Factually! with Adam Conover - A New History of Humanity with David Wengrow

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

When telling the history of our species, why do so many writers keep regurgitating the same centuries-old just-so story? If we had a more accurate, truer account of our origins, how would it change our understanding of our society and ourselves? To answer this question, on the show this week is archaeologist David Wengrow, co-author with the late anthropologist David Graeber of the blockbuster new book The Dawn of Everything. Check it out at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert about some incredible shit that they know that I don't know, that you don't know. All of our minds are going to be blown. We're going to have an awesome time learning and, dare I say, laughing together. What a terrible intro. Look, I am so excited about this episode. This one is a banger, okay? Because today on the show, we are talking about the origins of human civilization itself. And on the show, we have the author of one of the most talked about books on the subject. This is a huge episode. The interview is incredible.

You're going to love it. So look, there have been a boatload of attempts recently to tell the history of humanity from our origins all the way to today. That's right. The whole kit and caboodle. Best-selling books and documentaries keep popping up that attempt to tell that story and that are trying to give us revelatory new ways of looking at ourselves and our society. I'm talking about books like Yuval Harari's Sapiens, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, or his book The World Until Yesterday, and of course, Francis Fukuyama's 2011 banger, The Origins of Political Order. Sorry for using the word banger twice in the same intro. That was a little hacky. I apologize. But

something is a little bit weird about all these books, because even though they attempt to give us brand new narratives of human history, they end up telling the same story over and over again. These books always seem to say something like, human society was so great when we were hunter gatherers. They carried their babies around while they murdered elk and gathered berries. Until one day, everything changed. And we got agriculture, cities, kings, money, murder, taxes, and the Volkswagen Passat.

All right? Everything went bad when civilization started. I'm serious. If you look at these books, you will see this story told over and over again. Or you'll see its cousin, the story that everything was terrible back in the hunter-gatherer days, that humanity lived in murderous roving bands who were constantly killing each other, tearing each other apart with our teeth, and that we had to make civilization and social hierarchy to restrain us from murdering each other into oblivion.

to restrain us from murdering each other into oblivion. Now, the weird thing about these two accounts is that despite the fact that these books present themselves as giving a revelatory new perspective, these stories actually go back hundreds of years. Jean-Jacques Rousseau painted the rosy version of our prehistory in which mankind existed in a wonderful state of nature before civilization, and Thomas Hobbes painted the

bloodthirsty one, the idea that we had to build civilization to end the war of all against all. These are not revolutionary new ideas. These books are literally a rerun. You know, they sprinkle in a limited and selective arrangement of scientific or evolutionary factoids from present day, but they really do weave the same old yarn. And specifically, this is a yarn that implies that the world that we live in today, that the civilization we have built for ourselves was inevitable, that we had to, as a consequence of the laws of history, go from hunter-gatherers to agricultural feudalism to the growth of the state and then to the capitalism we have today.

That we had no choice in the matter, that this is the best of all possible worlds. And you know, that's kind of a weird thing to assert, especially because the people writing these books are often not anthropologists or archaeologists, people who have actually studied the ancient civilizations that we know about and the other forms of human social organization that exist on Earth today.

These are books written by psychologists or political theorists, or in the case of Jared Diamond, a biochemist who got his PhD studying the physiology of the gallbladder. So while the centuries-old just-so stories they tell might make intuitive sense to us, while they might make us feel reassured that we live today in the best of all possible worlds, they don't necessarily give an accurate account of what really happened in human prehistory. So we have to ask ourselves, what would such an accurate account look like? What would happen if someone wrote a book that used the actual most up-to-date research from anthropology and archaeology to describe what we actually know about where we came from, as opposed to just helping us tell the story that

we already decided happened a couple hundred years ago? If we did that, our picture of the past of our species and our idea of what the possibilities are for the present that we currently live in might look quite different. And, you know, in fact, they do because that book has actually been written. That is the project that has been taken on by the archaeologist David Wengro and his colleague, the late anthropologist David Graeber.

Their new book, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, is one of the most fascinating things I have come across this or any year. I think you're going to love this interview. Please welcome David Wengro. David, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me on. So your new book, I just want to say, first of all, get this out of the way.

You wrote it with David Graeber Who is an incredible thinker I was a huge fan of his He tragically passed away a number of years ago I was very upset I could never have him on the show Just last year Excuse me And so it's wonderful to have you on the show And be able to discuss

His work with you together. I look forward to it. Yeah. So tell me about this book. I mean, there's been a number of books over the last couple of years of here's the entirety of human history in a single book. I've read a couple of them. It's always an entertaining narrative. But what is wrong about the story

that we normally tell of the history of humanity? Well, one way to express this, I guess, would be to say that some histories of everything that's ever happened to the human species can actually be summed up in about one sentence. And it goes roughly like this. Human beings started out in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, and then somehow we fell from grace into a state of inequality, and now we're all kind of doomed because there are eight billion of us on the planet. Now, the fact that you can compress an entire book into a sentence and a half probably tells you already that there's something a little bit askew here. Basically, nothing about what I've just said is true. What we're trying to do in our book is actually bring the evidence of our disciplines.

