The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

By: David Graeber, David Wengrow

Narrated by: Malk Williams

Brought to you by Penguin.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, 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 reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.

'Pacey and potentially revolutionary' Sunday Times

'Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read' The Guardian

'Boldly ambitious, entertaining and thought-provoking' Observer

'This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast' Nassim Nicholas Taleb

© David Graeber, David Wengrow 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critic reviews

A boldly ambitious work ... entertaining and thought-provoking ... an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature. (Andrew Anthony)

What a gift ... Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring. (William Deresiewicz)

Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read ... As we seek new, sustainable ways to organise our world, we need to understand the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must certainly question conventional versions of our history which we have accepted, unexamined, for far too long. (David Priestland)

Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present. (Bryan Appleyard)

A fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of humanity. It seeks nothing less than to completely upend the terms on which the Standard Narrative rests ... erudite, compelling, generative, and frequently remarkably funny ... once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop. (Emily M. Kern)

A spectacular, flashy and ground-breaking retelling of human history, blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it's a pleasure to read and offers a bracing challenge on every page. (Simon Sebag Montefiore)

A timely, intriguing, original and provocative take on the most recent thirty thousand years of human history ... consistently thought-provoking ... In forcing us to re-examine some of the cosy assumptions about our deep past, Graeber and Wengrow remind us very clearly of the perils of holding ourselves captive to a deterministic vision of human history as we try to shape our future. (James Suzman)

An engrossing series of insights ... They re-inject humanity into our distant forebears, suggesting that our prevailing story about human history - that not much innovation occurred in human societies until the invention of agriculture - is utterly wrong. (Anthony Doerr)

Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will generate debate for years to come. (Rutger Bregman)

Interesting content

Wow, some real revelations about the history of social organization here. Learnt a lot, as I have from David Graeber's previous books

An illuminating story deconstructiing age-old narratives

The authors deconstruct our ingrained view of a linear development of our civilization from hunter-gather and pasetoralist societies to agricultural slaves with a wealth of new archaeological evidence and charge the reader with a hope that nonlinearity is possible that that we can liberate ourselves from the tyranny of guns and steel because such feats have already been done in humanity's nonlinear past.
A must-read for any individual who might have lost hope in that things in the political arena could run a different course.

Better than Yuval Harari’s Sapiens

A brilliant, wide ranging and fascinating journey into human history that references intellectual and indigenous voices alike.

not suited to this format

this is an important landmark academic document. it is conceptually dense and needs to be poured over to unpack. The audiobook format presents it in an upbeat 'level' toner which impedes comprehension.

Mindblowing

A real tour de force in tearing down so many assumptions about our origins and there nature of society and human organisation. It sagged a little in the middle for me, but it was so worth it. Really opened my eyes