Dan Snow's History Hit - How Brutish were our Ancestors?

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Was life for our ancient ancestors brutish and short or did they exist as noble savages, free and living in harmony with nature and each other? Many of our assumptions about ancient societies stem from Renaissance theories about how society should be organised and what civilisation is. Dan is joined by David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London and co-author of 'The Dawn of Everything' to challenge some of these assumptions and show that they were founded on critiques of European society. David shines a light on the great variety of ancient civilisations, the different models of society they offer and how that might influence us today.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We talked about this whole canard before. Who was right? Hobbes? Was life nasty, brutish and short? Before we gave in to the Leviathan, let the state control our every move, swapped liberty for security? Or was Rousseau right? That rather colourful 18th century philosopher who says that man was born free and is ever in chains. He's become associated with the term noble, savage, typically bon sauvage. He actually never wrote that phrase himself, but he's the philosopher that we remember

particularly connected with the theory that in a state of nature, we're free. We were nice to each other. We collaborated. And we've had various wonderful thinkers like David Runciman at Cambridge, like Rutger Bregman, thinking about that kind of central issue of our existence, which is, what are we actually like? How have we decided to live like this? And who put these guys

in charge of us? It's a big question. Well, now there's been another big contribution to this sort of field of study. It's been written by David Graeber and David Wengro. Sadly, David Graeber died just before it was completed. So I've got David Wengro on the podcast. He is the Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. And he got a bit bored of everybody, various political theorists, historians, jokers, writing about our prehistory without actually knowing anything about it. So David is coming on to talk about what we are actually learning about our prehistoric ancestors. Did they all live in a certain way? Did their human ingenuity provide all sorts of different

and competing ways to live with each other in a group? Did we hunt and gather do we farm do we do both david addresses the very biggest issues of all it was a great treat having all the pods stretched in your brain going for the biggest topics and one that allows us to think very differently like all the best history about our present and our futures enjoy this chat with david wengro it is fascinating. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure, Dan. This book was years in the making, right? It began, as you said, with chats in a pub and a few beers and late-night phone calls, and then it turned into a history of everything.

Well, the only thing that's not true in what you just said is the pints in the beers, which I enjoy, but my late co-author wasn't a great fan of pubs. So it tended to be more long lunches and long emails and sitting in parks and that sort of thing. Really, the whole thing got going around 2011, I think, which is when David Greber's book Debt came out, which I swapped for a copy of a small book that I wrote on the topic of civilizations, particularly ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. And we began to exchange thoughts and they ballooned and very soon it became clear that we ought to do something about it. Let's rehearse the premise, which is we've been anatomically modern humans for what,

two, three thousand years? Well, people disagree, of course. The geneticists will tell you now more than 300,000 years. But I think, you know, a conservative estimate, biologically, cognitively, modern humans would be something in the order of 250,000 years, perhaps a lot longer. And we get so-called recorded history, how many years ago? Recorded in the sense of writing. Systems of writing are invented in various parts of the world, beginning around 5,000 years ago. Recorded history in the sense of people writing down conscious narratives about who they were, where they came from, that all comes much

later. The actual uses of writing are much more restricted to begin with, things like administration, royal proclamations, that sort of thing. So we're talking 98-ish percent of human history? 98-ish percent, maybe even slightly more, comes from other fields, other sources of knowledge and information, in particular my own field as archaeology. And we'll come on to enlightenment in a sec, but just something that people will recognise, this kind of in many ways false dichotomy has been set up between your Russo and your Hobbes. What was going on in that 98% of the time? Were we all battering each other to death or were we all living as noble savages? going on in that 98% of the time? Were we all battering each other to death or were we all living as noble savages? We'll deal with that characterization in a second, but that is something that you guys have set yourselves to try and understand more. And is archaeology essential to this or are there other sources, other fields of scholarship that we can now draw on?