I'm an archaeologist. David Grebel is an anthropologist. And largely what we're trying to do in our book is tell a different story, which is closer to the evidence. We've got all this amazing new evidence that's just flooded in over the last 20, 30 years. got all this amazing new evidence that's just flooded in over the last 20, 30 years. Most of it's still locked up in funny little obscure scientific journals that only other professors read. So, it's partly about bringing all that stuff together and trying to piece together this emerging picture of human history, which is quite radically different from what I was just talking about. You know, this idea that we start out

as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, and then something happens. Some other books claim that it's the invention of agriculture. Others emphasize when humans first moved into cities. But there's always meant to be, in the standard story, let's call it the standard story, conventional story, there's always meant to be in the standard story, let's call it the standard story, conventional story. There's always meant to be some moment, like some threshold when we collectively sort of tip ourselves off the edge and we end up basically stuck on a one way journey to the kind of systems and social arrangements we have today. And supposedly there's no way of getting off. arrangements we have today. And supposedly, there's no way of getting off. You may have detected something a wee bit biblical about this whole way, you know, the Garden of Eden. Right, yeah.

We tried the forbidden fruit and it bit us in the ass and now... Well, and that story of agriculture, i've read you know in a number of these books as being a you know sort of uh disjunctive hey this is going to change how you think about everything what if the invention of agriculture was actually the big mistake that we made and it cursed humanity to live under back-breaking conditions etc etc that's been very in vogue as an idea you're right that. That's just the Garden of Eden again, except instead of an apple, it's a stalk of wheat. Well, this is how myths work. They basically tell us stuff we think we already know.

And then we all go, hmm, look how clever I am. I already knew that. Why did I know? Because it's been drummed into my brain since I was like two years old. I think what you may be referring to is what the historian Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens calls the wheat trap. Yeah, that's where I first encountered this idea was in his book yeah the wheat trap is where human beings get trapped by wheat let's dwell on this just allow that to sink in for a while but they come at us with nets or or what they the wheat's got it all figured out right in this story let's suspend our disbelief for a moment and ignore the fact that wheat is a form of grass.

The wheat has figured out that it can get you and me and all our friends to look after it. And if it's clever, we will devote most of our time to getting rid of all its weedy competitors and clearing all the stones out of the field and bringing water. You know, we'll turn our whole lives upside down just to look after Mr. and Mrs. Wheat because we've fallen into the wheat trap. Yeah. Right? So the catchphrase goes, we didn't domesticate the wheat. Yeah. The wheat domesticated us.

Now, let me just say. Can I just quickly add that is all wrong. That's all wrong. Everything I just said is wrong. Just to be clear. One of the things, I always do like the kind of argument where, you know, I first encountered it like Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. He writes about what if you look at it from the plant's perspective and there is a degree to which the plant has evolved to take advantage of our needs. I get it. That's a cool way to look at the world.

It's cool. It's fun. It's interesting. It's a sort of mind game. But if you're actually trying to understand what happened, why would you do that? I mean, like the idea that you could look at it from the perspective of wheat so what would that even mean the whole the whole difference between us and we is that we have a perspective

fair enough fair enough but also you i believe you're saying that also this didn't happen. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm making fun of it, but there is a serious point here, which is that not only do we have a perspective, but people thousands of years ago in the Neolithic, they had a perspective too, because they were people. were people. They weren't like subhuman, rather kind of silly creatures who would be falling into a wheat trap. What we actually know from archaeology, and if you think about it, it doesn't make a great deal of sense because our species were hunter-gatherers for most of our existence, which means, you know, if you look at the evidence of societies that were still hunting and foraging until recent times, they are the most incredible scientists. You know, they've got this encyclopedic understanding of plant life and animal life. They're great practical botanists.

And they understand exactly how to manipulate and engage with landscapes to achieve certain goals. So the idea that they would just sort of stumble into, you know, and in fact, when you look at the evidence, it bears this out. Because what we know these days, although it doesn't really feature in any of these big history books, is that on all the world's continents, that process by which humans world's continents, that process by which humans domesticate plants was really, really, really, really slow. I'm talking thousands of years during which humans are kind of tinkering, they're playing around, they're cultivating, but they're not going the whole hog. They're not becoming sort of peasant farmers. There was no agricultural revolution. There was no kind of, sometimes they go into farming and then they come out again

and they look at the social implications and decide it's not for them. There's all kinds of different variations depending whether you're in, say, China or Mexico or the Middle East. And, you know, the idea these days with the evidence we have, the idea that there was an origins of agriculture and the consequences were this is just like crazy reductionist nonsense. Yeah. You know, the consequences are actually very different in different parts of the world, as you might expect. A lot of what we're doing in the book is simply this. lot of what we're doing in the book is simply this, you know, it's actually trying to give an account based on the latest evidence of what people actually did as people, not some sort of

semi-mythical, you know, allegory for how we all became unequal or something like that. And I've encountered a little bit of disappointment from some readers that we don't kind of provide a substitute myth, like a simple story, you know, about how we all got stuck or why the world is in such a mess. But that's the whole point of the book. We want to get away. We want to get away from myths and fables and actually introduce the reader to a lot of this new knowledge, and also try and ask different questions. Like, what are those questions that you want to ask that are different? I'll give you an example. If you begin a history of our species from the assumption that once upon a time,

we all lived in societies of equals, and then something changed and we get inequality. You've already made a whole load of assumptions there. Like, for example, what's the evidence for this primordial society of equals? We don't really have any, actually. If you look at the earliest surviving evidence, which goes back only around, I say only, it goes back around 30 or 40,000 years. Our species has been around much longer than that. But for most of that time, the evidence we have from archaeology is just too sparse and too fragmentary to really begin to reconstruct what our societies were like. When we start to get enough evidence, which is roughly around the time of the last ice age, what we see is something totally different.

