Unstuck in Deep Time

THERE’S A SIMPLE story about life before civilization, retold by evolutionary scholars and New York Times bestsellers like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow summarize it skeptically in their big new book, The Dawn of Everything.

Long ago, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, “living…in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small.” We did this for hundreds of thousands of years, until an Agricultural Revolution fed an Urban Revolution, which heralded civilization and states. That meant “the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy,” but also “patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.”

Or perhaps, interjects Steven Pinker, those bands