It's a really important question and I want to try and give your listeners as clear a sense as possible of why we felt it was important to go back to those really fundamental issues. Basically, there have been two different routes traditionally for scholars to try and answer the question you've posed, which is, if I understand you correctly, Dan, is along the lines of what are we really like as a species, but what we like for most of the time we've actually existed on this planet. And the kind of answers that we've had have been based either on basically analogies with much more recent groups who have felt to be more representative of those early stages of human history, in particular, people who live by hunting and gathering. We have a lot

of problems in the book with that kind of approach, which we could talk about. These days, as you're aware, our scientific means of actually knowing that deep past directly, particularly, but not only through the field of archaeology and prehistory, has really taken off. Especially in the last few decades. We've just got so much more information pouring in from different corners of the globe about what went on over not just the last 30,000 years, but the last 100,000 years. And while we may not be discovering alien civilizations in other star systems, we are discovering these very radically new and different forms of human societies right here under our very feet. The strange thing is that when other people have gone to sort of bring it all together and tell us what is the broad sweep of human history,

and I think this is something that it's terribly important for people to have a clear notion of these days, because we're at a point in our species development where our tenure on this planet is, by general consent, put into question. So what is the overall shape of history? And for some reason, when people write books on this topic, often they're not actually archaeologists and anthropologists, they do, topic. Often they're not actually archaeologists and anthropologists. They do, for some reason, tend to go back to the state of knowledge, either as it was about 50 or 60 years ago, or quite often to the guys you mentioned, Enlightenment philosophers, Hobbes, Rousseau, the state of knowledge, roughly as it was in the 18th century, which is a slightly bizarre thing to do. And it's an interesting question in itself, why people who consider themselves cutting edge scientists still consider it

important to go back to those foundational European thinkers. Particularly, as you point out, they were not empiricists, right? That was an exercise in speculation. It was figurative. Hobbes didn't actually know how people lived 6,000 years ago. It's funny what's happened in a way. It's really peculiar. I mean, Rousseau is particularly explicit. The second discourse on the origins of social inequality, which he wrote in 1754, contains some very, very clear statements along the lines of, look, everything I'm saying here about how we started off in egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers and then came farming and private property, and from that you get inequality and eventually cities, and that makes states and

domination inevitable. He said, look, you know, I'm not claiming any of this really happened in history. It is an allegory, really, for him. It's a way of illustrating his point that we are innately free, that somehow we have enslaved ourselves. We're born free, but we find ourselves in chains. These were something along the lines of parables, but rather like what's happened with Thomas Hobbes' earlier treaties on the state, the Leviathan, modern scholars have seen fit to take them as the foundation for a kind of evolutionary social

science. I mean, Professor, this is the most important podcast you're going to hear, listeners, because you've got 20 minutes or so to tell us, in that case, Professor, who the hell are we? How do we live before we had these wheels and mobile phones and jet aircraft and plows? The best way I can answer your question is really going back to the big question, you know, what does it mean to be Homo sapiens as opposed to some other species? And the kind of answers that one tends to get fall into dichotomies, oppositions. People love this sort of stuff. Were we originally altruistic as a species or were we very competitive? Were we violent or were we peaceful? Basically, were we good or were we evil? Now, if you think about it,

these aren't really scientific questions. They're almost theological kinds of questions. One of the points that we started with in the book was an essay, actually quite an old one from the early 20th century, called Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, today more properly called the Inuit, by an anthropologist called Marcel Mauss. And he was interested in how many societies, often hunter-gatherers, but not always hunter-gatherers, don't just live in one form of society. Actually, they switch. They alternate. Often broadly in concert with the changing seasons, they'll move from something that

looks very hierarchical to something that's actually very egalitarian, maybe from small bands of very patriarchal and hierarchical societies in some times of year to these much larger agglomerations where people actually share food communally and live in a much more egalitarian way. So one of the first questions we asked is, well, what if they did the same thing with their political systems, with their politics? And as it turns out, we weren't the first people to ask this either. There's a whole archive of information about this sort of thing, which suggests that many human societies have been much more flexible,

