Everything We Think We Know About Early Human History is Wrong | David Wengrow on Downstream
What this covers
Humans have existed for at least 200,000 years. Yet until recently, historians believed that cities, astronomy, architecture and numeracy did not arrive until agriculture emerged some 12,000 years ago. But what if that was wrong? What if cities existed before agriculture and our hunter gatherer ancestors enjoyed a far more complex existence than we thought? And if they did, then what are the implications for modern political theory - which justifies inequality on the basis that we live in a higher, more sophisticated form of society that was always inevitable? What if there were social revolutions before documented history? And what if humankind had engaged in innumerable experiments in how best to live - including ones that involved the rejection of what we would consider to be ‘civilisation’? Aaron Bastani discusses all of that, and more, with archaeologist and co-author of the bestselling ‘Dawn of Everything’ David Wengrow.
_________________________________________________________
Support Novara Media for as little as £1 a month: https://novaramedia.com/support
Buy Novara Media merch here: https://shop.novaramedia.com/
Source description (no synthesized summary yet).
Wengrow argues that the conventional stage-theory narrative of human history—isolated bands, then agriculture, then civilization—is fundamentally wrong; instead, humans have maintained complex, interconnected societies for tens of thousands of years and have repeatedly experimented with radically different forms of social organization, including democratic and egalitarian ones, challenging the assumption that hierarchy and inequality are inevitable.
- Archaeological evidence shows hunter-gatherer societies were highly connected across vast distances, not isolated; they engaged in long-distance trade, shared knowledge, and coordinated activities long before agriculture.
- Multiple pre-Columbian American societies—Cahokia, Teotihuacan, Tlaxcala—explicitly abandoned hierarchical systems and chose more egalitarian arrangements, proving hierarchy is not inevitable once established.
- The indigenous critique from figures like Kondiaronk shaped Enlightenment thinking on democracy and freedom, yet indigenous peoples are written out of that intellectual genealogy, obscuring the true origins of democratic ideas.
This asset isn't compiled yet
You're seeing its claims, ranked. Compile it to build the argument threads, weight them, and check each claim against your library — the full view.
Academic archaeology itself has a troubling history of racism: Flinders Petrie, the founder of Egyptology and namesake of the Petrie Museum, was a eugenicist who believed non-Europeans were intellectually inferior and theorized that ancient Egyptian civilization could not have been created by Africans but resulted from invasion of a superior 'new race'.
“Flinders Petrie the archaeologist who it's named after was a eugenicist he believed that non-europeans were intellectually inferior and he was very into this whole business of phrenology you know measuring people's skulls and that sort of thing and he actually had a theory in the late 19th century that ancient Egyptian civilization could not have been created by Africans and that there had been an invasion of what he called the new race”
Cortés wrote back to the Spanish king that he encountered Tlaxcala as a place with no singular ruler, organized on principles similar to Italian city-states (Florence, Venice), yet this evidence has not been given prominence in mainstream historical narratives of the conquest.
“we've got the letters that Cortez himself wrote back to the king of Spain saying I found this place it's it's weird you know there's no King it's it's maybe a little bit like some of our Florentine or Venice you know it's run on some other principles all this stuff is out there um but um oh it really isn't given the prominence that you know you think it it probably ought to have”
Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors were able to conquer the Aztec empire partly by making alliances with the city-state of Tlaxcala, which had a democratic republican structure similar to Athens versus Sparta, with records of parliamentary debates surviving in Spanish colonial documents.
“The City where Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadors make alliances that enable them to go and challenge the the might of the Aztec empire is a city uh by the name of class color which had a relationship to the Aztec capital that was a bit like Athens and Sparta there's one's very hierarchical the other one's very Democratic classical clearly was a republic of some sort with its own Parliament and we even have records in Spanish of the kind of debates that went on there”
The rise of the Inca Empire similarly involved restriction of ritual control: subjects needed access to state-controlled resources (bread, beer/chicha) to perform essential social rituals like marriages, funerals, and ancestor veneration, creating systems of debt and dependency that reinforced hierarchy.
