A review by kb_208
The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow, David Graeber

adventurous challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Graeber is a hell of a writer, RIP. This is the second book I've undertaken from him, and it is a doozy. He tackles a big question that no one has really been able to answer with any type of certainty, "What are the origins of inequality?". He investigates this question in many different ages of prehistory many different areas around the world. My main takeaways from this book are that history is not just a simple evolution sequence where humans developed from savage nomadic hunter/gatherers, to farmers, to living in a large civilization, and then becoming "modern". It is instead far more complicated than that, but historians have often clouded these findings based on their own biases and looking at our world's current civil system the obvious end result. It has often just been easier to stick to this narrative, because it is simple, even when mounting evidence suggests this was not a straight and narrow road. He suggests that there was a lot of social experimentation during prehistory and people were trying out different social systems. Sometimes they would develop small cities and farming communities only to revert back to a more pastoral life after a few centuries. Also there are many cases of obvious rejection of agricultural and city life, due to evidence of hunter/gatherers living near and trading with these bigger civilizations. 
Some of the criticism I have seen of this book is that Graeber doesn't say things with much certainty throughout the book. I would say that this is because all this is prehistory and we don't truly know. He is just looking at the evidence that is available and making different hypotheses that often run contrary to popular belief about these subjects.