It's not human beings living in these little isolated, simple, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Instead, we see this incredible stuff. So, for example, in Europe during the last ice age, we actually have people buried like kings and queens. I mean, absolutely covered in jewelry and ornamentation with these great elaborate weapons and regalia. Various examples of this, these are hunter-gatherers living during the last ice age on the tundra, like on the edge of glaciers. And the interesting thing is we have the burials, but we have almost no other evidence that they were actually living in, you know, very hierarchical society. So what's going on there? It's like

play acting. It's like a costume drama. Or if we switch over to North America, three and a half thousand years ago, way before we have agriculture, there are sites like Poverty Point. Actually, there's no other site quite like Poverty Point. It's a unique site in Louisiana, which is huge. I mean, it's like a hunter-gatherer metropolis with these vast earthworks. It's like a sort of great amphitheater where hunter-gatherers must have been gathering in their thousands. We're not quite sure what they were gathering to do, but it's very clear they're not living in little, you know, little bands at this point when they're doing it. And there's a similar kind of picture that comes out of Japan before rice farming.

You've got thousands of years of really exuberant and diverse hunter-gatherers. So, you know, the whole idea that all of this can kind of be locked up in a little box and say, oh, nothing much happened before the invention of farming. It's just beginning to look kind of silly. So, a better question to ask might be something along the lines of this. When you look at the actual evidence for what's going on, what we seem to be seeing in a lot of these cases are human groups that actually switch around their social structures, often on a seasonal basis. There are actually historically documented examples of this. For example, some of the Plains nations up until relatively recent times, like the 19th century, when the annual bison hunt, when they were preparing for the bison hunt

and then afterwards for the sundance rituals that followed, these groups would actually form something like a state. You know, they would actually appoint soldiers and a police force because everything depended on the success of this one big collaborative hunting exercise. And anyone who screwed around with that or endangered the hunt could be locked up, whipped, punished, like a coercive power. could be locked up, whipped, punished, like a coercive power. But then when the hunt and the rituals that came afterwards were over, so we're talking about maybe two, three months of the year when all of these coercive structures are in place, they would just dissolve away.

And anyone who held those powers one year would not be granted them the next. They would just go back to, well, something more like egalitarian bands. So these are society, and this is not that unusual. We have lots of cases of hunter-gatherer societies that did this kind of switcheroo. So the question then becomes something more like, well, if that's more like what people were doing for most of our history as a species, instead of asking what are the origins of social inequality, what we could ask is how do we get stuck? How do you go from a situation where people are constructing and then taking apart hierarchy, either on a seasonal basis or by doing it in a ritual and then not doing it for the

rest of the year? How do you go from a fluid and flexible situation like that to one where you've got hierarchy all the time? Yeah. But even just that story you just told of those plains nations, that violates every story I've been told about the origins of humanity because I've read a couple of these books to varying degrees. And the question is always, where do the hierarchical structures come from? First, we didn't have hierarchical structures. Then they were imposed. And at this point, we have the king and the king or the dictator or whatever you want to call it. And that stuck around forever.

And, you know, where did it come from? But the fact that it would be back and forth, like just looking at the evidence of this is what this nation did instead, like completely, you're right. It completely makes that question look stupid. I think that's why some people are a little bit annoyed with the book. It kind of plays havoc with our standard by telling that story. I mean, the standard story, you know, usually goes something along the lines of,

well, first you've got the wheat trap, and then when you've got the wheat, societies for the first time have a surplus of wealth, and out of that comes private property. Then you have to defend the private property, so you get civil society, and then populations grow because you've got the surplus, and then you've got to have kings to control them and bureaucrats to administer them. And it's all really based on a story that the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau told in the 18th century, where the whole thing is predicated on the idea that our ancestors

couldn't see what was coming. They're a bit like Wile E. Coyote, you know, they're always stumbling into the next horrific trap. Every time they try something, it bites them in the ass, and they're sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into trouble. And it's a morality tale, basically, and deeper and deeper into trouble. And it's a morality tale, basically, but it really doesn't match the facts. Do you feel that when you look at this book, and it's a, you know, a many hundred page, you know, history of humanity, is there no story that you are replacing the old story with? Or is there a deeper narrative? And if there isn't, does that make what you're doing harder? Is it harder to have the information go down for people? This is very important, because a lot of the book is kind of brush clearing, you know,

it's using the latest evidence to clear away the cobwebs, if you like, of outdated theories that, clear away the cobwebs, if you like, of outdated theories that we just think are just bad, bad, bad history. What you're left with is interesting. And there are patterns. And one of them that emerged, which we think is important, is really about scale. Like what are the effects of populations actually scaling up? A massive issue today. There's nearly eight billion people on the planet. Most of us live scaling up. A massive issue today. There's nearly 8 billion people on the planet. Most of us live in cities. What does that mean? Does that constrain the kind of people we can be, the ways we can interact with each other? It's obviously a massive issue right now with the climate summit and the climate crisis. And, you know, are we basically trapped

