The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Another field within the social sciences, archeology consists of the study of physical evidence of human activity in throughout history, including prehistoric civilizations and other now-defunct societies. Archeologists examine historical artifacts, including architecture, written evidence, artistic productions, everyday objects, and geographical sites, to examine the development of human societies and cultures. Part of the objective of archeology is to understand how civilizations rise, fall, and change over time. Again, like anthropology, the discipline of archeology was founded amidst the rise of European imperialism and colonialism; thus, many of its earliest premises have been subject to reevaluation, as well.

Known as “the cradle of civilization,” the Fertile Crescent encompasses the area occupied by the modern states of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, as well as parts of Egypt, Kuwait, and Turkey. This region gave rise to what some scholars call the “Agricultural Revolution,” wherein foraging societies gave way to settled farming communities. This then led to larger populations and the proliferation of urban centers throughout Mesopotamia. In The Dawn of Everything, the authors argue that there are really two distinct crescents, an upland and lowland crescent, and interactions between the two communities reveal a more complex adoption of agriculture than the concept of “revolution” would lead readers to believe.

As the authors define it in the book, the Indigenous critique consists of a “consistent moral and intellectual assault of European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards” (48). Most notably, this critique excoriates Europeans for their lack of autonomy, equality, and their insensitivity to the needs of the less fortunate within their societies. Far from being a relic from the past, the authors argue that the standard story of human history—that agriculture begets larger and more complex societies, wherein “freedoms are lost” to sovereign rule and bureaucratic control—“was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of the Indigenous critique” (32). As such, its influence still lingers in the work of many modern scholars.

Popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau the “noble savage” is an image of an idealized and innately good, pre-civilized man. This fantasy allows for the dismissal of Indigenous critique. Constructing Indigenous people as naive and inherently unintellectual allows others to dismiss their complex societies or political ideas. Self-conscious decisions to live in egalitarian groups, for example, are viewed as a byproduct of simplicity rather than self-determination.

The sapient paradox notes the considerable distance in time between the emergence of homo sapiens as a species and the development of complex social organizations and political intelligence. Alongside the concept of the “noble savage,” the sapient paradox is another way in which the sophistication of early human societies can be obscured or dismissed. For example, some modern scholars of prehistory (Yuval Harari, for example) resort to relegating early humans to primitive status, comparing them to peaceful apes or violent chimpanzees.

As the authors demonstrate, this paradox leaves an unsatisfying either/or fallacy that is not supported by the material evidence. The sapient paradox insists “either that for countless millennia we had modern brains, but for some reason decided to live like monkeys anyway; or that we had the ability to overcome our simian instincts and organize ourselves in an endless variety of ways, but for some equally obscure reason only ever chose one way to organize ourselves” (93). The historical reality, they argue, is more regionally specific and socially complex than the sapient paradox would suggest.