“you see something similar with the rise of the Inca Empire where we do again have you know Spanish Colonial accounts and descriptions of what's going on where in order to perform an important ritual like a a marriage or a funeral or honor your ancestors you need certain resources you need a bread and beer What's called chicha in order to just perform the ritual and do the right thing but of course not everyone can get their hands on those resources in the same way that in Egyptian funerary rituals at a certain point you have to have bread and beer but to have bread and beer you know you have to have access to Estates where cereals are farmed and you have plow agriculture so people who can't actually look after their families in a cultural sense I'm not talking about biological survival but you know who can't actually complete their uh their necessary social rituals begin falling into debt uh relations of debt um or we'll go we'll have to go to extraordinary lengths and make sacrifices just to be able to do that and that seems to be a big part of what creates hierarchies and systems of dependencies is people either abdicating or somehow losing control um over over their own um yeah their own sort of basic uh basic kind of Life rituals or life cycles”
Modern political theory—from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—is rooted in completely speculative imaginings about deep human history with no tangible evidence, yet these theories remain the foundation of contemporary political thought and academic instruction.
“you know there was a slew of literature as you might expect on inequality in the roots of inequality and suddenly a lot of those very old ideas you know going all the way back to the 17th 18th centuries really coming back in quite a surprisingly aggressive way you know let's think again about the deep roots of inequality let's go back to Harps let's go back to Rousseau which as you say you know we're talking about the the foundational texts of modern political Theory but it's important to remember that they were completely speculative I mean they were conjured out of the imaginations of those people with no evidence tangibly whatsoever for the nature of human societies hundreds of thousands of years ago”
The impossibility of reconstructing a single 'original form' of human society means that the variability in human social forms across prehistory reflects genuine experimentation rather than deviation from a hypothetical natural state.
“it flies in the face of this very entrenched philosophical habit of trying to reconstruct the original form of human society there wasn't one and just the panoply of experimentation and social forms which is kind of inconceivable to us but actually that's where we that's where we come from yeah we're a product of this um this kind of composite uh composite of different subspecies and different traditions”
Pre-dynastic Egypt (the fourth millennium BCE before the first pharaohs and pyramids) contains fascinating evidence about evolution of funerary rituals and social organization that has been neglected in favor of monumental archaeology; studying ordinary people's burials reveals that populations lost capacity to conduct their own rituals as pharaonic states centralized.
“we all get obsessed with The Monuments the Sphinx the pyramids um what you see if you focus on Ordinary People and particularly their burials because we have a lot of evidence for how people were treated in funerary rituals Egypt is incredible in that sense that you can trace the evolution of a ritual it's a funerary ritual you can trace its Evolution over thousands of years”
Kondiaronk (also written Condirock) was a renowned Wendat diplomat, speaker, and intellectual of the late 17th century whose conversations with European interlocutors, particularly captured in writings by the French nobleman Lahontan, profoundly influenced Enlightenment thought on democracy, rationality, religion, and freedom.
“candy rank was a very well known figure person here on wendart's Nation which is is very much still a thing it has its administrative Center which I I was lucky enough to be invited to on the outskirts of Quebec City where they have a small street called Candia um so we were joking that maybe should extend it a bit now because he's he's um a key sort of um individual in in our book um because we have various independent accounts of this person which tell us that uh in that time so we're talking about the uh the end of the 17th century this is someone who's playing a pivotal role um in diplomacy Warfare and in um trying to negotiate a better future for his own people”
Claude Lévi-Strauss distinguished two forms of science: modern laboratory science that generates theories in artificial environments then applies them to the world, versus historical human discovery where discovery is embedded in social life and landscape interaction and applied from the beginning, with the latter being how most human knowledge throughout history was actually generated.