moving flexibly, setting up hierarchies, tearing them down, often on an annual or biennial basis. Now, that's very important because it implies that you can step outside your social skin, your social framework. You can think about what would it mean to live in a society with kings and queens all the time and do we really want to do that? Now this is the kind of process I was talking about before where you look at societies of the recent past and you say well what if most of human history was like that? And when most was writing his essay 100 years ago, that's pretty much all you could do. These days, it's different. We have science, we have archaeology, we can actually

compare these kind of hypotheses to what's really there in the record. So just to give you a brief sense of how different the picture that we have today is from this rather drab sort of stick figure notion of egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers or brutal or like bands of hunter-gatherers, whatever your preference. In Ice Age Europe, for example, going back about 20,000, 25,000 years, We have evidence for individuals buried like kings or queens, absolutely saturated with wealth and grave goods. But the puzzle is there's no evidence for monarchy or aristocracy in those periods. It's just burials. So what's going on there? If we look to the Americas, we have long before agriculture evidence for these

huge public arenas where hunter-gatherers would assemble in their shousens, places like Poverty Point in Louisiana about three and a half thousand years ago. So what's that all about? We even have cases of slavery being adopted and then abolished by groups that had never in their history practiced farming. So instead of this, as I say, rather drab and uniform picture of what our species is really like, actually it turns out we are originally, if you like, an incredibly playful species. The Ice Age prehistory turns out to be this kind of encyclopedia of all these wildly different forms of social experiments. So we found we had to throw out completely the kind of questions that Rousseau was asking and which people still seem to be very interested in along the lines of what is the origins of social inequality? Because, of course, that implies that there was some time

long ago when inequality didn't exist. Actually, if it turns out that our species is innately this kind of playful, experimental kind of species, then the real question that we should be asking, the big picture of human history, surely ought to be something more along the lines of how do we end up effectively stuck in one form of social reality, which I think as most people would accept is not always a very pleasant one. It's a reality with a lot of violence and a lot of structural inequalities. So we spend a large part of the book trying to get to grips with that question, but also talking about some of these other ways of being human, including being human in large groups, in cities, that we've only really found out about in the last 20 or 30 years. That's very interesting, is it? Because idiots like me tend to think of the great disconnect being the point at which we gather in cities. And that's when our present is set. There's only one way to live in cities. Everything got fixed and we all got shunted into this world of hierarchies and bureaucrats telling us to fill out forms all the time and us, basically.

Granaries. Yeah, I mean, the good news is it's not true. What we've actually found out about cities is, first of all, that there are a lot more of them on all of the world's continents than people used to think. And a lot of them actually go back thousands of years before things like writing systems, monarchies, anything like states or empires. So how did these other kinds of cities function? I should emphasize this is not a universal pattern. We see very different things

going on in, say, Mexico, Peru, China. But one of the things that really struck us as important is that a significant number of the world's earliest cities do seem to have been organized on quite robustly egalitarian lines. Now, if you go back to that conventional Rousseau-Hobbes type story of the overall shape of human history, small is meant to mean egalitarian. Big, complex is meant to mean hierarchical. It's not true. Actually, if we look at some of the earlier cities where human populations for the first time in history scaled up to tens, even hundreds of thousands of people, actually many of them have no evidence whatsoever. Things like kings or queens or even bureaucracy. To give you one example, maybe the most extreme one, one place where nobody was looking for cities

half a century ago is north of the Black Sea. We tend to think of Scythian tribes and Thracian tribes and the wild peoples of the steppes, barbarians of the steppes. Yes, ungovernable people. Exactly, treasure troves. And, you know, if you go to the major national museums of those countries around the Black Sea, that's what you'll see is all the wonderful gold. But long before that, it turns out archaeologists have found evidence. Going back 5,000 years, there were cities. They're as old as the first cities we know of in the Middle East, in Mesopotamia. They're as big as those cities in terms of space and extent and possibly population as well. Tens of thousands of people. But these cities, archaeologists like to call them megacites,

show absolutely no evidence of marked structural inequalities or wealth inequalities. There are no royal tombs. There are no temples, no palaces. They look like these great circular formations of houses, all roughly the same size. It looks a bit like tree rings, you know, one row of houses, another row of houses, all roughly the same size. It looks a bit like tree rings, you know, one row of houses, another row of houses. It all sounds very bland. Sounds like Baba. Yeah, but when you look more closely, you actually see these people had an incredibly aesthetically rich, I mean, some of the ceramics from these sites are the most beautiful