by our sheer numbers into something like our present system? And we go into this issue in quite some detail in the book. And one of the really fascinating things we found out is that when you look at the evidence for early cities, surprising number of them don't fit that characterization. They actually don't have kings and queens. Quite often, they don't even have central administration or central storage areas. These are cities with tens of thousands of people that actually seem to have governed themselves from the bottom up through neighborhood councils, that kind of thing. In fact, one of the kind of takeaways, I guess, from the book as a whole is that egalitarian cities and egalitarian, like, regional coalitions and confederacies historically are surprisingly common,

but egalitarian families are not, and egalitarian families are not and egalitarian households are not. And actually, what we ended up concluding is that the conventional stories got things back to front in the sense that the most insidious and deep forms of inequality are actually the ones that take root, not on the large scale, but on the small scale. It's when it gets into your head, gets into family relations, relations between men and women, children and elders, that kind of thing is when we appear to to get stuck in really durable systems of inequality. So that is, if you like, a more kind of... It's a pattern. It's something that we really wanted to go on and explore more in other writing. Wow, that's really interesting.

And it mirrors a thought that I've had sometimes, which is that, you know, as many systems as we try to put in place to prevent, you know, humans causing harm to other humans on a societal scale, we can sort of never stop people from like hurting their own families, you know, so much pain has caused you know domestic violence or you know like people cheating on each other right just emotional violence being done like that sort of thing um and there's often this this like you know sacredness of the family that's held out as like this perfect like social unit but if you actually look at talk to a social worker right about what they deal with about what people do to each other is like extremely pain and that must have been true

throughout throughout all our history as well it's exactly i mean it's it's weird like our common sense idea that things like you know making decisions by consensus is easier in small groups. It's like, have you never had a family? Try to pick what movie to watch in a couple weeks when you go home for Thanksgiving. And like, yeah, no, terrible. It's very counterfactual. And actually, it turns out that it's no different for hunter-gatherers. There was a study quite recently that showed it's exactly the same for them.

The difference is that historically, there's often been an answer to that predicament, which is that you just move away. of indigenous societies, aboriginal societies, let's say, whether it's Australia, North America, there were often these kind of systems of hospitality, which meant that if you found yourself in an abusive relationship or stigmatized, or maybe you've done something wrong, you've fallen into debt, whatever, you could move away, often very long distances, not just from your biological family, but even outside your own language group. And because there were systems of what anthropologists often call clans, you knew that there would be somebody else somewhere far away who was actually obliged by that code to take you in and look after you and effectively adopt you and there were rules about how this worked exactly but this is exactly what we see going on for a lot of human history way before there are cities what we have is not these like little isolated groups of human beings wandering around in bands.

But we have what we see in the archaeological evidence of these big like coalitions of societies spread out over whole continents. And the science is really great on this now. I mean, we can actually pin down how people are moving around and intermarrying and, you know, moving across landscapes on a really amazing scale, stuck, how we get trapped in, you know, hierarchy and abusive relationships with each other, which then spread out to other areas of society and the thing spirals. But what we found in the book is that unless it takes root first on the small scale, it doesn't necessarily have these major kind of ramifications. It's like these debates about warfare and violence. There's evidence for warfare and violence going as far back as we can trace it. But it's not all the time. You know, we're not innately warlike any more than we are innately peaceful.

Actually, what the evidence shows is that it kind of alternates. You go through periods of interpersonal violence and then people somehow figure out to live peacefully for a while. Then violence comes back. But it doesn't always have these cataclysmic effects. But then there are these moments in history where the violence becomes structural. It sticks, you know? And that's interesting. Why does that happen? We have a theory about this. I want to hear this theory, but let's take a really quick break. And that way there'll be

suspense so that people have to listen to the ads. You just set up such a perfect, such a perfect, whatever, teaser. We'll be right back with David Wengro. Okay, we're back with David Wengro. You left us on a wonderful cliffhanger that you have a theory about why humanity has, there's times at which violence becomes structural. Why do you feel that is? One thing we noticed, well, let's start with an example that everybody's heard of. So think about ancient Egypt, pyramids, pharaohs, all of that stuff. There's something very striking that happens when all of those things are happening for the first time. So, you know, you start getting kings and pharaohs and pyramids and whatnot about 5,000 years ago.

in the archaeological evidence, is that you get these kind of outbursts of violence associated with the burial, the actual funeral of a king who's died. It's really peculiar. And it's not just Egypt. You see something similar in China with the Shang Dynasty, Shang Dynasty and in North America, Cahokia. It's like it's almost a global pattern where setting up kings seems to involve, on the one hand, these very large-scale funerals and rituals, which are all about showing affection, showing care, showing love for your ancestors. But then into that comes the most extraordinary violence. So they start killing people and burying them around the king. And there can be literally hundreds of individuals who aren't necessarily slaves or enemies. Sometimes they're actually relatives of the king or members of his inner circle who have to die on the occasion of his death or her death of its queen. And they go into their tombs along with the king.

