Graeme Newell's Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Five stars for information…two stars for readability.

This book lays out some fascinating new findings on the origins of humanity and civilization. I was taught in school that hunter-gatherers led short brutal lives; then, humanity’s ascent to agriculture, cities, and governments was a deliverance from darkness and ignorance. Well, this book pretty much turns this whole model on its head.

Because Europeans wrote down their history in books and ancient civilizations didn’t, the 18th & 19th century scholars conveniently conjectured a self-aggrandizing story of our ancestors. The “noble savage” myth was born - grunting cave people more akin to apes than men.

Turns out that most of this trope got started back in the heyday of colonialism when Europeans needed moral justification for the genocide they were perpetrating across the globe. Gaeber & Wengrow present a trove of convincing evidence that the pinnacle of civilization was actually achieved in ancient times.

New archeological evidence shows that life in ancient times was pretty darn nice: large cities, sustainable land management, effective community policing, and a good life. The authors lay out a solid case that some of humanities greatest suffering has just come about recently with the advent of large centralized governments.

For most of human history we haven’t had priests, bureaucracies, and kings. Instead, we’ve had local municipalities, much like old-style New England town meetings. These governing councils did a bang-up job of building a good quality of life for most everyone. And many of these cities were BIG…many with thousands and thousands of people. They got big municipal projects accomplished, prevented abuses of power, and assured that no one person subjugated the populace.

It’s only been in modern times that this has fallen apart. Today, the top 1% have 43% of the resources. New archeological evidence shows this rarely happened in ancient times. The authors make the case that today we’re living at the nadir of civilization.

The evidence presented in this book is quite convincing and quite exhaustive, and I mean that literally. This is an exhausting book - 700 pages of minutia. I get the feeling the authors were primarily interested in building a solid case for their premise. Unfortunately, they neglected basic storytelling. I continually found myself nodding off in the middle of a paragraph on some esoteric piece of evidence. There are so many examples and so many civilizations profiled that it’s just darn hard to follow.

This could have been an outstanding book…if only it had been graced with a capable editor.

The information is groundbreaking, but it’s a long slog.