Humans Have Always Been Wrong About Humans

The phrase “the dawn of everything” first struck David Wengrow, one of the authors of The Dawn of Everything, as marvelously absurd. Everything. Everything! It was too gigantic, too rich, too loonily sublime. Penguin, the book’s august publisher, would hate it.

But Wengrow, a sly, convivial British archaeologist at University College London, and his coauthor, the notorious American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, whose sudden death in Venice two years ago shocked a world of admirers, couldn’t let it go.

Twitter users, after all, dug the title—Graeber had asked—and it suited the pair’s cosmic undertaking. Their book would throw down a gauntlet. “It’s time to change the course of human history, starting with the past,” as the egg-yolk-yellow ads now declare in the London Underground. Wengrow and Graeber had synthesized new discoveries about peoples like the Kwakiutl, who live in the Pacific Northwest; the foragers of Göbekli Tepe, a religious center in latter-day Turkey built between 9500 and 8000 BCE; and the Indigenous inhabitants of a full-dress metropolis some 4,000 years ago in what’s now Louisiana.

Citing this existing research, and more from a range of social scientists, Wengrow and Graeber argue that the life of hunter-gatherers before widespread farming was nothing like “the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory,” which hold that early humans lived in small bands in which they acted almost entirely on instinct, either brutish (as in Hobbes) or egalitarian and innocent (as in Rousseau). In contrast, the Dawn authors represent prehistoric societies as “a carnival parade of political forms,” a profusion of rambunctious social experiments, where everything from kinship codes to burial rites to gender relations to warfare were forever being conceived, reconceived, satirized, scrapped, and reformed. In an act of intellectual effrontery that recalls Karl Marx, Wengrow and Graeber use this insight to overthrow all existing dogma about humankind—to reimagine, in short, everything.

They did. The book’s a gem. Its dense scholarly detail, compiling archaeological findings from some 30,000 years of global civilizations, is leavened by both freewheeling jokes and philosophic passages of startling originality. At a time when much nonfiction hugs the shore of TED-star consensus to argue that things are either good or bad, The Dawn takes to the open sea to argue that things are, above all, subject to change.

For starters, the book makes quick work of maxims by domineering thinkers like Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. Chief among these is the idea that early humans, bent on nothing but the grim chores of survival, led short and dangerous lives chasing calories and subjugating others for sex and labor. By the research, many or even most premoderns did none of this. Instead, they developed expressive, idiosyncratic societies determined as much by artistic and political practices as by biological imperatives. For instance, while the Kwakiutl practiced slavery, ate salmon, and maintained large bodies, their next-door neighbors in latter-day California, the Yurok, despised slavery, subsisted on pine nuts, and prized extreme slimness (which they showed off by slipping through tiny apertures).

Wengrow and Graeber further cast doubt on the assumption that Indigenous societies organized themselves in only rudimentary ways. In fact, their societies were both complex and protean: The Cheyenne and Lakota convened police forces, but only to enforce participation in buffalo hunts; they summarily abolished the police in the off-season. For their part, the Natchez of latter-day Mississippi pretended to revere their all-knowing dictator but in fact ran free, knowing that their monarch was too much of a homebody to go after them. Likewise, the precept that large monuments and tombs are always proof of systems of rank comes up for review. In an especially mind-bending passage, Wengrow and Graeber show that the majority of Paleolithic tombs contained not grandees but individuals with physical anomalies including dwarfism, giantism, and spinal abnormalities. Such societies appear not to have idolized elites so much as outliers.

By the time I was halfway through The Dawn, I found myself overcome with a kind of Socratic ecstasy. At once, I felt unsuffocated by false beliefs. I brooded on how many times I’d been told that it’s natural to keep my offspring strapped to my chest, or sprint like I’m being chased by a tiger, or keep my waist small because males like females who look fertile, or move heaven and earth to help men spread their seed because that’s what prehistoric humans did. This was all a lie. The book’s boldest claim convulsed actual glee: Humans were never in a state of nature at all! Humans have simply always been humans: ironic, sentient, self-reflective, and free from any species-wide programming. The implications were galactic.

