Richard J. Severson

In The Dawn of Everything (2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow eviscerate the standard “march of progress” version of world history that belittles Stone Age foragers while amplifying the significance of the “agricultural revolution” and the crowning achievements of urban societies.  They challenge this ubiquitous triumphal narrative by marshaling a profusion of new evidence from archaeology and anthropology that provides a better understanding of human activity prior to the Neolithic Age.  For instance, there is new evidence that our Upper Paleolithic ancestors lived in cities and experimented with democracy and other forms of self-governance long before the domestication of cereal grains such as wheat and barley.  These ancestral people were our intellectual equals, not child-like simpletons whom history has ignored.    

Like Graeber and Wengrow, I suspect that the confinement of human history to the most recent decamillenium has spawned a legacy of misapprehension regarding our place in the world.  As a biological species, Homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years.  Almost everything significant about us—the invention of language, music, art, culture, self-awareness, moral conscience, spirituality, medicine, tool making, curiosity about the natural world, cooking, storytelling, pair bonding, and on and on—took shape in what we call “prehistory.”  It is not wishful sentimentalism to acknowledge that our Stone Age ancestors were animists who strived to live in harmony with the natural world.  The excesses of modern civilization, on the other hand, are threatening to destroy the natural world, as doomsday news reports about global warming, acidification of the oceans, mass extinction events, etc., constantly remind us.  What can be done to remedy this global ecological crisis?  I think it is vital that we find new ways to appreciate the wisdom of our distant ancestors.