The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

This is a good book and an important book. But it’s not a great book. I’d welcome comments from friends on what they think.

Really it’s two books. The book that interests me is the revisionist anthropology, a re-examination of human prehistory that upends current understandings. The other book is a critique of modern society, a call to egalitarian anarchism. That is also interesting to me but not as much and reads more as personal opinion than scientific writing.

To focus on the anthropology part, I really like the authors' challenging the standard narrative of humanity. That we went from unorganized egalitarian bands and tribes to the modern hierarchical nation-state, an inevitable march of progress, led by Great Men. Of course this simplistic view has been debunked for decades now but it still persists and suffuses everything we read or think about the development of human society. We need books like this one to get us to a more nuanced (and correct) view.

I just wish they wrote their arguments better! The book is full of details from diverse human populations, summarizing new archaeology to argue that this group never really organized into dense cities, or that group rejected hierarchical kingly authority, or these others were an egalitarian matriarchal society. I crave this kind of science! But the writing suffers from being diffuse at times, hard to follow, and repetitious. I lost the plot many times. Also their core arguments seem to be less than iron-clad, there’s a lot of “experts say this thing about this society but we say the opposite because our interpretation is correct”. I wasn’t entirely convinced in many cases. But I’m a layman and am certainly not expert enough judge their claims, nor will I do the research on the backing material. (And to their credit, there is a very extensive bibliography and list of footnotes.)

Then there’s the other book, the argument that modern society could be different. That we’re not trapped on some treadmill of inevitable domination of nation states and ruthless capitalism. I very much want to believe that could be true but it comes off pretty ax-grindy here. And it’s a major part of the book. I almost gave up after the second chapter which spends way more time talking about Rousseau than the anthropological record. But the balance is corrected for the middle 3/4 of the book and as a whole it comes together to make a strong, well reasoned argument.

I just wish the argument and the science were more clearly presented. A churlish thing to say after one of the authors passed away, maybe, but some good editing and rewriting could have honed this into a generation-defining book.