After Graeber died, on September 2, 2020, not long after alerting Twitter that he and Wengrow had completed their magnum opus, Wengrow found himself both grieving and rushing to finish. The grief nearly knocked him out. But there was one advantage to the hurry: Wengrow stuck “The Dawn of Everything” on the page proofs, too late for Penguin to balk. The sun rose on the book on October 19, 2021, with its golden-hour cover, and soon after it hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

I first met Wengrow—well, I first met him in Twitter DMs, but we’re moving to real life now—in Manhattan, where, over several espressos to brighten his jet lag, we discussed The Dawn. I also offered condolences on the death of Graeber. The official cause, which Wengrow was reluctant to discuss, was pancreatic necrosis. But on October 16, 2020, Nika Dubrovsky, a Russian artist and Graeber’s widow, wrote that, though she’d shielded Graeber from Covid, he’d occasionally bridled at wearing a mask. “I want to add my own conspiracy theory,” she wrote. “I firmly believe [his death] is related to Covid.”

Wengrow and Graeber were devoted to one another as few writing partners are. Their collaboration seems to have been a case of true philia, the kind of meeting of the minds I associate with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Some of this is explained by similarities in their backgrounds. Graeber grew up among working-class radicals in Manhattan, while Wengrow was born to a hairdresser and a partner in a small clothing firm in North London, his grandparents having been, he told me, “gifted people who lost their homes and opportunities when the Nazis came to power.” Though Wengrow’s father later found success in the rag trade, his son was the first in his family to go to college.

Wengrow made it to Oxford in a roundabout way. Having tried to be an actor for a year or two, he thought he’d study English, so he wrote earnest letters to several Oxford colleges to express his lifelong passion for literary studies. When he hit a wall, he canvassed friends about fields of study that might be easier to break into; someone mentioned anthropology and archaeology. He barely knew what these disciplines were, but once again he wrote an earnest letter, this time only to St. Hugh’s, assuring the college of his lifelong passion for archaeology. When he went in for an interview, the interviewer held up a sheaf of letters. On top was the letter he’d recently written about his passion for archaeology. The rest were the nearly identical ones he’d written about his passion for literature. The silence was awkward. But he got in. He received his DPhil in 2001.

Nine years later, Wengrow had just published his second book, What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West, which argues that civilizations don’t leapfrog from one technological miracle to the next but progress by the gradual transformation of everyday behavior. Having landed in New Orleans for a conference, he was lining up for passport control when a warm, rumpled anthropologist introduced himself: David Graeber. Graeber was impressed by Wengrow’s research on Middle Eastern cylinder seals, which he’d described as an early example of commodity branding. In turn, Wengrow was impressed to meet an anthropologist who knew what a cylinder seal is. The Davids stayed in close touch, meeting in either Manhattan or London, and at some point resolved to create a “pamphlet” summarizing new findings in archaeology that undermine many of the stories told about early human societies. For 10 years they talked, one man’s thoughts taking up where the other’s left off. Eventually they knew the pamphlet would be a book. Determined to preempt critics who’d be eager to pounce on any error, they were meticulous, writing and rewriting each other’s work so thoroughly that neither could tell whose prose was whose. The two never stopped exchanging ideas, and they were still planning a sequel to The Dawn—or maybe three—when Graeber died.

Given his background, Wengrow has never shaken the feeling of being an outsider in academia. “Oddly, this feeling doesn’t go away even when you achieve a degree of recognition and status,” he told me. He and Graeber “could relate on that level. And there was a common sense of humor, which comes from the Jewish background. If he hadn’t heard from me in a couple of days he’d call and put on a grandmother sort of voice: ‘You don’t write … you don’t call.’”