“there's our notion of science which begins in the laboratory so you carve out an artificial environment and you have men in coats or whatever um you know trying to generate new ideas and theories which are then applied to the world and he contrasted that with the way that most human Discovery throughout the history of our species has actually taken place which is a world of Discovery in which there are no Laboratories Discovery is part and parcel of social life it's out there in the landscape in people's interactions with plants and animals it's applied from the beginning”
Rather than simply dismissing pseudo-archaeologists as lunatics, scholars must introspect about how racist assumptions created epistemic space for such theories and continue to operate within academic disciplines.
“I do get a little bit irritated sometimes with colleagues of mine and the way that they respond to what you've called pseudo archeology um which is to say um you know we're the scientists we know best and um if you believe any of that stuff you're just a lunatic well I think I think that's um you know it's obviously true in a sense but you have to look also at the history of our own disciplines um which again as we've been talking about are very strange in the way that they will deny humanity and Consciousness to whole populations and whole groups of people”
The conventional stage-theory model of human history—small isolated bands, then agriculture leading to population expansion, then cities and civilization—is fundamentally inaccurate because different phases coexisted and interacted rather than replacing one another sequentially.
“you've got these long periods when sort of nothing happens then everything changes you get the Agricultural Revolution populations expand then you get cities and everything changes again then you get civilization and one of the things we tried to show in the book is that actually the process is much more interesting than that and you've got people that what are supposed to be different phases or stages of History actually living cheek by jowl sort of feeding off each other reacting against each other”
Megalithic monuments at sites like Stonehenge reflect sophisticated mathematical and geometrical understanding developed through empirical observation in the landscape and interaction with nature, distinct from the laboratory-based science model later adopted by Europeans.
“you see it reflected in in Monumental architecture from very early periods which is often laid out uh in very precise alignments in relation to other monuments in relation to the solstices here in the UK obviously you have famously Stonehenge um that's right I mean people were were clearly uh more than capable of developing very sophisticated mathematical geometrical understandings in different ways to the way we do it now”
Societies that later emerged in the Americas—some highly egalitarian—should be understood as having historical consciousness of earlier hierarchical systems like Cahokia and Pueblo civilizations, and as having made deliberate choices to adopt egalitarianism rather than simply always being that way.
“when you start looking at it that way it enables you to join the dots or make a bit more sense of the kinds of societies that Europeans did eventually encounter few centuries later in the same regions some of which were still very hierarchical like little mini cahokias but others had developed this highly egalitarian way of living which you know the natural assumption for Europeans to make is that they've just always been that way um but of course we're talking about people with fully developed historical consciousness who do have in their own histories the history of kerokia and the whole Regional system that it generated which goes almost as far north as the Great Lakes so there is a hierarchical past there that people have for one reason or another turned their backs on and created a different form of society”
Teotihuacan was a centralized, hierarchical city of around 100,000-200,000 people (conservative to high estimates) around 300 AD, with evidence of ritual killing and human sacrifice at its foundations, but underwent a profound political transformation around 250-300 AD when monumental construction ceased and resources were redirected to housing all citizens in luxury apartment compounds.
“it begins on a very hierarchical path you know if you go there today as a tourist or just Google some pictures of the site you'll see the two great pyramids pyramid of the Sun the Pyramid of the moon this other great structure called the Temple of The Feathered Serpent these are all later names that the Aztec actually invented for teotiwakan we don't know what they were originally called so it begins in this very hierarchical way and again you've even got evidence for ritual killing and Human Sacrifice they buried the bodies of captives under the foundations of the pyramids it's quite disturbing the hands type mind their backs and they built these structures on top of them but then something changes around 300 A.D 250 300 A.D there is no more Monumental construction on that scale and all of the labor and resources that presumably went into building great temples and pyramids go into something else and that's something else is housing and they cover the entire settlement on a grid formation with beautiful housing apartments these are Apartments which are low rise so I want to talk about apartment compounds we're not talking high-rise we're talking something more like a villa with a number of a small number of nuclear families big Central Courtyards subfloor drainage gorgeous murals on the walls”
The widespread phenomenon of successful slave revolts and abolition of slavery in history is often attributed only to European or Western abolition movements, yet there is strong evidence of multiple prior abolitions of slavery in non-European contexts that receive minimal historical recognition.
