Rewrite Your History
The Dawn of Everything
By David Graeber & David Wengrow

30 Jan, 2025
Miscellaneous Reviews
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021’s The Dawn of Everything is, as its subtitle proclaims, a non-fiction book presenting A New History of Humanity. Although really, what they offer is a new interpretation of history. Which would not be as snappy a subtitle.
There is a standard version of the progression of technology and civilization that many of us learned in school: a long uncharted stone age of wandering tribes leading simple, boring, uniform lives, the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of towns and cities, the creation of centralized states, and finally after some fuss, Canada. Whether or not all that was good is open to debate, but there is a certain degree of inevitability about it all. A leads to B leads to C and so on, each stage bringing additional complexity and challenges.
It would be disturbing if the facts did not to line up nicely with the model. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that they don’t.