Everywhere I went with Wengrow, he fielded impromptu elegies for Graeber, who was famous as the author of Debt and Bullshit Jobs, and as an architect of various anti-capitalist uprisings, notably the Occupy movement. Over our first lunch, Wengrow suggested that the specter of his brilliant friend might still be lurking. (Graeber, whose funeral was framed as an “Intergalactic Memorial Carnival,” loved the paranormal.) Indeed, Graeber remained a spirited absence during the time I spent with Wengrow. I pictured him somewhere between a guardian angel and a poltergeist.

The next time I saw Wengrow was in April in Dublin, to grab a bite at a … what was this place? A disco or a ballroom, loosely attached to a hot-dog stand, at which hot dogs were sold out. Wengrow was unbothered. He and his wife—Ewa, who was trained in archaeology and now works at the British Library—companionably split a burger. After dinner, Wengrow was scheduled to address a group of labor activists about matters archaeological, but for now we discussed Irish politics, and in particular the vexing matter of Facebook’s and Google’s longtime use of Ireland as a tax haven (an arrangement that seems to be ending).

The gathering had been organized by Wengrow’s host in Dublin, Conor Kostick, an Irish sci-fi writer, champion of the 1950s board game Diplomacy, and devoted leftist. Captivated by The Dawn soon after its publication, Kostick had emailed Wengrow, inviting him to speak to a small group at Wynn’s, an old Victorian hotel and pub on Abbey Street and a short walk from the hot-dog disco. Kostick’s invitation showed some chutzpah. If Wengrow took it up, he’d have to break up the extravagant victory lap that had been his book tour in the US to address a few dozen labor activists, trade unionists, and scruffy anarchists in a modest venue. He’d also be coming to Dublin by way of Vancouver, where he had just been flown business class to give a TED talk, on a docket with Elon Musk.

Wengrow said yes without missing a beat. Kostick tweeted: “Imagine Darwin was coming to #Dublin, to speak about his new book On the Origin of Species. Well that’s how I feel about being able to hear @davidwengrow’s talk next Thursday.” The invitation was just what Wengrow needed, he told me, a sort of anti-TED, “to keep mind and soul together.”

Wengrow considered TED both cultlike and fascinating. Reflecting on the experience with Kostick and me, Wengrow spoke animatedly about Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Russian dissident who’d kicked off the conference with a speech about the war in Ukraine. Wengrow had no contact with Musk (about whom he appeared to know little, and care less) and joined forces instead with Anicka Yi, a conceptual artist who works largely in fragrance, and the feminist author Jeanette Winterson. “They were great company and reminded me what I was there for, which was to get the message of my work with David Graeber out there in a place where you might least expect to find it.” Munching on his burger, he still seemed dazed by a single data point: Attending TED can cost $25,000. Kostick, who has a ponytail and the vibe of a Roz Chast character, refused to take that in. The average annual salary for an Irish laborer is about $35,000.

Weeks later, I watched Wengrow’s TED talk. In khakis and an oxford-cloth shirt buttoned to the top, he cited his fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan to debunk the stubborn fallacy that a make-believe “agricultural revolution” ruined humanity by creating stationary societies, private property, armies, and dreadful social inequality. On the contrary. Some early farming societies rejected these traps for 4,000 years and traveled far and wide, spreading innovations from potter’s wheels to leavened bread across the Middle East and North Africa. Cities in the Indus Valley from 4,500 years ago had high-quality egalitarian housing and show no evidence of kings or queens, no royal monuments, no aggrandizing architecture.

The hardest punch thrown by The Dawn is its implicit rejection of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion that “there is no alternative” to feral capitalism, a claim still abbreviated in Britain as “TINA.” Laying waste to TINA, The Dawn opens a kaleidoscope of human possibilities, suggesting that today’s neoliberal arrangements might one day be remembered as not an epoch but a fad.

We strolled a few blocks to the hotel, where the upstairs lecture room seemed like something out of a pub scene in Ulysses. Voluble young radicals filed in, bedecked in buttons of esoteric meaning. Rhona McCord, a socialist and anti-fascist representing Unite, a massive trade union, stood up to encourage people to join. For as little as 65 cents a week. We were far from the Gulfstream brotherhood of TED.