“you make this great sort of rhetorical question in the book which is what we talk about the abolition of slavery um and of course we talk about the story of Simone de Bolivar and Tucson levature and the abolitionists and whatnot but perhaps it was abolished numerous times many times in history yeah I mean I think this is just sort of classic eurocentrism you know the idea that yeah maybe these things were happening elsewhere but they don't really happen until they happen in a European context”
The transformation of Teotihuacan from hierarchical to egalitarian organization resembles a social revolution, with multiple experts suggesting a profound transformation occurred; this contradicts conventional assumptions that very large dense urban populations with established hierarchy cannot reverse course.
“there are um experts uh on on that site uh who have suggested that that may have been the kind of thing that took place there's no absolute consensus on it in the way that there's generally very little consensus in archeology but I think uh everyone would accept um that there is a profound transformation that takes place there and that's kind of fascinating because you know one of the things that we're told in the traditional Narrative of human history is that once you have very large dense human populations and once hierarchy sets in in those kind of settings it is irreversible whereas here we seem to have a situation where there is a reversal”
European colonizers adopted material habits—tobacco use, caffeinated beverages, sitting arrangements—from the Americas, yet there is significant cultural resistance to the idea that they also adopted intellectual and political ideas from indigenous peoples, despite this resistance being logically inconsistent.
“it's not controversial to point to the fact that Europeans adopted a lot of material habits from the Americas at that time many of which are actually linked to the habit of sitting around having those kind of intellectual conversations you know smoking tobacco from pipes drinking caffeinated Beverages and yet there is a great resistance to the idea that along with those substances and material habits came ideas”
Hunter-gatherers and foragers prior to agriculture were less parochial—more geographically and culturally mobile and connected—than most people until relatively recently in history, due to their mode of life requiring travel and exchange.
“foragers hunter-gatherers being less parochial basically than modern humans I mean maybe not today in the age of the internet but until relatively recently yeah can you talk about that”
The 'indigenous critique' of European civilization transmitted through figures like Kondiaronk shaped Enlightenment thought on democracy and freedom, yet this contribution is systematically erased from historiography, replaced by narratives attributing democratic ideas to ancient Greece or European soil.
“the context that it comes out of is is a real one of culture contact and exchange and the effects on the European thoughts we would argue were explosive so candy rank in other words ought to be considered part of the story of what we call the enlightenment in the same way as Voltaire did era and all the rest I mean importantly it precedes all of them so and it precedes them all by some decades so you have what you might call a sort of proto-enlightenment Salon before the appearance of the the famous salons in Europe”
In classical political theory, there is a deeply ingrained assumption—both in left and right traditions—that only moderns, post-Enlightenment peoples, are capable of consciously designing societies according to chosen values, whereas earlier peoples are treated as passive or determined by forces, which Wengrow and Graeber reject.
“there's this deeply ingrained assumption to think that it's only us moderns or supposedly moderns you know us post-enlightenment folk who've been able to do that to actually make a decision about the kinds of societies we wish to live in and then consciously try to make that happen and I think that's that's a deeply rooted idea both in the intellectual philosophical and political traditions of the left and of the right in Europe in the European tradition let's say and we think that's wrong”
The fall of Tenochtitlan is conventionally taught as the beginning of Western global domination, but a crucial step in that pathway was the encounter between European conquerors and Tlaxcala, an indigenous urban democracy—this encounter barely features in world histories despite being foundational to understanding the conquest.
