I was delighted to meet David Wengrow at the Idler Festival. His coauthor, David Graeber, was a great friend of the Idler.

David Wengrow and I spoke about their revolutionary, fascinating and inspiring book, The Dawn of Everything. It challenges the concensus history and prehistory of humanity, as found in writers such as Steven Pinker and Noah Yuval Harari.

As one questioner from the audience stressed, this is so important for freeing ourselves from their deterministic anticipations of the future.

But I have critiques of the new story as well. David Wengrow's responses to them were illuminating, I felt, and I hope my thoughts were interesting to him.

My fuller discussion of the book itself can also be found on this podcast.