discuss Paleolithic hunter-gatherers worldwide and also the various early peoples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Minoa, the Indus Valley, Mezzo America, the Mississippian territories, and more. To cut to the chase, the way things are now is just not the way things have always been politically, culturally, socially, economically or in other ways. Humans have been much more innovative in the past (and the authors hope in the future, too). As a teaser, the authors document that many ideas of the European Enlightenment were stimulated by contact between the French and egalitarian Native Americans in the Great Lakes area, thus changing the history of Europe. Join us.

An article on “The Dawn of Everything” (2021’s most important book) published today: https://mashable.com/article/dawn-of-everything-history-book

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