“we're quite rightly taught that the fall of tenashtitlan was in in a sense you know the beginning of um Western global domination what we're not taught is that one of the things you know one of the steps on that pathway was this extraordinary encounter between uh European conquerors and an indigenous Urban democracy of sorts”
Stonehenge and other major monuments in the British Isles were constructed during a period when the population consciously abandoned cereal farming (which had been imported from the continent) and reverted to foraging wild nuts and acorns, while maintaining herding of pigs and cattle, representing a deliberate social choice rather than climatic necessity.
“Stonehenge by the time it's constructed about 5 000 years ago uh farming has already been adopted in the British Isles as an import from the European continent but then as in many other places of the world and again you know this goes back to your initial characterization of human history where you get Agriculture and then everything changes the British Isles are one of many examples of where people adopt Agriculture and then basically change their minds so the period when Stonehenge and many other great monuments constructed is actually one in which the populations of this island um more or less give up the habit of cereal farming and they go back to foraging wild nuts and acorns and things as their staple plant food they decide to keep they hold on to other things so they hold on to um the farming of animals pigs and cattle”
Cahokia was the center of a regional system with cultural and political influence spreading throughout the Mississippi basin, showing evidence of hierarchy (including mass female burials suggesting ritual killing) and surveillance (from elevated mounds), but then was abandoned by its inhabitants rather than destroyed.
“certain things are going on there um which are predicated on her um various forms of hierarchy or inequality there's a mound which is is actually full of the bodies of young women who seem to have been richly killed in in some kind of horrible ceremony um on the Monks Mound itself there's an incredible ability to have surveillance over the whole settlement and we know that when the site centralizes the surrounding Countryside sort of empties out so you get these housing districts which would have all been visible from up there you get fortifications forming and it seems to be going in that kind of Direction and then everything changes and the area is abandoned depopulated”
The period of Stonehenge and megalithic construction was also a time of large seasonal festivals at sites like Darrington Walls where populations engaged in massive communal meat feasts alongside coordinated construction activities, indicating sophisticated social organization and deliberate resource allocation.
“there's a site close to Stonehenge called Darrington walls where they've actually found the place where people congregated for seasonal festivals and feasted on huge amounts of meat it must have been a hell of a party and this presumably was at the times when they were also engaging in these big coordinated construction activities that we see there”
Universities fail to integrate knowledge from adjacent fields, teaching political theory based on 17th-century speculation about prehistory while archaeology departments studying actual human prehistory work in isolation, representing a lost learning opportunity and institutional failure to connect evidence with foundational theory.
“around the corner from where you were learning about uh lock and roles and all the rest of it would have been the place where I work the Institute of archeology... you know it's I guess it's unfortunately in the nature of universities to carve these things up into separate departments which don't actually generate that kind of learning where knowledge Moves In what should be very obvious directions”
Pseudo-archaeology often presents ideas from obsolete 19th-century mainstream archaeology (e.g., lost civilizations like Atlantis, 'new races' building monuments) as novel revelations, yet these ideas have long been disproven by contemporary archaeology.
“what is often presented as some great new revelation is actually just a very old rehashed obsolete theory that comes out of what was probably mainstream archeology you know sometime in the early 19th century like you know lost city of Atlantis that kind of thing it's nothing new about those ideas”
Indigenous American societies encountered by Europeans (particularly in the Great Lakes/Eastern Woodlands region, now Canada and upstate New York) were organized along radically democratic lines with unusual levels of freedom for women compared to contemporary European societies, and this had profound influence on European political imagination.
“Europeans encountered societies that were organized on radically different lines much more democratic lines with levels of Freedom particularly for women which were unheard of in European societies at the time and which clearly had an enormous impact on the European imagination including on the political imagination”
La Hontan wrote 'Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense' featuring Adario (based on Condorac) giving brilliant, scathing analysis of European civilization; this book became a bestseller translated into multiple languages, inspired stage plays running for years, and became the foundation for a genre of dialogues used by major Enlightenment thinkers.
