The Dawn of Everything
A New History of Humanity
David Graeber & David Wengrow Allen Lane 2021
Hb, 692pp, £30, ISBN 9780241402429
There are broadly two views of our prehistory, say David Wengrow and the late David Graeber. The first is Rousseau’s: hunter-gatherers lived an Edenic life of peace, contentment, and enlightened egalitarianism which was wrecked by the Fall of the Agricultural Revolution. The second is Hobbes’s: in the Upper Palæolithic, humans were as they