in the prehistoric world. They had this incredibly rich ecology. It was basically garden cities. So they had an incredible variety of fruits and berries. They weren't just farming cereals. They were hunting and gathering. Now, nobody even knew about these cities, except a very small number of Russian scientists and Ukrainian scientists. And because of the Cold War, it took a very long time for knowledge of them to seep into the consciousness of European and Western historians. But there they are. And they really give the lie to this idea that there is something inevitable, that when humans move into very large configurations that we call cities, they have to somehow surrender their freedoms and set up presidents and politicians and leaders and central bureaucracies. And of course, it's not the only case. We have other cases in Central America, South Asia, the so-called Indus Valley or Harappan civilization has long been recognized as problematic for those who assume that the emergence of cities and civilization means the origins of the state because there's simply no evidence that they had one.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the whole history of the world. Simple as that. Everything. All of it. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What are the limitations of archaeology? How can we know this? I mean, we talk about the absence of giant civic buildings, as you say, burial sites. I mean, can we be confident in this? Or will your successor say, well, actually, I mean, come on, they missed all this obvious stuff. I think we can be absolutely confident in this kind of data in the same way that people

have had no trouble at all in the past identifying kings and states and empires and forms of domination. I think the real challenge now is to recognize that if we only focus on those things, the kind of things that tend to get prioritized on things like UNESCO World Heritage Lists, you know, the great monuments, the great statues and so on, we're actually missing most of what happened in human history. I think we can begin to be a lot more rigorous and robust in talking about the ways in which humans have been free, for example. I'm not talking about the kind of abstract legal freedoms that we get excited about today. I'm talking, for example, about very concrete things. So long before there are cities,

what we see now scientifically is not human beings living in tiny isolated bands. Actually, what comes before cities are these great networks of societies. Demographically, they're quite small, but they form these enormous coalitions that cut across whole continents. You know, this is what archaeologists used to call culture areas. Today, people prefer more scientific sounding names, but it's the same kind of thing. And that implies an incredible freedom. People are moving around and moving from one community to another. There must be forms of hospitality that make that possible. There must be forms of hospitality that make that possible.

Now, speaking of that, your chapter, your section about the Great Lakes region of US and Canada today ticks all my boxes because I love the water and my family are from Toronto and the lakes, so I know it well. Tell us about that because that was so eye-opening for me. This is terribly important because it really comes back to something you mentioned right at the start, which is the legacy of this thing that we call the Enlightenment, which we tend to think of as the birth of our most cherished social and intellectual values, resistance to arbitrary authority, resistance to revealed religion, a rational outlook on life, and that sort of thing, the pursuit of happiness. We tend to think of these things as unique creations of European and Western history. One of the things we discovered in the book, actually, when we were looking into the origins of Rousseau's own writing, is that Enlightenment

philosophers themselves didn't think this way at all. Actually, when they talked about the origins of values that we today hold dear and think of as our own freedom, personal autonomy, they saw those things as coming from somewhere else. They saw them as coming from the Americas and particularly the eastern part of the Americas, including the Great Lakes region, areas that then were populated by long-established groups of Iroquoian-speaking and other indigenous populations. The strange thing is, there were all of these books written along the lines of dialogues that took place between European colonists, particularly French colonists, and basically indigenous intellectuals and indigenous statesmen. Some of them became wildly popular in European circles, particularly

enlightenment salons. Everybody would have had a copy of these things, curious dialogues with a wise savage from the Americas and so on. Some of them were so popular that people based stage plays on them that ran longer than Les Miserables. This stuff was hugely influential. And in those dialogues, the other, the savage, is made to articulate all of these criticisms of European societies as you would have found them in the 17th and 18th centuries, societies that are rigidly hierarchical, absolutely committed to the pursuit of wealth. Here's the strange thing, though, Dan. When modern scholars go to these accounts of the late 17th and 18th centuries, almost universally they assume that the indigenous critic is a fantasy,