“one of those books is the one called curious dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense who has traveled and it features these conversations between LA Hotel playing himself a character called adario who everyone accepts is based on Candy Rock and in these dialogues adario slash khandirong gives the most brilliant sort of scathing withering analysis of European civilization and this is the book that takes off like wildfire and inspires countless imitations it’s it’s a bestseller it’s translated into multiple European languages uh stage plays which run for years are based on it and it becomes the foundation of a whole genre of such dialogues that almost every major Enlightenment thinker had a go at”
The fact that ideas traveled both ways between Americas and Europe during colonization, yet this barely figures in our understanding of colonization, is striking; we treat idea transfer as one-way (Guns, Germs, and Steel model) despite 200 years of cultural contact and intellectual exchange.
“we took about 200 years and yet that barely figures in our in our understanding of the exploitation and the colonization of the Americas it’s seen as purely one way in terms of ideas in terms of capital and humans um but what you say which I think is actually very empowering for for for peoples and ideas which aren’t in the global North the most powerful countries is actually it went both ways”
Condorac/Adario preceded all major Enlightenment thinkers by decades, meaning he should be considered part of the Enlightenment narrative in the same way as Voltaire and others, not as an external influence on it.
“candy rank in other words ought to be considered part of the story of what we call the enlightenment in the same way as Voltaire did era and all the rest I mean importantly it precedes all of them so and it precedes them all by some decades so you have what you might call a sort of proto-enlightenment Salon before the appearance of the the famous salons in Europe”
If pre-state peoples were capable of making decisions on the scale of abandoning agriculture across entire regions, it raises a profound question about why modern societies struggle with structural changes like energy transition despite having far greater resources and knowledge.
“and it raises a question right which is uh if people have been able to make decisions on that scale in what we are taught to think of as primitive societies uh why do we struggle so much with those kinds of structural changes now”
Beginning of the pharaonic state in Egypt involved extraordinary carefully orchestrated violence against people, warranting investigation into what political purposes this violence served rather than dismissing it or attributing it to mysterious civilizations.
“what it makes you do is reflect on what we mean by a city um and what are the assumptions that are baked into that so we're going to produce a kind of installation Which models these rival accounts and debates doesn't necessarily try to prove one version but which visually kind of immerses you in the questions if that makes sense so that's one project I'm doing I've also been talking I mean one of the things that's really um just been kind of overwhelming about the the response to the dawn of everything is the creative response and I'm not talking particularly about um people writing or you know academic writing or even essays but musicians uh artists filmmakers”
When reading Rousseau carefully, he explicitly frames his account of private property and agriculture as a thought experiment ('do not take this as history') meant to make readers reflect on these institutions' effects, not as historical reconstruction—a distinction later authors like Stephen Pinker and Yuval Harari lost by presenting speculation as objective truth.
“when he’s describing a story very similar to the one you started with about you know how agriculture trapped Us in certain new ways of life in the invention of private property he says do not take this as history this is effectively a thought experiment and you know it’s it’s meant to make you reflect on what private property is and its place in the world and its effects on us as human beings the distinction of mine and Vine if you like it’s not meant to be a reconstruction so actually what’s happened with some of the other modern authors you mentioned is also rather strange where you’ve got what began a sort of radical speculation is now presented as objective truth or even the sort of laws of history”
Questions about whether the Sphinx is older than the pyramids represent a legitimate line of historical inquiry, though one that currently lacks compelling supporting evidence, and should be distinguished from conspiracy theories attributing monuments to non-human builders.
“there are more ambiguous examples of this aren't there so you know there's there's people out there who say that the Sphinx is significantly older than the pyramids it's still constructed by people in Egypt you know not by a sort of race of aliens and that actually we're really wrong and it's thousands of years older than we presently think would you call that a conspiracy theory no it's a completely legitimate line of questioning um it just happens I think not to really lead anywhere terribly interesting I mean there are ways of investigating that sort of thing”
Real archaeological evidence is already fascinating and puzzling without fabricated mystery; the actual evidence is challenging and stimulating on its own terms without elaboration or conspiracy.
