The Dawn of Everything: Graeber and Wengrow's New History

David Graeber died in September 2020, three weeks after completing The Dawn of Everything with archaeologist David Wengrow. It was the culmination of a decade of collaboration—an anthropologist and an archaeologist trying to answer a simple question: What actually happened in human prehistory?

The answer they found upends nearly everything we thought we knew.

The book isn't just another pop-archaeology synthesis. It's an argument—polemical, ambitious, and occasionally infuriating—that the entire way we think about human social evolution is wrong. Not details. The framework.

The Central Argument

Here's the standard story: For most of human existence, we lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then agriculture emerged. Agriculture produced surplus. Surplus enabled inequality. Inequality crystallized into states. The sequence is bands → tribes → chiefdoms → states. It's a one-way escalator from simple to complex, from equal to hierarchical.

Graeber and Wengrow's counter-argument has three main prongs:

First: Early humans weren't stuck. They weren't simple bands waiting for agriculture to liberate them into complexity. The archaeological record shows sophisticated social organization, seasonal variation, and deliberate institutional experimentation going back tens of thousands of years.

Second: The "agricultural revolution" wasn't a revolution. It wasn't a moment. It was a process lasting millennia. People adopted farming, abandoned it, combined it with foraging, switched between modes. Agriculture didn't automatically produce hierarchy; many agricultural societies remained egalitarian for centuries.

Third: Early humans were conscious political actors. They debated how to live. They organized themselves deliberately. They observed neighboring societies and often defined themselves in opposition. The idea that they were just reacting to material conditions, without thought or agency, is condescending and wrong.

The implications are radical: we could have organized differently, and we can still choose to.

The Critique of Rousseau and Hobbes

Graeber and Wengrow argue that we're trapped between two origin stories, both wrong.

Hobbes' version: Primitive life was war of all against all. We escaped through the social contract—trading freedom for security. The state is necessary because without it, chaos.

Rousseau's version: Primitive life was paradise—simple, equal, free. Agriculture created private property, which created inequality, which corrupted our natural goodness. Civilization is a fall from grace.

Both stories assume a "before" state that was static—either brutal equality or idyllic equality—and a transition that was inevitable once certain conditions obtained. Both deny agency to prehistoric people. Both treat social organization as determined by technology or material conditions rather than conscious choice.

Graeber and Wengrow call this the "myth of the stupid savage." In both Hobbes and Rousseau, early humans are essentially children—incapable of political thought, simply reacting to circumstances. The only difference is whether they're violent children or innocent children.

The evidence doesn't support either story. What it supports is something more interesting: people who thought carefully about how to organize their societies, debated alternatives, experimented with different configurations, and often consciously rejected the arrangements of their neighbors.

The Indigenous Critique

One of the book's most striking arguments: Enlightenment ideas about freedom, equality, and democracy weren't Europeans' own invention. They were the result of encounters with Indigenous peoples who criticized European society—and whose critiques were taken seriously.

The key figure is Kandiaronk, a Wendat (Huron) statesman who engaged in recorded debates with French colonists in the late 17th century. Kandiaronk's critiques of European society—its inequality, its obsession with money, its system of punishment, its treatment of the poor—were documented by the Baron de Lahontan and circulated widely in Europe.

What did Kandiaronk actually say? He found European society horrifying. He couldn't understand why some people had enormous wealth while others starved on the streets. He was baffled by the concept of punishment—why would you lock someone in a cage? In Wendat society, disputes were resolved through negotiation and compensation, not cages. He thought European obsession with acquiring money was a form of madness.

And here's the crucial point: Europeans took these critiques seriously. Lahontan's Dialogues became a bestseller. Educated Europeans read Kandiaronk's arguments and found them troubling. The idea that their society might not be the pinnacle of human achievement—that these "savages" might actually have figured out something important—entered the intellectual bloodstream.

Graeber and Wengrow argue these critiques directly influenced Enlightenment thinkers. The concept that humans might be "naturally" equal, that social hierarchy might be contingent rather than necessary, that alternative forms of organization were possible—these ideas entered European consciousness partly through Indigenous voices.

This isn't about claiming that Indigenous peoples "invented" the Enlightenment. It's about recognizing that the encounter was a genuine dialogue. Europeans were confronted with sophisticated societies organized on entirely different principles, and their own certainties were destabilized.

The Indigenous critique mattered because it was evidence. When Kandiaronk argued that Wendat society was freer and more equal than French society, he could point to how it actually functioned. This wasn't abstract philosophy. It was comparative anthropology avant la lettre. Europeans could see for themselves that societies without kings, without prisons, without rigid hierarchy, actually existed and worked.

What the Archaeological Record Shows

The book is dense with examples. A few that illustrate their argument:

Göbekli Tepe (Turkey, ~9500 BCE): Monumental stone architecture built by hunter-gatherers, before agriculture. Massive T-shaped pillars, some weighing 50 tons, carved with elaborate animal reliefs—lions, bulls, foxes, vultures. Whoever organized this project could mobilize labor, coordinate logistics, and maintain a shared vision over generations. Then they buried it and left. The standard story says you need agriculture for this kind of complexity. The standard story is wrong.

The site wasn't a permanent settlement. People came from elsewhere, built these monuments, conducted whatever rituals they conducted, and then returned to their nomadic lives. This is temporary monumental architecture—a concept that shouldn't exist in the standard framework.

