The Dawn of Nothing
The Dawn of Everything is framed as a challenge to conventional myths about human history, particularly the idea that inequality and hierarchy were inevitable outcomes of social evolution. But the evidence is weak, and the reasoning is intellectually dishonest. For something that claims to debunk myths, it spends a lot of time creating its own.
The book was an instant best seller that continues to inspire global audiences hungry for a new story about the human past, and new ways to think about our future. Popular audiences praised its hopeful message, but scholars were more cautions and even critical. Behind the rhetorical flourish, they found a pattern of selective analysis, weakly supported observations, and an unfair dismissal of existing research.
I’ll be more direct. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity isn’t history. It’s ideology dressed up as analysis, built on selective evidence and confirmation bias. The authors create a straw man version of mainstream views, then disprove those misrepresented ideas to support their claim that humans are naturally egalitarian. The way things turned out was a tragic detour—but what exactly is the big new insight? That it didn’t have to happen? That’s not history. That’s wishful thinking.
David Graeber was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist and professor at the London School of Economics. His work focused on the anthropology of value, debt, and social structures. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London whose research includes early urbanization and the origins of inequality. Both have strong academic credentials, though Graeber was considered a more polarizing figure.
The Dawn of Everything challenges the idea that human history followed a fixed, linear path from simple, egalitarian groups to complex, hierarchical states. It emphasizes the diversity of past societies, and shows that humans experimented with a variety of social arrangements—including egalitarian systems— and at times abandoned political structures in favor of earlier ways of living. The authors cite a many fascinating examples of the diversity and dynamic nature of social development that led them to conclude that the present is not the only possible outcome—and that alternative futures remain possible for humanity.
The problem is that the linear path that they present as mainstream is a straw man. No credible modern scholars still defend such a simplistic model of human evolution from primitive bands to hierarchical states. In fact, the mainstream view has long recognized the complexity and variability that Graeber and Wengrow present as something new.
A key component of the popular appeal of The Dawn of Everything is its supposed breakthrough claim that early human societies were far more egalitarian, experimental, and politically self-aware than conventional narratives suggest.
But this “discovery” is hardly new. Nearly 40 years earlier, cultural historian Riane Eisler made a similar argument in The Chalice and the Blade, documenting the existence of egalitarian, cooperative societies—many of them the same Neolithic settlements in Turkey (like Çatalhöyük) that Graeber and Wengrow highlight. Eisler’s work, which has sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into multiple languages, was widely influential in academic and feminist circles. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu even called The Chalice and the Blade “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species.” Yet Graeber and Wengrow make no mention of her, omitting a foundational voice from a conversation they claim to have invented.
Many of the examples Graeber and Wengrow use to support their arguments are exceptions rather than representative patterns. They rely heavily on case studies from relatively recent Indigenous North American societies, which are fascinating but not statistically significant in the broader context of world history. By emphasizing these outliers without accounting for differences in resource abundance, population density, and geography between the Old and New Worlds, the authors overstate the universality of their claims.
Graeber and Wengrow offer an intriguing catalog of early human social experiments, showing that egalitarian systems and alternative political arrangements once existed. But their argument fails the basic “so what?” test.
So what if some societies were egalitarian or seasonally flexible? That’s not how history played out. Over time, those alternatives were out-competed or were absorbed, and what remained were the forms best suited to scale, organize, and dominate—states, agriculture, property, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and markets. This global convergence wasn’t random or arbitrary; it reflects the selective pressures of history. Pointing to long-extinct exceptions doesn’t change that we ended up where we are.
Perhaps the most glaring weakness in The Dawn of Everything is the authors’ failure to answer their own central question: if humans have always had a wide range of possibilities, why did we end up with hierarchical, bureaucratic, and state-based systems? Graeber and Wengrow offer no clear explanation.
The result is a book that feels more like an effort to prove a point than to understand reality. As Tom Murphy puts it, their command of archaeological detail allows them to throw “sand in the gears,” all while insisting there are no gears to begin with. It’s a clever story, but it sidesteps the crucial question: why the alternatives lost.
Despite its subtitle, this book is not a “new history of humanity.” It’s a one-sided argument against the world we ended up with, offering little more than the claim that things could have turned out differently.
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I was delighted to read this. I started the book last year and perceived a manipulative subtext that I couldn’t articulate, so I put the book down. You explain it well here.
Thanks for those comments, Mike.
All the best,
Art
you should try reading the book
My critique of the book also has to do with time blindness. Imagine if you were a small rodent living 67 million years ago. If you were capable of the same kind of thinking, you might ask “how did the world end up in the wretched state of affairs in which dinosaurs dominate the Earth.” The assumption that our current cultural and social structures are permanent, rather than a stretch of road, is fallacious. Modern techno-industrial society is not sustainable. When our material circumstances are radically altered, our societies will have to adapt or perish. Just ask all the non-avian dinosaurs and ground shrews. They could tell you that survival of the fittest is actually survival of the fit enough for now.