“the real evidence is fascinating and it's puzzling and it's challenging on its own terms you don't need to you know come up with Confections and elaborations to make it interesting just try and get to grips with it is already challenging and stimulating enough without you know it's trying to surround it with some fabricated area of mystery”
Wengrow continues to promote and discuss the book as a form of fulfilling what Graeber would have wanted, feeling impelled to work hard talking about the book and getting the work across, carrying forward a collaborative intellectual project that is simultaneously a personal loss.
“the only thing that I can really hold on to in the middle of it all is that he would definitely want me to be out there working hard talking about the book telling people about the book and just trying to get the work across as well as I'm capable of see doing it partly for him as well when you got that extra mile yeah yeah 100 yeah”
Only a very small number of people in specific locations (the Fertile Crescent) began agriculture about 12,000 years ago; most of the world's population remained hunter-gatherers and fishers, so the 'agricultural revolution' was not a universal transition but a localized phenomenon.
“when you say we we started having agriculture 12 000 years ago only a very tiny number of people on the planet started doing that in very specific locations uh specifically the Middle East what they sometimes called the Fertile Crescent most of the world at that time was still hunter-gatherers and Fishes”
Baron La Hontan, a French nobleman who went to the colonies at age 17, lived there for a decade, spoke two indigenous languages, and was a troublemaker kicked out of the colonies, went to Amsterdam impoverished and wrote travel logs that brought him back into favor at court.
“a minor French nobleman who went by the name lahonto the baron La Junta who is a person who went over to the colonies in his youth I think at the age of 17. lived there for a decade spoke at least two indigenous languages um and was deeply embroiled in the goings-on of of those tumultuous times but also seems to have been a bit of a troublemaker they didn’t get on with authority ended up getting kicked out of the colonies and found himself more or less penniless on the streets of Amsterdam and he writes these books these sort of travel logs and finds his way back into favor at court”
Cahokia was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America with a population estimated at around 40,000 people at its height (around 14th century AD), comparable in size to major European cities of the time.
“around a thousand years ago this place is the same size as London so about a thousand A.D it's got a population in the tens of thousands you know ballpark it's a it gets up estimates are something like around perhaps forty thousand people at its height um around the the 14th century yeah so maybe Norwich or something you know it's a largest European city”
The site of Göbekli Tepe (c. 9000 BC) in eastern Turkey should not be characterized as a city but as a permanently settled site where people aggregated periodically to coordinate large-scale activities, suggesting social organization more complex than typical contemporary settlements.
“I wouldn't personally refer to quebecue Tepe which is much later I mean there's no neanderthals around at that point so we're going back about um to about 9000 BC here in um in the Middle East and I wouldn't personally characterize quebeco Tepe as a city I think we're dealing with a a site which is clearly uh permanently settled but where you have periods when people are coming together and aggregating and coordinating their activities in very large numbers”
Multiple scientific techniques—isotope analysis to trace movement, ancient DNA analysis, tracing of raw material distribution—now enable reconstruction of early human societies showing global connectivity, contrary to prior assumptions of isolation.
“we've got scientific techniques these days which are pretty good I mean you can actually Trace people's diodes tens of thousands of years ago you can say whether they moved from a coastal environment to a terrestrial environment you can trace movements of plants animals raw materials we have ancient DNA so there are many methods by which we can reconstruct a picture of early human societies”
At least four to five different species of humans existed simultaneously around 50,000 years ago—Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis in Indonesia, and recently discovered humans from Luzon Island—with genetic evidence of interbreeding across species.
“a lot further like 50 000 years ago um we know at that point there are at least four probably five different species of humans around the planet there's us there's the Neanderthals there's the denisovant there's homophoriensis in Indonesia which are the little people sometimes playfully called Hobbits and there's also some more recent discoveries from Luzon island in the Philippines so this is a situation with no modern parallel when you've actually got different varieties of the human species interacting we know genetically that there was interaction of the closest possible kind that was reproduction across those species”
One of the earliest Egyptian kings, named Aha (readable in early hieroglyphs), was buried with not only hundreds or thousands of other people who appear to have been ritually killed, but also with three lions, indicating elaborate ceremonial practices from the very origins of the pharaonic state.
