Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use, or that has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the Day is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow. This book challenges everything we have been taught about how society formed. By this I mean the concept that we were all just innocent hunter gatherers with nothing approaching a real civilization until we started plowing fields. And this book doesn’t just challenge that concept, it literally destroys it.

One example is that much of this belief stems from the remaining true indigenous societies still living in “the old ways.” Of course, they all live on very marginal lands and, due to that, they are forced to remain small. However, how’d that happen? The modern academic just shrugs it off, but what about all the areas rich in game and forage before agriculture? The book makes a very effective case that such peoples were simply pushed into the margins when their land was conquered.

In effect, and these are my words, not those of the authors, agriculture didn’t actually create civilization. Rather, as agriculture developed, those who harnessed it as a technology over time conquered civilization. It turns out we have extensive archeological records that show many complex societies that predate agriculture, or that didn’t practice it as modern academics use the word. In other words, they may have been somewhat horticultural, but in no way agricultural.

These societies lived mostly off the land as hunters but did have permanent settlements. One such example is located in an area called “Poverty Point” in Louisiana. I actually took a course on ancient societies, and Poverty Point was heavily featured in it. I was so impressed by it that I actually did an episode a few years ago called, Sustainable Civilization Lessons From Poverty Point Louisiana. You may want to give it a listen if you didn’t hear it back when it came out.

This book, though, goes so beyond anything I thought I knew about this topic. There are civilizations that had ruthless enforcement of rules, for instance, by people you could only call “police officers.” But these rules were only enforced, say, six months of the year, with power rotated. One example was a society where game was hunted about half the year and men traveled from their towns to hunt. Often, even extended family went along. There were rules for harvest numbers, where game was taken, as not to offend other groups and cause war, etc.

Then when the hunting was done for the year, everyone went home. The “police” were instantly stripped of all power. During the hunt they could go as far as executing violators. Seems like a lot of power to grant, so how do you balance it? The very eloquent solution was that this power rotated.

Meaning, if our people went out and I was an enforcer this time, not only do I have to come back to my town where I live across the street from you and do so for six months with no more power, the next season when we go out, I will not have said power and you will, or someone else will. Think about how well such a system can actually work. Imagine if the people who run your local government KNEW they’d be on the receiving end of it in six months?

It all just keeps going. Literally every ancient group you’ve ever heard of is in this book, but so are perhaps a couple hundred you’ve never heard spoken of. The diversity of civilization in our pre agriculture history is amazing, dare I say far more diverse than after agriculture conquered society. There were very stable and peaceful societies, warlike conquering societies, mixtures of both, and more. The big thing is these societies were every bit as complex and structured as anything we today call a “civilization.”

Is there any negative to this book? Well, I’d have to say possibly, it depends on the reader. This book is written at a very high academic level. It may be a bit dry at times for some. It may cause you to have to mentally stretch at times, and issues and topics are deeply explored. In other words, it is not light reading, and it is a long read as well. But if you like these topics and enjoy discovering what the mainstream continues to deny and, honestly, hide from you, give this book a shot.

As an aside, I think an enterprising author could use this book to write some very interesting “fact based fiction,” creating stories of the past with characters in these societies. This honestly makes me think of famed science fiction and fantasy genre author Piers Anthony’s Geodyssey Series. In this series one family is reborn over and over in different periods of history, beginning at the dawn of man and ending in quite dystopian futures. Though what could be done with the information in The Dawn of Everything would blow Anthony’s work out of the water.

In any event, if you want to deeply understand true human history and uncover the incompetence, deceit, and downright malice of the current academic guard of anthropology, get a copy of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow today.

It is available in all formats, Kindle, hardcover, softcover, and audio. The audio version is narrated by Mark Williams, who has a very classic British accent that would be a perfect fit for a lecture hall at Oxford, just so you know before deciding.  FWIW I have the audio and I am happy with my choice, I just thought it may be a detail the reader might want to consider.

 * Remember, you can always find all of our reviews at TspAz.com.