Re-examining the Past to Shape Our Future
Isn’t it about time we started thinking differently about what is humanly possible?
A new book is shaking up how we think about ancient history by challenging the idea of civilization itself.
For generations, we’ve been taught that a key to civilization is people living together in a single space where a stratified society imposes structure and rules.
Now, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wenbow have written a new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, that proposes that humans thrived without a key requirement for “civilization,’ settling in one place. They describe people at the end of the Ice Age who traveled seasonally and gathered in large groups during times of abundance to feast and build elaborate monoliths with carvings of animals and serpents.
Take the excavated ruins of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey for example, which was built around 9,000 BC. The inhabitants didn’t appear to practice agriculture; in fact, one thousand years would pass before farming began to take hold. Rather than become sedentary farmers, they gathered at the site during periods of seasonal abundance where they processed huge amounts of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making festive foods to fuel the work of construction. The authors cite evidence suggesting the towering, artful buildings…