Ukrainian mega-sites (~4000 BCE): The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture built settlements of 10,000-15,000 people—larger than Mesopotamian cities of the same era. But no evidence of central authority. No temples. No palaces. No elite burials. No defensive walls. Egalitarian cities, sustained for centuries before being deliberately burned and abandoned.

These weren't primitive villages that grew too big. They were planned communities—concentric rings of housing, standardized lot sizes, apparent zoning. The planning implies collective decision-making. The absence of inequality implies it was sustained. They shouldn't exist according to the standard story.

Poverty Point (Louisiana, ~1700 BCE): Massive earthworks requiring coordinated labor, built by non-agricultural peoples who then dispersed. The site includes six concentric semi-circular ridges and several mounds, covering over 400 acres. Whoever built it had sophisticated astronomical knowledge—the ridges align with solstices and equinoxes.

But the builders didn't farm. They fished, hunted, and gathered. And they didn't stay. This was a gathering place, assembled for purposes we don't understand and dissolved afterward. Evidence of sophisticated social organization that could scale up for a project and then deliberately scale down.

Teotihuacan (Mexico, ~300 CE): After centuries of pyramid-building and apparent hierarchy, the city underwent what appears to be an egalitarian revolution. The Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon stopped being the focus of construction. Instead, the city built standardized apartment compounds—over 2,000 of them, housing an estimated 100,000 people in remarkably similar conditions.

This looks like deliberate reorganization toward equality. The ruling class didn't fall to invaders. There's no evidence of conquest or destruction. The change appears to have been internal—a society that chose to reorganize itself.

The pattern across all these cases: complexity without permanent hierarchy, or hierarchy that was deliberately dismantled. The one-way escalator doesn't match the evidence.

The Three Primordial Freedoms

Graeber and Wengrow identify three basic freedoms that characterized many early societies:

The freedom to move away. In a world of abundant land and flexible group membership, you could simply leave if leaders became oppressive. This is an enormous constraint on power—bad leaders lose followers. Many societies maintained this freedom deliberately.

The freedom to disobey. Without enforcement mechanisms, collective decisions were advisory rather than mandatory. You could ignore the chief. The cost was social, not physical. This limits what authority can actually accomplish.

The freedom to create new social arrangements. People could and did reorganize their societies—seasonally or permanently, in small ways or large. The social order wasn't fixed; it was subject to conscious revision.

Modern states have systematically eliminated all three. You cannot easily leave (borders, citizenship, property laws). Disobedience has physical consequences (police, prisons). Reorganization happens only through prescribed channels (elections, constitutions).

The question the book poses: How did we get stuck? How did temporary, reversible, situational authority become permanent? The book doesn't fully answer this—Graeber's death may have prevented the planned sequel—but it insists that the question itself is important.

The Critique of the Critique

The book has drawn significant criticism.

On cherry-picking: Critics argue Graeber and Wengrow select examples that support their thesis while ignoring contrary evidence. The Ukrainian mega-sites might not have been egalitarian. Göbekli Tepe's social organization is largely speculation. The book's confidence sometimes exceeds the evidence.

On the Kandiaronk thesis: Historians have questioned how much influence the Indigenous critique actually had on Enlightenment thought. The connections Graeber and Wengrow draw may be more suggestive than proven.

On political motivation: The book clearly has a political agenda—to expand our sense of what's possible, to undermine the inevitability of current arrangements. Critics suggest this agenda sometimes distorts the scholarship.

These critiques have merit. The book is an argument, not a neutral survey. It pushes interpretations to their limits and sometimes beyond.

But even granting these limits, the core claim stands: the standard story is too simple. The archaeological record is more varied, more surprising, and more politically interesting than the textbooks suggest. Whether Graeber and Wengrow's alternative is entirely correct, they've demonstrated that alternatives are necessary.

Why It Matters

If Graeber and Wengrow are even partially right, several things follow:

Human nature is institutionally flexible. We're not wired for hierarchy or for equality. We can do both. The constraints are political and technological, not biological. This undercuts both conservative arguments ("inequality is natural") and progressive ones ("we were corrupted from original equality"). The truth is more interesting: we're capable of many configurations, and which one we inhabit is a matter of circumstance and choice.

History contains unexplored possibilities. Every society that chose differently, every experiment that was abandoned, every configuration that was deliberately reversed—these are roads not taken. They're still available. The Cucuteni-Trypillia people ran egalitarian cities for centuries. We could learn from that. The seasonal variation of authority that characterized many societies could inform how we think about leadership today.

Current arrangements are contingent. The state form, the private property regime, the particular way we organize work and family—these are not the inevitable results of civilization. They're one configuration among many that happened to succeed in specific circumstances. This doesn't mean they're bad. It means they're not necessary.

Institutional imagination is possible. If early humans could consciously design their social arrangements, so can we. The question is whether we have the will—and whether we understand our options. The first step is seeing that options exist. The second step is studying the experiments that came before.

The book's title is deliberately echoed from Hesiod's Works and Days, which described humanity's decline from a golden age. Graeber and Wengrow are arguing against any narrative of decline—or of simple progress. What they offer instead is a history of experiments, some successful, some abandoned, some forgotten.

The practical implication: when we build new institutions—startups, platforms, communities, DAOs—we're not inventing from scratch. We're adding to a vast archive of human experimentation. The more we understand that archive, the better our experiments will be.

We're still running experiments. Understanding the previous ones might help.

Further Reading

- Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. - Wengrow, D. (2018). What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West. Oxford University Press. - Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press.

This is Part 2 of the Anthropology of Institutions series. Next: "Seeing Like a State"