So you get this very odd, very intense fusion of systems of violence and systems of the opposite, like systems of love, care, and affection. And that seems to have an extraordinary effect on how these societies then develop for many generations afterwards. And the violence and the hierarchy do become structural. And I guess if you think about it, this is not, it all sounds a bit exotic, but it's actually pretty familiar. You love your country. You kill for your country. Systems of care, systems of love. When those get confused with systems of violence, that seems to have an extraordinary effect.

I was thinking the other day that, like, the perfect expression of this is museums. You look at a museum, like a big state museum, like the British Museum in London or the Met in New York, and it's full of loot, right? It's full of stuff that was forcibly ripped from every corner of the world. Indiana Jones is like diving into some, some poor dude's tomb and being like, I'm going to take this and put it in a museum and dodging all the traps. It's empire. It's violence. That's not, that's not like pussyfoot around it. That's what it is. But what happens to all that stuff? Well,

it goes into this building with all these laboratories and everyone just loves it and strokes it and fixes it and cares for it and puts it carefully and arranges it in little glass case and you sort of love it and and and you know that's why you get to keep it is because you can look after it better than anyone else so it's like it's like the ultimate expression of that fusion of like love and and horrific violence and it literally becomes a structure. I mean, a museum is a building after all. Yeah. And when someone says, hey, hold on a second, give all that stuff back.

No, no, they don't know. They don't know what to do. We, we, we know. We've been looking after it. Look how nicely we've been looking. Yeah. We here at the Met or the British Museum or whatever, we are the true stewards of this Indian artifacts. I'm not saying we've got this all figured out, but when we started looking at various examples from different parts of the world, there does seem to be something in that combination that is very powerful and can actually trap people into certain kinds of otherwise undesirable

patterns of behavior and relationships, you know? Do you feel that you said that we are not in, you know, innately warlike no more than we're innately peaceful. Do you make an, do you make an argument against, I've heard both arguments, right? When people hold up, oh, the bonobos, they all kiss each other and have missionary style sex. And that's what we're like, not like the chimps, right? When people hold up, oh, the bonobos, they all kiss each other and have missionary style sex. And that's what we're like, not like the chimps, right? Or, you know, this is, and it's a just so story as much as anything else. Do you feel that there's anything that we are

innately, or is this an argument against that sort of innate way of thinking about humanity? Well, it's an argument against the idea that we're basically innately good or innately evil, because really those are kind of, they're more like theological arguments than scientific ones. I mean, clearly good and evil are concepts that we made up. It's like arguing whether we're innately fat or innately thin. It's a matter of judgment. Not everyone's going to agree. That's partly why we're human is precisely that we can have these kinds of debates. And presumably that's what we've been doing for the last 200,000 years. But there is one aspect of our species history that we feel

has been underplayed, which is that we do turn out to be innately, if you like, just a lot more playful and experimental than we tend to give ourselves credit for. You know, when we tell these big narrative histories of the broad sweep of human history or whatever, it's always like the story of how it all went wrong and, you know, how, you know, we kept sort of falling into these traps. And every time we try to pull ourselves out, we sink down even further. This really isn't the picture that we get. The picture that we get from history and archaeology is actually of a species that was constantly trying stuff out for size and then often rejecting it or just doing it in a certain context and not doing it elsewhere. And that is, I guess, the point about human nature that we feel has been rather lost.

And that has implications, right? Because if you're constantly telling yourself that you're basically not a very inventive sort of species. Right. And at the same time, you're aware that you're living in a cultural system that has some pretty nasty things in store for us over the next century in terms of mass migration, global poverty, whole continental shells going underwater. That's a pretty toxic combination. So I think there is a case to be made for re-evaluating the evidence of what our species has actually been like for most of its history, partly just to remind us that there are possibilities

out there, which otherwise we might not even consider. Yeah, if I can, well, tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but so often these stories are told about, you know, what we were like as hunter-gatherers or, you know, the sort of evolutionary psychology accounts are meant to sort of reify and solidify something about the way that we live today. Often someone is saying, well, in hunter gatherer times, men were like this and women were like that. And therefore that's what we're really like.

And we should continue to model our society that way. See everything I already thought was true. Right. And we shouldn't change stuff too much because, you know, our society is based on these old principles. It sounds like you're saying the opposite, that like there's a, principles. It sounds like you're saying the opposite, that like there's a, we were so variable that we shouldn't really draw any specific conclusion about that the way our society is today was inevitable and it must be this way. In fact, we could change things a lot more than we perhaps think. Am I getting that right? Yeah. I mean, if anything, it's the other way around.

I mean, what's really striking about people today is that we find it really, really hard to even imagine living in different kinds of societies, let alone actually putting that into effect. Whereas our ancestors, I mean, cities did have to be invented, right? Somebody had to do that for the first time. And it turns out that when they did it, they did it in myriad different ways. There wasn't just one model. There wasn't just one model of agriculture.

