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by David Wengrow (Author) Format: Paperback
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (7,291)
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A breathtakingly ambitious retelling of the earliest human societies offers a new understanding of world history
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, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy, then what kinds of 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 Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.
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About the Author
David Graeber (Author)
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of, among others, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and Pirate Enlightenment, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, the Guardian, and the Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.
David Wengrow (Author)
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of three books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Product details
Publisher : Penguin Press
Publication date : 19 July 2022
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From Australia
Sheila Gawthorne
5.0 out of 5 stars How we really got to where we are
Reviewed in Australia on 8 July 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book blew my mind! The detailed scholarship is put together in a readable format - it is so detailed! Re-writes history by pointing out biases in previously accepted teaching about how we arrived at where we are. Brilliant!
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Sandro Rossi-Dragovich
5.0 out of 5 stars The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Reviewed in Australia on 25 February 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
good book
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Mr. Greg Gaughran
4.0 out of 5 stars Controversial reading
Reviewed in Australia on 1 November 2024
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Struggled between giving 3 or 4 stars. The author is so controversial at times that it's jarring. The middle of the book is also woefully repetitive. But there are so many interesting parts in the end that it's still a worthwhile read
2 people found this helpful
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Stephen C
5.0 out of 5 stars Life Changing
Reviewed in Australia on 5 June 2022
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
The writers/thinkers have the courage to put in plain language a thesis that might horrify their peers and disturb what is regarded as settled ground: that history has an end point that we get near with every modern breakthrough. Now we can view ourselves in a new light - as temporal players who may or may not be remembered at all.
3 people found this helpful
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kim
5.0 out of 5 stars Food for thought
Reviewed in Australia on 11 May 2023
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Very interesting and thought provoking.
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Gorry
3.0 out of 5 stars Worth Reading—If You Can Read the Print
Reviewed in Australia on 29 June 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
The 3-star rating does not reflect the content of the book, which I found valuable. My rating is based solely on the physical presentation. The book is very small, and the font size is so tiny that it feels like you need a magnifying glass to read it comfortably.
As a suggestion for future editions, please consider increasing both the size of the book and the font. A larger, more readable print would make the reading experience much more enjoyable.
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Kane Blayden
5.0 out of 5 stars Arrived in good condition in a timely manner.
Reviewed in Australia on 7 November 2022
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No complaints, about delivery or condition. Or about the book itself for that matter, a thoroughly good read.
One person found this helpful
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Gary Follett
4.0 out of 5 stars Very informative and thought provoking, dry writing style
Reviewed in Australia on 22 September 2022
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The thesis of the book is very thought provoking. It is very well researched and the facts are presented in a credible manner. The writing style is pretty dry so its a bit hard to read more than a few pages at a time.
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rajnochjan
3.0 out of 5 stars I’m in two 2 minds about this book.
Reviewed in Australia on 15 May 2025
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I’m in two 2 minds about this book.
On the positive side, the authors make some great points. My favourite is ‘schismogenesis’ of Athens and Sparta, extrapolated to Northern Californian ‘Protestant Foragers’ vs. Pacific Northwest ‘Fisher Kings’. Another great point was the observation that Rousseau and Montesquieu might’ve been influenced by Native Americans (and the consequences of such influence). And the insight that what we call ‘Agricultural Revolution’ was instead a 3,000-year-long transition was brilliant.
On the negative side, it reads as written by jaundiced, postmodernist anarchists. The tone of the book is of pedantic condescension. As if the authors – who are clearly experts in their fields – were somewhat wronged by mainstream historians/anthropologists (Harari, Diamond..) and needed to set the record straight. They’re nitpicking at any attempts to classify, group and categorize historical events, periods and areas, and repudiating the natural phenomena such as hierarchies (common to all species incl. human). Their criticism of Mircea Eliade is absurd, and I’m not convinced of their rejection of the need for states either.
If they’d dialled down the tedious details and chip on their shoulder, it’d been a brilliant book.
