Changing Seasons - Is That Too Simple?

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The idea of stages is very appealing. You can reduce a lot of complexity and diversity into a simpler model, which can be over symblefied. But on the other hand, you want some kind of theory what happens when you hit this particular a population density. And i think one of the reasons why that simple model is still talked about is cause it was kind of elegant. It's easy to remember, bands, tribes, chiefs, an states. We can all get our heads around thete andand although archaeologists and anthropologists have been critiquing that model blind for generations now,. people still remember it because what we haven't done is put something equally elegant in in its placed

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.