One review on 29 Apr 2023

First Published: 2021

Non-Fiction

The Dawn of Everything

A new view of the history of humanity

Authors: David Graeber , David Wengrow 

Summary: An interpretation of the latest thinkingin human deep history and archaeology. It is not all an inevitable story of progress from cave to today - different ways were possible and can still be achieved.

Publisher:
Penguin
Date first read: Sat 29th Apr 2023

Format:   Paperback

Catalogued: 30th Apr 2023

Synopsis

A detailed and highly referenced account of the problems with conventioanl archaeological interpretation both of interactions with "primitive" people in recorded history and of the archaelogical record going back over 10,000 years and potentially 100,000 years since the human brain evolved.

The authors discuss the implications of alternative views of the record and use that to offer both a model of different modes of development that actually occured and why we may have ended up where we seem to be today "stuck" in a single paradigm of linear progress and invevitable unsustainable growth ofhuman civilization - which of course is now crashing into some more of less hard planetary limits.

Reviews

Simple Rules Create Complex Social Systems

by rogerco on Sat 29th Apr 2023.

Societies and Civilisations differ in the ways in which they constrain the three basic human freedoms - freedom of movement (eg away from oppression), freedom of choice (eg choice to refuse to obey any order), and freedom to create any form of new social order that one can imagine.