Is There a Universe Pattern?

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Sometimes it's the smaller groups, the seasonably smaller groups, are more hierarchical. For example, the circum polar peoples would have a very age winter houses built of whale bones and whale ribs. And during that long winter season, there was no private property. People would have to share everything, even sexual partners. But equally, we have other examples like in the nambiquara, brazilian amazonian society. When they congregate into the larger villages to practise cultivation and things are actually not particularly a galitarian. So there's no uniform sort of paten to it. It's not as if small means small means equal and large means hierarchical. Sometimes it's the other

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.