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Liana
1.0 out of 5 stars book is unreadable
Reviewed in Australia on 24 June 2024
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Sadly this is the first time we have had to make a bad review. The book we received is in perfect condition except it cannot be fully read. The top two or more lines of every page in the book have actually been guillotined off in production.
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Morgan
3.0 out of 5 stars some interesting insights
Reviewed in Australia on 8 August 2023
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
well worth a read
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Dr Luis Riebl
5.0 out of 5 stars Not just a tour de force…
Reviewed in Australia on 2 August 2024
Format: Paperback
A work of tremendous scope that presents and integrates recent decennia of research in archeology and anthropology, offering new readings with a central message: there was no ideal Roussauan beginning, nor was life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”: it was vastly more diverse, inventive and actually interesting than we were taught. There are respectful but incisive reviews of J Diamond and Harari and many others.
A book that changed the way I view the world of men - it is hopeful in its message that there might be far more choices for humanity than we think.
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Peter
3.0 out of 5 stars Very Speculative, occasionally interesting ideas.
Reviewed in Australia on 29 May 2024
Format: Paperback
A very slow read.
Quite wordy and chatty with occasionally interesting ideas.
Many hypothetical assumption without proof presented with assurance and repeated quite a few times to hopefully becoming true.
Filled with pseudo-logical deductions:
One could easily imagine…
We can be fairly certain
Let me add another unprovable assumption, almost conclusion: Maybe the price to pay to live in one of their egalitarian paradises is to remain stuck in the stone ages?
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Ongoing history wars
Reviewed in Australia on 25 January 2026
Format: Kindle
Would be a wonderful read and would make you think these guys are soooo right, unless you’ve read their opponents’ work as well.
Then their cherry-picking petulant lack of charity in their polemical quest becomes apparent
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Jason Cullen
1.0 out of 5 stars I found the thesis of the book unbelievable
Reviewed in Australia on 17 August 2025
Format: Audiobook
I found the thesis of the book unbelievable.
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Charles Kane
5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal
Reviewed in Australia on 26 September 2022
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Toss out your copy of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noa and read this. Very thorough review of the earliest history of humankind by 2 scientists who deconstruct how we have got our history wrong by accepting opinions and presumptions rather than the rigor of science.
It isn't afraid to delve into a detailed review of really ancient history so there are times it requires some perseverance but there isn't anything here that isn't fascinating and eye opening.
5 people found this helpful
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From other countries
Eta Carinae
5.0 out of 5 stars Evidence-based rewriting of human history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2021
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Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring a perception of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in their childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilisation that ‘they all ran headlong to their chains’. These are two variants of the same myth because they both posit an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age. Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment.
What makes Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth – what they call ‘the Myth of the Stupid Savage’. Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests. Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to assume that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between socio-political identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’ the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book.
The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at UCL. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. David Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at LSE, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations.
We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that ‘primitives’ only spent their time in isolated bands. Counter-intuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centres of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives.
The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like ‘play farming’ across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed.
In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms – first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change.
The final chapters focus on the ‘state’. Or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as ‘incipient states’ because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything offers a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete – a ‘beautiful irritant for archaeology’ – where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses.
There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. To assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency–determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages.
Staying true to Ostrom’s law – ‘whatever works in practice must work in theory’ – Graeber and Wengrow set out a new framework for interpreting the social reality brought to light by empirical findings. Firstly, they urge us to abandon terms like ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ societies, let alone the ‘origin of the state’ or ‘origin of social complexity’. These terms already presuppose the kind of teleological thinking challenged in the book. The same goes for ‘modes of production’: whether a society relies on farming or fishing is a poor criterion for classification because it tells us almost nothing about its social dynamics. Secondly, they lay out some new descriptive categories of their own. They show, for instance, that social domination can be broken down into three elements – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – and that permutations of these elements yield consistent patterns throughout history. While the modern nation state embodies all three, most hierarchical societies of the past had only one or two, and this allowed for the people who lived under them degrees of freedom that are barely imaginable for us today.