Thanks for those thoughtful comments, Scott. Graeber and Wengrow should know that it’s only been the last few thousand years that humans have strayed from an earth-centered world view. How that happened should be the real subject of inquiry. Many others–Campbell, Jung, McGilchrist among them–have done a far more conscientious job but have not put their work in best-seller format.
All the best,
Art
The notion of a pre-civilisational ‘earth-centered world view’ is as fallacious an understanding as Graeber and Wengrow’s rejection of materialist/deterministic contributions which have led to our predicament of extreme human ecological overshoot. This notion, that we might be able to ‘change our minds’ civilisationally, is being mobilised in some circles to suggest that a broad collective agential transformation of human relation to the ecological economics of material/energy flows is somehow possible, and/or, feasible – it is not. Collapse is inevitable and, very clearly, already in process.
More accurately it could be stated that – ‘worldviews’ emerge from their relational energetic and material flows, much as the delusion of infinite progress on a finite planet today flows from its relationship with fossil energy. Whilst acknowledging that not all civilisations are necessarily sedentary and agricultural, collectively, the pre-civilisation neolithic human did not have a ‘worldview’ as such but rather responded to the ecological economics of the environment.
Notwithstanding the how’s and whys, the real issue is what we do with the reality of our predicament. It is in this regard that socio-ecological justice can be effected in the present even as the ship inevitably goes down. This is resistance. This is worth fighting for. This is a JustCollapse.
Your position is impressionistic and ideological, not factual. Show data, Tristan.
Better, read Campbell, Kramer, Jacobsen, Hornung, Allen, Kenoyer, Hodder, Thomas, Eliade, Dumézil.
I’ve researched this thoroughly and you’re ignorantly wrong.
Art
Thank you for the critique of the book, I’ve got it on my bookshelf to read after having been impressed with Graeber’s Debt the first 5,000 years, so will keep a critical hat on whenever I get to it. The critique does lead me to ask whether you have a list of books you’ve found useful in better understanding the world, society, issues etc (and I’ll look into The Chalice and the Blade) – I’ve dipped into a few that are listed here: https://civilizationemerging.com/resources/books/ so thought I’d ask if you have any similar reading recommendations.
Jonathan,
That list has some awesome books. I’d read Tainter first from the list. I’m surprised that Joseph Cambell is not there–Hero With 1000 Faces is where I’d start reading. I’d also read Hagens & White, Reality Blind,
All the best,
Art
Mankind has not changed from the beginning. First comes self interest and survival. In pursuit of these, man has thought of ways to improve his interests. That’s where technology comes in and means of trading things for value, such as barter and money. As mankind advances, the only things that change are knowledge and better living conditions. Unfortunately, we still have wars and greed. The only change is we have more deadly weapons. As said in Ecclesiastes, There is nothing new under the sun.”
I disagree, Mark.
The beginning that you are describing is fairly recent in human history, about 4000 years ago. Read about history in addition to scripture that was a product of man’s separation from Nature.
All the best,
Art
The hippies never stop with their fantasizing about a past that never existed just like the techbro optimists won’t stop fantasizing about a Star Trek future that will never exist.
That being said I think the civilizations given to us by the old dead white guys has actually been more egalitarian but it had energetic requirements so intense it may also have to be shoved into the dustbin of history.
Thanks for your comments Chris. Civilization is a structure to contain our worst behaviors. It has worked fairly well from that perspective.
All the best,
Art
There are always anthropologists willing use their knowledge to bedazzle the masses in pursuit of ideological justifications. They write a best seller such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Thanks for debunking this. Also give thanks to the internet, which subjects such essays to criticism. Academics no longer live on Mount Olympus, coming down from their lofty perches to tell masses what they are doing wrong, and why we need a planned society run by them.
Thank you again for debunking this. A made-up past will not give us a bright future.
I appreciate your comments, Richard. What this book lacked was a thorough description of the present and an explanation of who we got here from the past.
All the best,
Art
Art,
Charlie Hall is address CACOR tomorrow. By being there I will see all the Q&A and comments.
In 2022 I was hearing about the book, the rave celebrations, but only realized I’d need to take a closer look when Alice Friedemann joined in and provided extensive excerpts from the book with notes added, 68,490 words or about 250 pages of the over 704 page book. For this, I would make time for. So I gathered into one file her mostly excerpts she had cut and pasted from her Kindle version. I then read and added my own notes. The title soon became The Dawn of Everything Comments:
The last 30 thousands years of our story is not remotely about everything
Glossing over the last 30k years of human ecology (selectively) is a confession of being time blind. I ended up agreeing three years in advance to the points you make. To avoid death by terminal facepalming, I stopped reading about half way though the 250 pages. I posted all of them, even left in my notes, but so far as I know I haven’t wasted anyone’s time reading them.
Eric
Thanks for those comments, Eric.
I was immediately skeptical when I heard about the book’s theme that it would be ideologically driven. After reading it, I was right.
There’s plenty of anecdotal information to like in the book about variations on the human social development theme. I dislike straw man arguments and stories that fail to address the “how’ and “why” of their subjects.
All the best,
Art