a fabrication, something that the European author has made up as a kind of sock puppet so that he or she can articulate subversive critical views about their own society. Like the way Tastus made up barbarian chieftains and put speeches in their mouth, yeah. Precisely. Or even sometimes it's claimed that they are basically aping the ancients and the classics of people like Juvenal, creating an imaginary savage in order to critique but not get into trouble with the church or the state. Now, what we discovered is that indigenous historians in Canada, in North America, have also gone back to some of these early accounts, and they've come to radically different conclusions. Actually, in some cases,

we can even identify particular individuals who took part in what were effectively proto-Enlightenment salons taking place around Montreal or in the Great Lakes region decades before what we tend to think of as the beginning of the European Enlightenment. And the key figure here was a Huron-Wendat statesman by the name of Candironc. The French had a nickname for him. They called him Le Racte for reasons that nobody understands, but he was a major political figure. He was a warrior, a statesman. He was one of the signatories of the great peace of Montreal. And he was famous, not just among indigenous people, but among Europeans as well, in the late 17th century, as really the most brilliant mind. He was famous as a debater and an orator. And the then governor of that part of what the Europeans

called New France also fancied himself as a bit of a debater. He was a guy called the Comte de Frontignac, seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character. But he would invite kandirank on a regular basis to his fort where they would sit and talk out the vices and virtues of european versus indigenous civilization on every topic you can really think of everything from sexual freedoms women's rights the uses and abuses of money in society and and this whole issue of freedom and hierarchy. And what was really challenging about reading these accounts today is that a lot of points that you or I would probably be making don't come from the Europeans. It's the European who's staunchly defending the importance of revealed religion and hierarchy. And it's very important that we defer to each other all the time and obey orders and use money. And it's actually

the voice of the indigenous critic. And it's a very consistent voice that you find across multiple different accounts from that period. Also accounts written by Jesuit missionaries of the time. They found a lot of this stuff very alien. And the criticisms that they had found their way into European circles, they were very popular among women because they did talk about women's freedoms. And this is a really crucial point. What happens basically, there's one guy, a minor French aristocrat called to be Baron L'Agenton. Now, L'Agenton has a habit of getting into trouble wherever he is. He ends up as a sort of soldier of fortune, goes off to New France. He's a very outspoken critic of the church, which gets him into all sorts of problems, but it makes him a

great friend to some of these key indigenous politicians and thinkers of the time. L'Agental begins to write down some of these debates and dialogues going on between Fontignac and Candiranc and so on. He becomes fluent in the local native languages. He goes back to Europe, basically in exile, and ends up homeless, basically a vagabond on the streets of Amsterdam. And then he publishes this book, Curious Dialogues with a Wise Savage Who Has Traveled, in which he puts down the words of Candironc, who's called Adaria in the book, but there are many good sources that make it clear who this individual is. And the book goes crazy. It becomes a bestseller. La Rentaul finds himself invited to the court in Hanover, where he becomes great pals with Leibniz,

hugely influential. And then it is imitated. Basically, all of the great Enlightenment figures, or most of them, Diderot, Voltaire, they all begin to produce their own versions of curious dialogues with the savage. They change the identity of the savage. Sometimes it's a Persian or a Tahitian or a half-Huron. I can't remember exactly who has which. But the important thing is that the content, the words, remain constant. And one of the most famous ones of these is written by the French saloniste, a lady called Madame Graffigny, who writes her letters from a Peruvian woman where it's actually an Inca princess who's effectively saying the words of Candirong. And she sends a draft to one of her buddies, who is the budding economist and physiocrat, Thiel Goh, who is famous today,

along with Adam Smith, as one of the people who gave us that whole story about human history, beginning in bands of hunter-gatherers, and then this technological progress and the origins of farming and so on. Now, this is not a coincidence, because Thiel Goh reads Garfini's letters from a Peruvian princess, where she's expressing all these doubts about, well, do we really need hierarchy in cities? You know, do we really have to live this way with this awful sort of oppression and inequality? And Thiel-Gault is very keen on it. You know, he says, obviously, I'm not against freedom and equality. These are all great things. But don't you think this is a little bit dangerous i mean let's remember we're just a few

