#JustFinished The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
This was a great book! Graeber and Wengrow integrate new archeological discoveries with anthropology and turn common belief on its side. In the same way that we used to think that evolution was a progressive march to new and improved species, we also thought that human development was on an upward arc to better things, with capitalism and
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Democracy at the apex. But we learned that evolution is a collection of paths through a forest, sometimes heading where we want to go and sometimes not. Mutuations are random and not always more beneficial. Thus, species don't always progress with change.
They posit the same for human history. We haven't been heading in a direct line to where we are, and we don't have to stay here.
Levels of equality and freedom have come and gone, and maybe European patriarchal society isn't the apex.
Read this one.
I second that.
This book challenges a lot of common implicit and received assumptions about the history of civilizations.
(Also, it filled quite a lot of knowledge gaps I didn't even know I had ...)
it's definitely worth reading.
DThoris
Quincy ⁂
Marsh Ray