Introduction
While researching palaeolithic human development, I stumbled upon a video on Aurignacian culture, and ever since, my YouTube feed has offered up a plethora of theories claiming to ‘overturn’ previously held ideas. To be convinced of the merit of radically different perspectives on the past, published books are a more reliable source. I cite many specialists who have accessed the myriad technologies now available to more accurately identify human behaviour from the distant past. Two authors who successfully synthesised new evidence to make interesting inferences and, in my view, justifiably critiqued not only the traditional archaeological canon but also some highly acclaimed contemporary academics. I refer here to David Graeber and David Wengrow. Unfortunately, I didn’t become aware of their extensive 2021 opus, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, until after I had nearly finished chapter 2. While I couldn’t face revisiting chapter 1, partly because it dwelt more on the Palaeolithic, I did amend some observations in chapter 2. I use G&W for brevity when I refer to them.
In chapter 1, I emphasise the evolutionary inevitability of the incremental steps taken towards agriculture. Whereas, G&W stress the importance of according as much significance to the 5000 years of agriculture that “…did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just 5000 years in which it did.”[1] They grant far more agency to human choice of political arrangements than I did. They are deliberately disdainful of 19th century stories about Rousseauian hunter-gatherers and civilization. Nor do they confine their critique to that century; Steven Pinker’s massive work, The Better Angels of Our Nature, comes in for some justifiable stick. Foremost among their problems is Pinker’s relegation of human societies pre city states to “…a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilisation some 5000 years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.”[2]
They expose the paucity of Pinker’s stance by detailing the highly complex semi agricultural nomadic hunter societies of North America and Mesoamerica.
The research in chapter 2 attempts to sift through recent multidisciplinary studies of how humans arranged societies from Neolithic farmers to roughly the end of the Bronze Age – 10,000- 1,200 BCE. This work of synthesis is necessary to tease out the changing connections between climate, politics and culture which contributed to our indifference to the suffering of others.
Like me, G&W wanted to synthesise the same recent multidisciplinary research. My main question asked whether humans’ capacity for empathy necessarily closed down sometime during the various transitions from farming to cities to states. Unlike me, their questions matured or grew out of their initial scepticism for the widely held assumptions of traditional teleological notions of inevitable state formation. They claimed that there is no extant work utilising the depth and sheer amount of contemporary science to reappraise political forms of ancient societies because we haven’t invented the language to do so. For example, they suggest there is no word to describe ‘a city lacking top-down structures of governance’.[3] In addition to the lexical vacuum, descriptors like ‘equality’ or ‘inequality’ should not be applied “…unless there was explicit evidence that ideologies of social equality were actually present on the ground.”
I guess the big takeaway from Dawn of Everything is the fluid non-linear nature of when where and how human affairs changed. We made different choices in response to similar material conditions during the same times. Hence, the North West indigenous population was a slave-owning aggrandizing aristocracy next door to the puritan share and share alike Californians – all pre-European contact. The ultimate refutation of Western superiority was when they give evidence for the French philosophers getting ideas of individual “…liberty, mutual aid and political equality…”[4] from the Osage Nation.
Despite the numerous caveats provided by G&W, my own attempt to connect the disparate studies of the new science does point to some plausible reasons why indifference manifested at different times. Reading G&W has shown me that times of tolerance and mutual respect have alternated with times of abject subjugation and exploitation. Neither state of being transitions or evolves out of the other; they both represent choices made. Using their insights, I have amended some of my general summations which I will make clear in the text. As noted previously, I will refer to Graeber and Wengrow as G&W.
A note on dating protocols. When talking about the early and mid-Palaeolithic and a couple of climate events, I use KYA (a thousand years ago). For most of the archaeological record and the early written record I use BCE which I like because it immediately anchors the date to the beginning of our calendar which, as a Westerner, is associated with the Roman Empire.
Occasionally dates are given BP (Before Present).
[1] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, p. 523
[2] Ibid, p. 13. Quoting Pinker.
[3] Ibid, p. 522
[4] Ibid, p. 482
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