decades before the french revolution here so we have the correspondence between them and he writes back to her and he says well couldn't you just tweak the ending so that zelia the inca princess eventually comes around to the views of her european suitor and says well yes you're right you know we do need money and bureaucracy and all of these things. It's very important. Of course, Graffini ignores him completely and publish it the way that she wants to. And a few years later, Tilga effectively gets his intellectual revenge and he writes the essays on universal history that actually is the first time that we have clearly articulated this whole stage-like sequence

from hunter-gatherers to farmers to urban commercial industrial civilization. And this is a key moment because what he effectively does there is pull the rug out from all of these indigenous criticisms of European civilization. What he's saying effectively is that the reason people like Candirong can have these freedoms is effectively not because they're more advanced than us, but because they're more simple than us. It's not because of their superiority. It's because of their inferiority, and in particular, their technological inferiority. Yes, you can have social freedoms. Yes, you can have a more just

society, but you're effectively going to have to destroy civilization and go back to living in the trees. And this effectively sets up the whole scheme, the whole framework of social evolution that we take for granted now, that what's really important is how people get their food, not what their social or ethical systems are like, but the fact that they are in fact hunter-gatherers, as opposed to farmers, as opposed to city dwellers. It all begins as a kind of fairly conservative counter-reaction to what was then a very important critique of European societies. critique of European societies. were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

We've all accepted, haven't we, most of us, that in order to have extraordinary medical advances, jet travel, dating apps, or 74 gun ships align in some of the 18th century, we've accepted that those advantages, they are impossible without this stratified, social, organized societies in which we find ourselves living. We assume that they all stem from that, right? It's a necessary precondition. Exactly. And, you know, it's becoming quite disastrous, I think, for us as a species to think that way, because it's very clear where our current cultural system is leading us. And it's not a terribly good place in terms of the health of the planet and everybody on it. So it's really important to understand where what you've described comes from. It's this ambivalent notion

of civilization that in order to have all the good stuff, in order to have the NHS, in order to have advanced medicine and so on, we also have to give up these freedoms. And this is basically what Jean-Jacques Rousseau did in his famous discourse on the origins of inequality, he put together the indigenous critique with its love of personal freedoms and autonomy. He put that together in a synthesis with that stage-like view of human history that was just becoming fashionable at the time. And what you end up with is precisely this ambivalent idea that as civilization advances, with each step, we have to surrender something else. We have to surrender our freedoms. And I think if I understood you correctly, that's what you've just articulated. And it's what a lot of people take to be the inevitable course of human history.

What we found out in the last few decades is that things were not so, and presumably, therefore, don't have to be that way now. Where did it all go wrong, Prof? I mean, at some stage, well, at various stages, almost simultaneously, someone realized, hold on, I can conscript my fellow man, I can create priests and thinkers to justify it, and then I can wedge massive warfare against other. I mean, what's that process? Because those societies become pretty widespread on nearly every continent 5,000 years ago, right? That's right. I think this is where the really important work still needs to be done. And in the book, we begin that journey really by asking how some of these basic human freedoms that once

seemed to have been taken for granted, became eroded and became lost so that we do actually end up with much of the globe covered with very hierarchical and unequal kinds of societies. One thing that struck us since you mentioned warfare, clearly this is important. You know, what is the role of warfare in human history? One thing that we noticed is that the mere occurrence of violence, even large-scale violence, while it's obviously very disturbing and traumatic at the time, doesn't necessarily have transformative effects on the way that society as a whole is structured. When that takes place, it seems to involve something that's slightly more subtle, but very important. The best way I can put it to you, and I can perhaps give you an example or two,

is when systems of violence and warfare get confused with systems of care. Systems of care as in systems based on actually precisely the opposite, ideas about love and affection. Think of ancient Egypt is a very clear example of this, where once a year, most of the country's working population effectively got to be caregivers for the king. They participate in building pyramids and temples and looking after his ancestors and so on. Actually, we know that some of the top bureaucrats and government officials in Egypt, apart from all of their