Surrounded by students and leftie hotheads, Wengrow was in his element. I asked a Covid-masked anarchist, who went by the mononym Shane, about The Dawn of Everything. “It’s a really hopeful book,” he said. “It’s very easy to get trapped in that mental thing of, ‘Nothing’s ever going to change. It’s just going to be the same neoliberal, state capitalist thing forever.’ But a lot of the book is just saying, ‘No, we can change.’ We have been doing that for the entire time that humans have existed.” I turned to Liv, a Portuguese anarchist whose buttons excoriated the foes of the working class and commemorated the Spanish Civil War. “We have to make a change. And it has to be as fast as we can, otherwise … it will kill us all.” I heard this from other Dawn enthusiasts. The book delivers jolts to the system, and—in some readers—shakes defeatist notions that human exploitation is inevitable.

But why have we felt so defeated, so locked into TINA, I wondered. As I took my seat, a plaintive passage from the book popped into my mind: “How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients … but as inescapable elements of the human condition?” The poltergeist in the air was insistent: Why do we put up with this?

From the lectern, Wengrow asked that no recording be made. He likes synchronous human exchange in person or by telephone, and he welcomes questions and disruptions. While composing The Dawn, Wengrow and Graeber built arguments to the tune of their own overlapping voices, interruption, enthusiasm, dissent, doubt, and rapturous agreement.

Early in the book, the Davids even offer a spontaneous celebration of dialog as the engine of philosophy. “Neuroscientists,” they write, “tell us that … the ‘window of consciousness,’ during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds.” This isn’t always true. “The great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else … In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end.”

The same collaborative meaning-making was in evidence at Wynn’s, where Wengrow was receptive to everyone, even the inevitable town-hall shaman who stood and delivered a mumblecore homily about … something. For an academic superstar with a theory of everything, Wengrow lacked arrogance in an uncanny way, the way someone else might lack eyebrows.

The lecture touched on something called Dunbar’s number: the influential if dubious thesis by evopsych anthropologist Robin Dunbar that humans function best in groups of up to 150 people, implying that in bigger groups, they need guns, monarchs, and bureaucracy lest they become unruly. A bite-size idea, the kind of pro-cop, pro-executive palaver that animates airport books about “management” and “leadership.” But then Wengrow pointed to actual archaeological evidence. In December, researchers Jennifer M. Miller and Yiming Wang published a study of ostrich-eggshell beads that were distributed over vast territory in Africa 50,000 years ago, suggesting that early human populations lived in attenuated social networks of far more than 150 people and kept cohesion and peace without police or kings.

I left Wynn’s while Wengrow was still talking animatedly to a pair of Gen Z activists, holding thoughts and reflecting on problems for hours on end.

Wengrow and I met the next day too. I didn’t think any lecture could be less glitzy than the event with Kostick and the 65-cents-a-week Unite membership, but I was wrong. The final talk Wengrow gave in Ireland was at University College Dublin, and there was not a CEO or tattooed fanboy in sight. This time the audience—in a narrow gray lecture hall with an undersized platform on which four academics balanced precariously—was made up of a few dozen laconic academics. At UCD, Wengrow’s sponsor was Graeme Warren, vice president of the International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research. Where Wengrow had referred to the Wynn’s gig as one for “trade unionists,” this one was for “hunter-gatherers.”

As I got my bearings in the windowless auditorium, the social dynamics came slowly into focus. At last, one of the men, sitting alone at the edge of the audience, emerged as important. When he started to speak, I recognized the room’s suspense from my own tour in graduate school; he was donnish, oracular, the one whose opinion matters. Would he like The Dawn of Everything? Sweetly, Wengrow himself seemed deferential. The suspense broke when the man—I later learned he was Daniel Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin—offered a technical observation about the book, and then shook his head in pure astonishment at the achievement.

Wengrow was pleased. But he was no less delighted when a baby-faced lecturer, Neil Carlin, proposed in a deceptively gentle brogue that Wengrow had gone wrong in his analysis of Stonehenge. Didn’t The Dawn, Carlin asked, merely rehash the mainstream account of Stonehenge’s construction? Carlin’s gall was exciting, but my ears pricked up for another reason. Finally. An archaeological site I’d heard of.