And I guess the extreme version of this in anthropology would be that, you know, we are walking around in this incredibly densely populated, technologically complex universe. a densely populated, technologically complex universe. But we've still got these hunter-gatherer brains in our heads, and they haven't actually changed since the days when we were walking around in tiny, simple, egalitarian bands. So we're constantly getting overheated. You know, it's like a constant challenge to even exist in the kind of societies we've ended up in. The interesting thing is, you know, this really comes back to what you mean by a hunter-gatherer brain, because actually the latest studies in places like the Journal of Human Evolution, which are based on very rigorously quantified studies of what modern hunter-gatherers actually do in terms of the

kind of societies they form, they completely go against this idea, because it turns out that although in demographic terms these are often very small groups, they hold in their heads a kind of mental picture of a much larger society. So we're talking here about groups in Australia, in sub-Saharan Africa, and it turns out that these carefully observed studies show that even though they may not meet any of these people ever, in the same way that you'll never meet everyone in America, they have exactly the same kind of idea that potentially these could be marriage partners or these could be people you form relationships with.

In other words, there's a mental picture among hunter-gatherers of a vastly extended cultural network, which is not, in essence, very different at all. It's just not different from the way that we think about our own societies. around with a hunter-gatherer brain in the middle of Manhattan is not really much more of a problem than wandering around with a hunter-gatherer brain in the Australian outback. You know, they both involve interaction at two different scales. And this is what really makes us different from bonobos, chimps, and all those other primates, is that they base their interactions on direct evidence. Like, I have a friend who's a very famous, sorry, I'm bragging about how famous my friends are. He's not really famous. He's only famous in the tiny internecine world of anthropology.

But within that field, he's very well known. Morris Bloch. And he has a nice story oh morris block you know morris oh my thank you very you see you see oh uh morris block he's a legend he's a legend morris block everyone's heard it you go down the street you talk about saying morris block everyone knows who you're talking about i'm blushing just thinking about the fact that you've met morris block okay i'm sorry please go on uh here we go. So Morris has a story about a village where he did his fieldwork in Madagascar, which he uses. It's a very simple story, but it just

illustrates this point, right? So there was an old guy in the village who was a very respected ancestor. And at some stage, he, like everybody, started getting very elderly and losing some of his faculties and so on. Now, when this kind of thing happens in a troop of chimpanzees, so, you know, the alpha male isn't that alpha anymore, immediately he will be replaced, that alpha anymore. Immediately, he will be replaced, like knocked off his position by some other aspiring chimp who will then steal his mates. And it's all based on direct observation of the other chimps' capacities. And if those capacities start to look a bit unconvincing, chimp's in big trouble. And what Morris points out is just a very, very simple observation that what goes on in human societies is often completely different, where in fact, what happened to this old man is that, you know, he'd lost many of his faculties, he couldn't speak

properly anymore, and yet he was still totally revered and treated with the greatest respect as a living ancestor by his everyone in his vicinity and what this highlights is a capacity that we have as humans which seems to be completely or almost completely lacking in other animals including other primates, which is the ability to treat each other, not purely on the basis of how we perform, but of the roles that we play. And it begins very, very early in the life of a human infant, maybe even in the womb. You know, there's been work on simple categories like mummy and daddy. Yeah. And immediately, you know, the infant learns that there is a thing called mum. And sometimes mum doesn't act like mum, but that category doesn't immediately evaporate.

It becomes stable. So even when mum's acting a bit off, she's still mom. And it's that separation, but it's what they call essentialism. Like you have categories which are durable in our minds. The fact that we can do this allows us to build completely different types of social systems to other primates. So, you know, we trace our genealogies back over many, many, many generations. We can live on really large scales, even though we don't actually meet most of the people involved. But we know that they are New Yorkers, you know, they're fellow New Yorkers, they're fellow Londoners. These are all abstractions, which are part of how we organize ourselves. And this is really a key difference in human psychology which sometimes gets ignored in these discussions and it completely i mean it makes this idea that we are somehow ill adapted to the world that we've created that we have hunter-gatherer brains that don't fit in in our current our current world it's like well it makes it seem like some sort of weird anti-tautology because it's like well we created this world because our brains were able to create it because we're able to deal with abstractions um if we had primate brains we'd be ill-suited to it but you know

we we created this world full of abstractions because we uniquely had the ability to create a world full of abstractions it's like how so so how can we possibly, it's sort of like saying like, like I built a glove to fit my hand, but my hand doesn't fit it. No, I, no, I built it. I sewed it together. I used my hand as the pattern. What the fuck are you talking about? You know what I mean? One thing that you said about all the differences, you know, that we've, we've had so many uh various ways that

we've established human society so we should open the possibility to ourselves you know of what human society could look like reminds me of a particular passage in harari's book uh sapiens that always stuck with me and i you know that's an enjoyable book because it's the kind of book where there's there's a couple of big flashbulb ideas on every page like every page you're sort of like oh interesting oh i'm not i'm not sure if that's true but it's interesting to think about and one of the ones that always stuck with me is he makes this assertion that throughout and i'm and i've always wanted to ask someone who maybe knows better than he does what they think of it um he makes this assertion like throughout human history, there has always been,

men have always run human society that we've always had a patriarchy. And he says that he says there's no stable matriarchies. And he says, he says also no one knows why he says it can't be, it can't be because men are physically more strong because we don't have a world in which the strong person is always ruling. We can have Bill Gates's and people who are physically weak. So he says, no one really has any idea why men are always in charge, but they always are. And anyway, moving on.