Graeber and Wengrow reflect at length on this last point. More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom – freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – that appear to have been simply assumed by our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: “The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared”, they suggest, “but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.”
So much of what makes this book fascinating is the alien nature of what we encounter within, at least to contemporary eyes. Potlaches, headhunting and skull portraits, stranger kings, revolutions, shamanic art, vision quests… The Dawn of Everything reads like a work of sci-fi, except that what turns out to be fictional is our received view of human history. The writing is often funny, sometimes hilarious. At the same time, because hardly a paragraph goes by without bequeathing insight, this is a book that needs to be patiently taken in. It sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading.
The Dawn of Everything intellectually dwarfs the likes of Pinker, Diamond, or Fukuyama (and Harari too). Whenever non-specialists try their hands at human history, they inevitably end up reproducing the same old myths we have grown up with. Consider Steven Pinker: for all his talk about scientific progress, his books might as well have been written at the times of Hobbes, in the 17th century, when none of the evidence unearthed recently was available. Graeber and Wengrow casually expose these popular authors’ startling incompetence at handling the anthropological record. Only a solid command of the latter – namely, of the full documented range of human possibilities – affords a credible interpretative lens over the distant past. For it supplies the researcher with a refined sense of the rhythms of human history.
One of the experiences of delving into this book, at least in my case, was a gradual recognition of being in the presence of an intellectual oddity, something difficult to situate within the current landscape of social theory. By embracing once again the ‘grand narrative’, the book makes a clean break with post-structuralist and post-humanist trends widespread in contemporary academia. We know that Graeber, at least, liked to think himself as a ‘pre-humanist’, actively expecting to see humanity realise its full potential. One can certainly see this work as a contribution in that direction. One can also see The Dawn of Everything as belonging to the tradition of the Enlightenment (except that one of the other major claims in the book is that Enlightenment thought developed largely in response to indigenous intellectuals’ critiques of European society of the time). As for how it squares with current archaeological and anthropological theory, the book is of such a real sweep that I don’t think it admits easy comparisons.
If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar calibre in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively. The book produces a similar decentring effect: in dethroning our self-appointed position at the pinnacle of social evolution, it deals a blow to the teleological thinking that so insidiously shape our understanding of history. With the exception that while works such as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and On the Origin of Species hinted at the relative insignificance of humans in the face of the cosmos, The Dawn of Everything explores all the possibilities we have to act within it. And if Galileo and Darwin stirred turmoil of their own, this will do even more so for precisely this reason. Ultimately, a society that accepts the story presented here as its official origin story – a story that is taught in its schools, that seeps into its public consciousness – will have to be radically different than the society we are currently living in.
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J. Carlos
5.0 out of 5 stars An overhaul on understanding history of mankind
Reviewed in Brazil on 24 February 2026
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I believe the authors came in a very good time, to kind of 'block' the over-edginess of the famous Yuval Harari guy. This is a much more grounded reading - in true academic research, and not glossing the current state of human affairs. I enjoyed reading it also because its very light, even considering the heavy presented research on it.
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Shillings
5.0 out of 5 stars States aren't enevitable.
Reviewed in the Netherlands on 3 September 2025
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A very good book. I took longer to read this book than most, partly owing to personal circumstances but also due to the density of the subject matter. Graeber and Wengro peal back many of the assumptions we typically recieve in popular history, anthropology, and sociology. I'm looking at you History Channel (I'm kidding, please start doing history again). I and many other people look at the history books, with long descriptions of dynasties and kings, and wonder what normal people were doing. According to the Davids, most of them went about their lives forgetting there was any such thing as an autocrat and I think that is just beautiful.
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Dan
3.0 out of 5 stars Poor printing quality
Reviewed in the United Arab Emirates on 7 July 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
A great read. The book itself, however, fell apart as I read it, page by page.
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