“There’s a very big presence on my shoulder as I speak about this,” Wengrow said. That would be, I gathered, Michael Parker Pearson, one of Wengrow’s colleagues at UCL, the ranking expert on Stonehenge and an archaeologist whom some consider Anglocentric. Had Wengrow crossed up his book’s own thesis by failing to question orthodoxies, especially the ones that credit imperial powers like England with all great human achievements? The upstart Carlin was sidling uncomfortably close to charging Wengrow with sycophancy or even careerism.

Wengrow wasn’t thrown. He’s indifferent to wolf-pack dynamics everywhere, most of all in academic settings. A preoccupation of The Dawn, after all, is the contingency of hierarchies. They come and go, sometimes literally with the weather; any system of seniority and groveling is a joke; we are hardwired neither to rule nor to be ruled over. In particular, Wengrow’s own newfound status as an archbishop of archaeology, Mr. $25K-a-membership, struck him as laughable. As Jacques Lacan wrote, “If a man who thinks he’s a king is mad, a king who thinks he’s a king is no less so.”

While Wengrow had received posh plaudits in Vancouver, and whoops of support at Wynn’s, he seemed to find full-contact dialog with the UCD archaeologists most gratifying. And stimulating. The eye-opening questions, the testing of ego, the swerves in and out of accord. Reflecting on his collaboration with Graeber, Wengrow ventured that university management has made academia so sterile that making friends within it has become a radical act. “In that way, too,” Wengrow said, “our relationship was going against the grain.”

True to form, Wengrow earnestly considered Carlin’s Stonehenge questions, and even made notes. Later, he gave the critique a complete hearing in an email to me. As with the missing hot dogs, Wengrow was unbothered.

Like the death of Wengrow’s intellectual soul mate, The Dawn opens far, far more questions than it closes. The book’s several critics seem to balk at its ambition more than its research. Some say its idea of the dawn of everything, beginning 30,000 or so years ago, is more like its teatime. Others say Wengrow and Graeber are so eager to find anarchism and feminism in early civilizations that they shade the data.

In the book’s final chapters, clouds pass overhead. The authors land on the puzzle of modern “stuckness”—the idea that we have lost the experimental spirit that makes humans human and settled into the ruts of our capitalist-neoliberal hellscape. This works as a rhetorical move: No one wants to be stuck, and dread of this fate can impel a person to action. But as an overarching theory, the idea that humans moved from freedom to stuckness seems to reinscribe some of the schematic evolutionary folktales that the book exists to critique. And if our spirits were flying along just fine, creating new worlds until they were all simultaneously crushed by Thatcherian capitalism, isn’t this just a new fall-from-grace story, like the ones that said humanity was wrecked by agriculture or urbanization or the internet?

Contemporary society strikes me as far from stuck. Precarious and imperiled, but not stuck. The pandemic, for one thing, threw into relief the proliferation of cultlike groups that reject modern medicine and even modernity itself. More encouragingly, young workers everywhere are organizing, protesting, and taking to the road in record-high numbers. Gender and race are being reimagined. Any or all of this might be threatening or vertiginous or worse, but none of it suggests stuckness.

Wengrow didn’t worry too much about my objection. He holds ideas lightly, and if the “stuckness” concept didn’t land for me, he said, maybe I could just let it go. The book supplies hundreds of rich examples of early societies that didn’t conform to evolutionary stages. The research is what most excites Wengrow. The imperative to act on our humanness—to refuse to sleepwalk, to refuse to get stuck—grows out of the scholarship.

Over drinks after the lecture, Wengrow talked, when pressed, about his book, but he already seemed to be testing new intellectual territory—the cult of TED, ostrich-shell currency, good old Stonehenge. Academic careers, like all human endeavors, don’t have to be only about prizes or disgrace. There is so much to study. There are worlds to imagine. Call it TAAL: The alternatives are limitless. 

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