important national duties, also had these other jobs in the palace where they would be, I'm the guy who makes the king's breakfast. I am the king's manicurist. I look after his favorite jewelry. So this structure, which on the one hand we know produces enormous violence. I mean, Egypt was an expansionist imperial state which taxed its citizens, often quite ruthlessly, had slave labor. At the end of the day, it was also really based around this notion that everybody is involved in caring for the king. Similarly, with ancient Mesopotamia, you know, Mesopotamian temples begin about 5,000 years ago around the idea of feeding the gods, caring for the gods, usually in the form of a cult statue.

And this whole bureaucratic apparatus and industrial apparatus kind of develops from that. Later on, we get kings effectively moving in next door to the gods and demanding the same kind of treatment. So again, you have people who are largely invested in plundering, looting, and warfare, inserting themselves into an institutional structure that's really about the opposite. It's about care. Now, I think there's something terribly important here, which we find working on large scales and on small scales. Groups that raid, take in slaves, but then effectively put them to work looking after their own. Actually, it's widely thought that the first economies that used slavery didn't actually produce very much. Slaves were mainly

engaged in looking after heads of household and their children and that kind of what you might call caring labor. So one of the things that we discovered is that forms of inequality become much more magnified and much more durable when they involve this kind of synthesis between systems of violence and systems of care. I must let you go. We've gone on about this all day. I would ask one last question at the end. Did you think a lot through this about your own bias, about today, about who we are?

We're thinking about inequality. We're thinking about climate breakdown. We're starting to realise, as you point out, that many of those indigenous voices that we've ignored for 200, 300 years had profoundly important points, like chopping down all the trees and killing all the animals and things. Did it make you think, like, how weird that my predecessor as a professor in this department in 1900 would have written this book, is that it's very clear to me that gigantic imperial entities are the natural way of doing things over the last

millennia. Is that something that you're aware of when you're writing a book of this scale of importance? Yeah, you're highly aware of it in the same way that you're constantly presenting your ideas as they evolve, not just to each other, but to a whole range of other people. Whatever it may be, a seminar, a public talk. We began actually by writing scholarly articles. So, you know, the process there, you send it off to some important journal and it goes off and other academics review it and they send back criticism. So we went through all of that and we felt it was very important to do that because actually, without mentioning any names, the kind of people who have written bestselling books that claim to tell you what the broad sweep of human history is, have for interesting interesting reasons not actually been the people who traditionally know about this stuff they're not archaeologists or anthropologists we've had biologists geographers evolutionary psychologists psychologists political scientists it's an

interesting phenomenon and i'm certainly not against the idea of people moving across disciplines i'm all for it but you know when they start getting it all wrong, at some point you have to, I think, get involved. And I think what's happened partly is a problem of over-specialization. So it's not true that other people don't know this stuff. They often know it much better than we do, but they just know their own little bit of it. And I think this is something that has become slightly broken in the way that research actually goes on, that we need to try and fix. It's just talking more across regional specializations, period specializations, really piecing together

the puzzle of this whole fascinating new picture of world history that's begun to emerge, and thinking about the implications. Lastly, what are the implications? The implications is that we don't have to be like this. We can reimagine it and it could take as many forms as our ancestors have demonstrated. Well, in a way you said it, we have to start this project of consciously, I think, reimagining the capacities and the possibilities of our species before it's too late. And we don't have to build castles out of sand and rely on utopian dreams and visions, because actually what science is telling us is that we do have possibilities, which traditional speculative views of history

have told us we don't. It's not true. There are far more paths not taken than the one path we all feel that we're sort of trapped along. Thank you very much, David, for giving me so much of your time. The book is called? The book is called The Dawn of Everything, a modest and niche title, as somebody pointed out. But it's really a book for everybody. And in a way, we hope it'll become a bit like a kind of mental toolkit that you can dip into on all of these issues that we've been talking about today so that people can start to debate and discuss things that have been regarded as beyond the pale of discussion in the past.

Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. you