“one of the earliest Egyptian kings goes by the name which we can read in early hieroglyphs amazingly his name is Aha and it's transcribed into English as aha um and aha's team actually has not only human beings in pits there's also like three Lions buried in it nothing to do with the England football team”
Humans cognitively identical to modern humans have existed for approximately 200 to 300 thousand years, yet we know vanishingly little about what they did during most of that time.
“humans have been around as far as We Know humans who are cognitively just like you and I same kinds of brains perfectly capable of having a conversation just like the one that we're having for something in the order of 200 to 300 000 years”
The book 'The Dawn of Everything' was motivated by a recognition that around 2008-2009—the financial crisis—a slew of literature emerged reasserting old 18th-century ideas about the deep roots of inequality, and Wengrow and Graeber decided to challenge this by bringing actual archaeological evidence to bear.
“something David and I noticed around the time when we decided to start thinking about these kinds of issues was pretty much exactly the time of the last big financial crash about 2008-9 and you know there was a slew of literature as you might expect on inequality in the roots of inequality and suddenly a lot of those very old ideas you know going all the way back to the 17th 18th centuries really coming back in quite a surprisingly aggressive way”
Wengrow is collaborating with forensic architecture (based at Goldsmiths College) to create an installation about ancient Ukrainian cities (dating back 6,000 years) that present no evidence of political or economic centralization, using architectural modeling to immerse viewers in debates about what constitutes a city.
“I'm involved with the new collaboration with a group that you might have heard of called forensic architecture based at Goldsmith's College that's an interesting one because they do mostly human rights work and they use architectural Theory and principles of modeling to go to court over a whole range of different issues...he came to an event a big event in Germany in Berlin about the dawn of everything which was called the civilization questions big three-day event...we decided to collaborate on something...it's going to focus on these incredible archaeological sites in Ukraine in Ukraine you have cities going back as early as the earliest ones that we know of in Mesopotamia in what's now Iraq and parts of Syria so we're going back around 6 000 years ago you have these huge cities that present no evidence of centralization not in political or economic terms and there is a big debate about whether they should or should not be referred to as cities or rather as something else like overgrown Villages or Mega sites”
David Graeber, Wengrow's co-author, had the 'incredible capacity to take rather obscure topics and Concepts and write about them in a way that touch people and made it personal and made them want to engage and create,' which Wengrow views as a tribute to Graeber's work.
“I think it was more of a sort of young adult actor and I mean I’ve met Child Actors and they’re a very specific kind of person but it’s never quite one of those um but um what happened basically after trying various other things including a little flotation with journalism uh the BBC Arabic service um and various other things I wasn’t really finding a Direction so I had good grades from from school and I decided to apply to Oxford”
David Graeber (the co-author) passed away approximately three weeks after completing the manuscript, meaning he did not live to witness the book's global success and translation into multiple languages, which has been emotionally complex for Wengrow.
“he put out a um sort of faux Jim Morrison quote Yeah my brain is bruised with numb surprise we finished or something like that yeah and then he passed away a month later yeah about three weeks after we finished the manuscript”
The book 'The Dawn of Everything' has generated creative responses from musicians, artists, and filmmakers—not just academic papers—indicating that the historical arguments resonate beyond academic audiences and inspire cultural production.
“one of the things that's really um just been kind of overwhelming about the the response to the dawn of everything is the creative response and I'm not talking particularly about um people writing or you know academic writing or even essays but musicians uh artists filmmakers I was just the other week with a a fantastic uh singer and artist she's based in Paris Yasmin Dubois her stage name is La founder and um she wrote a song called the dawn of everything”