And I was like, I don't I don't have a counter argument to this, but I want to I have always been curious about it. Do you have any? I have always been curious about it. Do you have any view on that? We actually, yeah, we do actually go into this in the book. I didn't realize that that's what he thinks, but he's not the only one. Actually, the interesting thing here is that if you look at pretty much every known historical example of a society that is clearly very hierarchical in the form of a kingdom or an empire or something like that, almost invariably, whether we're talking about ancient Egypt or ancient China or 18th century France, the society itself, the hierarchy, models itself on a patriarchal household where the king is like the father of his people in some sense, or he governs the land as he governs his domestic arrangements. as he governs his domestic arrangements.

So this idea of patriarchy in different parts of the world clearly becomes very, very important at certain points in history, and then it becomes very hard to get rid of. So the million-dollar question is, were we always like that? And this is where it gets interesting, because there is a resistance. We talk about this in the book, somewhere around the middle of the book. There is a resistance to talking about societies that weren't like that. So, if you bring up matriarchy, for example, it's kind of a no-no in my field. If you speculate that, let's say, societies before kings might have been different, you know, maybe not even matriarchy, maybe let's just say men and women had roughly equal status,

or women had autonomy, or maybe just priority in ritual and religious affairs, you almost immediately get accused of romanticizing or sort of playing around with unscientific ideas and this kind of thing. And this is a problem because unless we're actually allowed to interpret evidence for societies that were not patriarchal, you do end up just saying, oh, it must have always been like that as far back as humanity goes. Actually, what we show in the book is that there are exceptions to this. Actually, many of these early agricultural societies in the Middle East, for example, we have very good evidence now. Like there's a very, again, very famous in very small circles place in Turkey called Çatalhöyük,

which is an early farming settlement, probably the most intensely researched Neolithic town in the world. It dates back around 10,000 years ago. And this was a town of considerable size, about 5,000 people. And this was a town of considerable size, about 5,000 people. We've got really detailed, hard evidence that shows that in terms of diet, quality of life, and just about any other measure you can think of, men and women, biological males, biological females, had roughly equal status. And we've got lots of evidence for how they organized their houses and their artistic and ritual creations. And there's no indication that men in any way dominate or encompass women. Actually, if anything, it might be the other way around. Now, it's true that in the past, people have made some exaggerated claims that,

oh, it must be a matriarchy, it must be a matriarchal society. Well, that's very hard to demonstrate. But it's much harder to say that it's a patriarchy. Something else is clearly going on. And unless we can talk about those things, it's very hard to even begin understanding where patriarchy comes from and why at certain points in history. So initially, I think the problem with the kind of account you were just describing,

which you attribute to Harari, I don't know if he says it or not, but other people certainly do, is that they won't even allow you to ask the question. So something we do in the book is just try to open these things up again for debate so we can at least try to understand where patriarchy does come from, rather than just assuming it's there all the time yeah because well again in the account i gave i wrote this book a couple years ago so if anyone wants to write in and tell me that i i'm misattributing it feel free but he says it has always been this way and no one knows why and what you're saying is if you make the assumption that it has always been this way, or if you come to that conclusion too quickly... You'll definitely never know why.

There's another nice example from the history of ancient Egypt, where there's a period of about 300 years from about 800 BC to 500 BC, when women were basically running the country in ancient Egypt. Actually, they were often foreign women from Nubia or Libya, and they basically take on most of the responsibilities of kings. They own the biggest agricultural estates in the country. And it's historically quite an unusual situation. But it all falls into a period of history that Egyptologists call, wait for it, the third intermediate period, which is like, it's like putting a big sign on top saying nothing happening here. Well, look, I got to, I could talk to you for 1000 years, but we have to start to come in for

a landing here. So let's put our seatbelts on and try to work our way to, you know, to, to the end of this here. I want to talk more about how we think about contemporary society, because I think it's very difficult again, for us to look at these accounts. We have, we have this weird dichotomy, where we look at them as both being, like you say, sort of non-humans and, and as separate from us. and then we also just want to say well what is that i don't know what can we learn about how we live today uh you know what what what lessons can we take from our very simplistic understanding of our past selves and

say you know apply today it's very hard to literally think of ourselves as being the same species as what we're reading about and studying. And so how does all this work change your view of human society now, of you as a, you know, primate walking around in a system that we've all built? I'll give you an example that, you know, there's a lot of speculation at the moment about artificial intelligence, right? And how this is going to change human societies. What I've noticed about a lot of that literature is that they start off from a completely oversimplified,

like almost cardboard cutout version of human history and what human societies actually are, which when you're speculating about something like AI is kind of fatal because in a way, the way that they imagine our ancestors is as if they already were robots. Like, you know, for most of human history, we were kind of automatons stumbling around, adapting to our environments, reacting to stuff, but not really understanding or reflecting on what was going on. Well, guess what? You know, that's what AI will be. That's what robots are. But that's not the future of humanity. I mean, if you've got a completely unrealistic idea of what we were like for most of our history,

how can you even begin to then speculate on what actually having thousands of robots and automatons is going to be? You know, if you whereas if you start from a realistic idea, then you've got a platform to actually begin to assess the real possibilities. And, you know, what could we do with that technology? Let's not fall into the wheat trap, you know, the digital version of the wheat trap. You know, we're in control. What do we want this to do? What do we want social media to do instead of it constantly doing things to us? Yeah.

