We think that there were at least ten, possibly more, such monumental centres in that particular area. And when i say i'm not exaggerating, we're talking about huge stone buildings with great sculptured images on them. There's no evidence that they had domesticated crops or that they were keeping domestic animals. So there you have two inferences, which, according to diamond and according traditional wisdom, should be wrong. Untogatherers should not be doing this kind of thing. But here we have very solid archaeological evidence that indeed they were right.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.