David Wengrow: rewriting the history of humanity

The commonly held belief that equality and freedom have to be traded for progress is a myth masquerading as fact, says archaeologist David Wengrow.

He and the late anthropologist David Graeber blow apart many long-held assumptions in their new book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

The latest findings in anthropology and archaeology reveal that the story we've been told about social evolution - that it is linear and progressive and stems from the invention of agriculture - is simply not true, Wengrow tells Kim Hill.

Marshalling evidence for this from thousands of years of history into a 700-page book wasn't as taxing as you may think for him and Graeber, though.

"It was almost a tacit agreement with us that it mustn't feel like work - we'll only do it when the urge takes us and if it becomes just another kind of burden or a bit of an albatross then we'll just stop."

The Dawn of Everything challenges a widely accepted narrative of human history endorsed by thinkers like historian Yuval Noah Harari, geographer Jared Diamond, and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.

The way these academics present human evolution doesn't add up with what we now know, Wengrow says, and their arguments often share the fallacies of earlier philosophers.

"If we take the psychologist [Pinker], who's famous for pointing out to other people that we need to be statistically rigorous, we might just cherry-pick the evidence and if we look objectively at human history we can see that actually it's kind of a success story.

"This is the modern-day tale that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes told many centuries ago, that human life, in the beginning, was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' and that even if today we have to make do with warfare and the threat of nuclear holocaust it's generally better because there's less chance of getting clubbed to death when you walking out of your house…

"The broad [basis of that thinking] is supposedly based on rigorous statistical evidence, except when you actually go to read the work - I'm thinking here particularly of Stephen Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature - the whole treatment of that long early phase of history is entirely based on cherry-picking."

In this book, Pinker writes of Ötzi the Iceman, who lived and died in the European Alps around 5,200 years ago and uses evidence of Ötzi's wounds to conclude he was murdered and lived in an extremely violent society.

Pinker's conclusion that all pre-agricultural societies were therefore violent and oppressive is an example of cherry-picking, Wengrow says.

"We do have some very good statistical studies of how many bodies in very early periods of pre-history do show signs of fighting and inter-personal warfare. It's just that he never cites them or even seems to be particularly interested in them."

The anthropological evidence we now have of pre-history points to a more complex and intriguing reality, Wengrow says.

"There were periods as far back as you can trace it when people were up to all kinds of nasty things. There were periods of violence, periods of warfare. But - and this is the crucial thing - there were also just as many long periods when people seemed to have abolished all that - long periods of peace.

"Actually, one of the most intriguing things we talk about in the book are these individuals whose burials have been very carefully excavated in studies. Some have been extremely old, going back to the last Ice Age, much older than Ötzi the Iceman, some 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, these are some of the earliest evidence of funerals and rituals that we know of.

"The really intriguing thing is that some crazy percentage of them, something like 70 percent, somebody's quantified it all, are burials of people who had very, very clear and obvious physical anomalies, people who today we would call giants or people with very obvious genital conditions.

"I think, partly what this shows, is that not only did individuals who would have been different in very extreme ways survive to a good age but also they were accorded this careful and often extremely lavish burials."

Using this evidence, one could cherry-pick in the opposite direction and suggest early societies were kind and altruistic, Wengrow says but, as often, we find the truth somewhere in the middle.

In some periods of history, humans lived peacefully within egalitarian systems, while at other times, societies were founded on extreme violence and domination.

This chequered history points to the fact that modern social inequality is not being driven by some kind of evolutionary progression, he says.

Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first people to present this idea, back in the 18th-century.

Rousseau wrote of early humans living in small bands of hunter-gatherers who lived without hierarchies because they had just enough but no surplus food.

"Then comes the kind of fall from grace, which in Rousseau's story is all about the invention of private property, and that is supposed to be a consequence of the invention of agriculture and then with private property and agriculture people become fixed in one spot.

"Populations grow. We have cities and surpluses and before you know it we have states and empires. We have classes, generals, priests, poets, scientists. And we're kind of on this road to modern society.

"But Rousseau never makes the case that because of this, we're kind of stuck."

In recent decades, since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, our understanding of the relationship between inequality and history seems to have changed, Wengrow says.

"There was a really burgeoning literature on the topic of inequality, which kind of made the argument that, because of this broad sweep of human history, it is inherently impossible to create more equal societies and keep living in very large-scale complex sophisticated cultures.

"So you have to be a primitivist if you want a more equal society. You've got to destroy everything and go back to living in simple bands of hunter-gatherers."

American geographer Jared Diamond's view that our current global system is the unavoidable consequence of historical progression and a highly-populated technological society reinforces a gloomy sense that we're stuck, Wengrow says.

"This idea of history as progression is simply wrong, it's not supported by any evidence."

Teotihuacan - an ancient Mexican city that was home to 100,000 people around the Year Zero - is one of the fascinating human societies Wengrow and Graeber explore in The Dawn of Everything.

In a kind of "utopian experiment of urban living", the citizens of Teotihuacan seem to have lived in high-quality social housing in a society without hierarchy and with low rates of inequality, Wengrow says.

"Around the year 300AD, the population of Teotihuacan seems to have turned their back on… constructing pyramids and violent rituals and then it all changes… and what my colleague David Graeber used to call 'caring labour' gets channelled into something else - housing. They divide the whole city up into an enormous grid and start building really luxurious compounds with a few nuclear families in each of them."

Evidence of other complex city-sized settlements that existed before the advent of agriculture contradict the narrative humans were all brutish savages before farming came on the scene, Wengrow adds.

Poverty Point in the American state of Louisiana is one such site, where indigenous people constructed earthen ridges and mounds from as early as 1100BC.

Five thousand years ago, Ukraine's ancient Trypillian people lived in architecturally designed 'proto-cities' where there were no central authorities and no wealth inequality, Wengrow says.

"You just had this kind of neighbourhood organised in a kind of circular basis - houses and neighbourhoods with assembly spaces.

"They seemed to have managed to integrate on a very large scale ... and they seemed to have kept this going for 700-800 years.

"There was clearly farming, clearly a surplus of wealth but at no point was anyone allowed to grab it and declare themselves a chief, overlord or a king."

The human capacity for this kind of societal experimentation seems to have been lost today, Wengrow says.

In The Dawn of Everything, he and Graeber ask why we are now so wedded to the current social system when it's neither inevitable nor necessary.

"It's not a dogmatic book ... We don't make any claims to have exhausted all the evidence. We do propose a whole series of concepts, which we feel are helpful in making sense of this huge flood of evidence that comes particularly from my field of archaeology. But we don't say we've exhausted all the possibilities.

"Essentially, what we're trying to do is ask better questions than the ones that have been going around in circles now, since Hobbes and Rousseau, and just don't seem to be getting us anywhere in terms of this really intriguing rich evidence that we have these days for what human beings are actually up to most of the time."

David Wengrow is a Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.