Well, and it's also an argument against people who abdicate responsibility for designing a system like the AI. Like the AI, you know, we've talked about on the show before when we've discussed AI that like it's so often framed as this is going to happen and it's going to turn out this way. So we have to get ready now. We have to accept that, you know, all the cars are going to be self-driving in this particular way and what that means. And we need to start putting, you know, barriers at all the crosswalks because people won't be allowed to walk into traffic anymore because, you know, the AR cars are going to be driving. walks because people won't be allowed to walk into traffic anymore because you know the ar cars are going to be driving and instead we can we can acknowledge no as you say we are designing the system we are creating the ai we are creating a tool for us to use and so let's take some fucking responsibility for it and say this is what we want to design and the same thing with you know our our current social economic systems, capitalism and, you know, say democracy in the

United States is often framed as this is the best we got. This is the end of history. This is the, the, you know, final outcome. I mean, it's also about our particular notion of democracy, which is something we talk about quite a lot in the book. You know, we've ended up with an understanding of democracy that is very different from, let's say, the ancient Greek understanding. The ancient Greeks did not think that elections formed part of democracy, precisely because they create winners and losers. They're like a big sports game, big charismatic, you know, often rather weird individuals competing for your votes. And they tend to throw up charismatic individuals who can very easily become war leaders. Actually, the ancient Greeks thought that this was undemocratic.

This was what they called the aristocratic mode of electing leaders. And it creates, obviously, electing leaders. And it creates, obviously, not just competition, but very short-termist understandings of key decisions. So, we are in a situation where we tend to take decisions of global scale, you know, global, the future, the implications of AI, how we respond to the climate crisis, and we harness them to politics, which is often a short-term game of basically one-upmanship, where it's kind of impossible within that system to make decisions on a really long-term scale. And there's no reason, you know, there's nothing in our history or in our social development that obliges us to do that, to put long-term decisions in the hands of a tiny number of individuals who, you know, very clearly and very overtly are trying to win the next election race.

Why do we do that? There's no particular, as we show in the book, you know, there's no particular reason why that version of what we call a state or a nation state, that doesn't have any deep evolutionary basis. It's something that's come together over really just the last century and a half. And then through wars and conquest and colonization has basically been spread and imposed throughout much of the planet. But it's not inevitable. There's no particular reason. And people already are experimenting with other ways of making those kinds of decisions. So if you can do that for one important set of decisions, potentially you could do it for a whole bunch of others.

What is an alternative way of making those decisions? Well, in the UK, for example, we've got people trying out things like assemblies, which are selected from the public at random, the same way you do jury duty. So you get a random cross section of the population for a given region or city, and they have to sit down and have long, intensive conversations about what changes we make to our own communities in order to reach these carbon emission targets. Wow, anything could be worse than jury duty. No, it actually sounds very nice. It's an example. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to work or it's going to take off everywhere, but It's an example. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to work or, you know, it's going to take off everywhere. But it's an example of people trying something else where, you know, who you're going to vote for in the next election is not the determining factor of that discussion.

But instead, instead of getting a notice, oh, you have. Well, first of all, when you get that jury duty notice, I think we underestimate how deeply weird of a thing that is. that jury duty notice, I think we underestimate how deeply weird of a thing that is. Hey, you have to go decide someone's fate randomly, even randomly selected to go decide whether someone's going to be incarcerated and perhaps killed by the state. But instead, you'd be randomly selected to essentially lead the country, make policy choices, say, hey, what should we do about climate change? Take part in the decision to take part in a process of deciding what your life and what your children's life should be like. Why do we find that so strange? Yeah, yeah. It's that slogan, you know, that I've heard so many times of, you know,

a better world is possible. Like, there's a reason that's a mantra, because you sort of, we need to remind each other of it. Maybe that's a nice point to end on. I mean, right, you sort of we need to remind The Dawn of Everything, is kind of a logical thing to do if you're involved, as he was, with social movements, which in essence are all about asking that question, you know, is this the only way we can organize ourselves? Are there alternatives? It's very logical then to go and, if you're an anthropologist especially, go and investigate all the other ways in which people have organized themselves. But what we found was that when other authors have come to do this and try to capture that big picture of human history, they end up doing the opposite and basically telling these myths, fables about how we got stuck and trapped into just one sort of path of development.

So the book is really coming out of a desire to bring the latest scientific evidence to bear on exactly those kinds of questions. just highlighting, as you say, something more of just the true range of human possibilities that's often hidden from our view by these very, very deeply entrenched, tenacious myths. Yeah. Well, that's an incredible project. And I can't thank you enough for coming to talk to us about it. I can't wait to read the book. If folks want to pick it up, you can get it from our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. You'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore when you do or go pick it up at your local bookstore.

David Wingrove, thank you so much. Oh, and the name of the book is one more time for us, please. The Dawn of Everything. Incredible. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Well, thank you so much to David Wengro for coming on the show. You know, since I recorded this, I have started reading the book, and it really is fantastic.

If you want to check it out, hit up factuallypod.com slash books. Once again, that's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building the incredible custom gaming PC that you are listening to this very interview on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually.

That was a HateGum Podcast.