The Moral Origins of Evolution

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One to three per cent of human populations are psychopathic, sociopathic. They just don't play nice by the rules. So you got to deal with men. But when berm himself gives the big picture of human social evolution, he does something that, to our minds, was a bit strange,. ecause it seems to go against his own theory. He goes back to that idea that before the invention of agriculture, every one lived in societies of equals and there were no dominators. Now, why would that be? If what makes us distinct is this capacity for imagination, why did we leave it on the shelf for all those years?

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.