How Images Can Play Important Cognitive Roles

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Tetde: Images and image systems throughout human history have played much more complex roles than we actually tend to give them to day. We tend to think of images as illustrations to a story, or things that illustrate a proposal that you might make in the form of language. In australi and aboriginal art, for example, images often incode land rights and systems of inher tants. People have found ways to use images as really ere important intellectual devices.

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.