Are You Just Going to Ignore All That Evidence?

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The myth of the noble, peaceful native american a savages. Ok, so that's debunked, obviously. That's kind of a race tude. But neither were they just as violent, let's say, as the crusaders,. Or something like that. So what do you do with, like, archaeological finds like the pinker sights? And in the better angels of our nature, were, like, maybe 20 % of the skeletons in a particular dig site show indications of violent death. It's not like they all died violently. Yet yet, the rates are much higher than they would be in a in a civilized state, something like that as a percentage. The key to

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.