The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow does a great job at debunking the big histories of figures like Noah Yuval Harari and Stephen Pinker, but at a cost that ultimately undermines their argument.

In this discussion and critique of a wonderfully disruptive book, I outline their case and some of the evidence, argue that they are implicitly advocating a state of nature myth, based on reason not Eden or violence, and suggest that this, unwittingly, recolonises the past with modern secular reason.

But it’s a book very much worth engaging with!

0:44 Why they are right about retelling our back story.
4:50 Why they are right about emerging evidence for its endless complexity.
10:44 Tasters of the alternative Homo sapiens prehistory they tell.
18:20 And yet, what is crucially missing in their retelling.
28:22 How it recolonises the past with notions of secular reason, freedom and will.
33:19 The first cities as ritual sites and what that says about consciousness.
37:33 Why a demythologised past isn’t enough for our future.