The Ice Corridor - The Beginning and the End

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Most prehistorians have seen these footprints as the earliest evidence. They push back by some considerable thousands of years. The key there is that i thinktis is onot ste the place where they doe. They did the atomic thebar migt tand ri worthy did the first nuclear weapon, atomic bomb was detonated. Night wads at 19 thousandnd less 26 thousand or somebody was, like, seven thousand years older.

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.