THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARFINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022Pacey and potentially revolutionary Sunday Times Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read The Guardian 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 pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see whats really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of huntergatherers, 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...

Binding: Paperback;352 pages; Publisher: TBS-Penguin Random House Wholesale; Classification: HBLA; Weight: 610 g; Dimensions: 130 x 197 x 36

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