Human History Gets a Rewrite

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

by yboris • 5 years ago

167 96 5 years ago

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics.

I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it.

Side point: this article is primarily aimed at promoting a (long) book, so readers are expected to enjoying reading for reading, and will appreciate the author's effort to lead them through a syrupous long ride, I guess. This reminded me I don't belong to that camp.

throwawaylinux3• 5 years ago

I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it.

Other than the "our dumb ancestors dumbly believed their ancestors were dumb" narrative, I don't think I have ever seen this among people who who have actually seriously thought about it.

And if you're referring to dumb cavemen hitting everything with clubs "narrative" that's seen in comedy and other entertainment, I don't see why you think this article indicates we're moving away from that. Or really what the problem with it is at all, or why we would want to move away from it. Larson et al. rigorously proved it to be hilarious.

marcus_holmes• 5 years ago

Archaeologists' insistence on defining anything they don't immediately understand as "for ritual purposes" - implying our ancestors were prone to superstition, instead of admitting the archaeologists' own ignorance.

Every time we say "civilisation started with X" and then discover a city from before that time.

We still don't understand how the Australian Aborigines got to Australia 50K years ago. You can't get to Australia without good boats. Yet there's a blank refusal to admit that this means that early humans had sophisticated boats.

It's really common to write off early humans as less sophisticated.

yongjik• 5 years ago

Well, FWIW, there was this weird guy who claimed our ancestors weren't dumb, they weren't even conscious. And by "our ancestors" he didn't mean Homo erectus, he meant ancient Greeks. (The so-called "bicameral mind" theory.)

I think that's completely bonkers but apparently some people like the theory. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316

jablongo7• 5 years ago

I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective

With what does that agree? Where is that stated?

makeitdouble2• 5 years ago

That is a way to look at the "dumb" aspect, just as we would say "kids are dumb".

But I think it hides away how much they got done within their limited means and technology. Them not knowing about bacteria was less a limitation of their intelligence than a limitation of the scale they could observe the word (including data collection technology and drawing patterns from huge samples)

masswerk• 5 years ago

Those discrepancies in life expectancy are mostly due to chances of surviving the first few years. There are studies indicating that health and adult life expectancy were at their peak for Victorian middle classes.

mellavora• 5 years ago

While I tend to agree with you, a society where "everyone" lives to age 70-80 does require a re-think of many social structures.

For example, one could wonder how much of the mess of current US politics is because the average age of people in power is so far about 60?

mannykannot• 5 years ago

Human society has become vastly more knowledgeable over time, and so therefore its individuals, on average, have become so, but this does not imply that the intellectual capacity of individual humans has undergone any improvement. For example, despite our medical knowledge, there is plenty of irrationality, willful ignorance, denial, and poor judgement to be found.

Left to our own devices, none of us would ever learn anything more than a miniscule fraction of what we know today.

jablongo7• 5 years ago

*After learning more, Graeber definitely was very pro-technology, so I’m really arguing w/ no one here. I’ll have to read the book...

anamax• 5 years ago

And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.

The key phrase is "at birth". The vast majority of the difference between "75 years at birth" and "25 years at birth" is due to infant/toddler mortality.

If you made it to 10, your life expectancy wasn't a lot different than today.

akomtu2• 5 years ago

IMHO, the biggest myth that modern historians adamantly believe in is that human intelligence has mysteriously developed from zero to current level in just 12,000 years. We are supposed to believe that humans were dumb savages, yet with fully functional, but apparently unused brains, and then they suddenly chose to become smart and in a few wild leaps they've gotten to quantum mechanics.

throwawaylinux3• 5 years ago

Practically all modern historians? Or even just the major consensus of this field? That's astounding to me, I have trouble believing it without at least some anecdotes. Do you have a link or name of one well respected and cited modern historian who adamantly believes this? And a reference to some of their writings or talks where they explain their ideas? That would be fascinating to read about, thank you.

tremon• 5 years ago

I'm not sure whether historians ascribe that to intelligence or to knowledge. My interpretation (not a historian) is that writing (i.e. the development of script) is what gave humans the means to go from the lore model of tribal knowledge to the collectively "smart" societies we developed over the past millennia.

Whether you choose to ascribe the quality "savage" to a tribal society is a discussion all of itself; there is evidence of vast (continental-scale) trade networks even from the tribal era, so it wasn't all lets-bash-some-skulls-before-lunch. But being smart can only give you limited sight if you have no giants' shoulders to stand on.

chrisweekly• 5 years ago

syrupous?

barrenko• 5 years ago

The original meaning of the word "idiot" is someone who doesn't care for their local politics.

Our ancestors were of course, the same as us.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

What I see (and am glad for) as the narraritive being challend is not just the simplistic "our ancestors were dumb", which some people may have, but this other one, that's so widespread that it's often considered "common sense" and seems more "objective":

ALL hunter-gatherer societies/culture are fundamentally the same, because the main components are somehow a necessary consequence of being a hunter-gatherer (which is a stable category, which applies to a variety of human cultures throughout history, that can all be summed up as being more or less the same), and therefore we can tell how ancient "hunter-gatherers" lived by looking at contemporary people we call "hunter-gatherers".

No, no, no, no, and no.

And, in fact, human culture always has and still is various, diverse, and with many possibilities. From the review:

Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.
“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”?

mcenedella• 5 years ago

The subject’s book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” was so poorly researched and argued, it’s one of the few books I’ve returned to Amazon in the past two decades. (“A History of Interest Rates” by Homer & Sylla, remains the definitive history of debt among humankind. Originally written in 1963, I’d been hoping to find a modern update to the subject matter.)

Similar to this article - lots of claims of greatness, but never actually gets around to using facts to build the case.

“All hat and no cattle” as they might say.

handrous• 5 years ago

I didn't evaluate its sources, but thought the writing in Debt was excellent. The typical pattern throughout was for Graeber to introduce an idea in a paragraph, for me to think of several "what about..." and "hm, I dunno"s for it, and for Graeber to spend the next few paragraphs addressing all of those, directly.

__MatrixMan__2• 5 years ago

One thing I took away from it that has been true every time I've had occasion to check: When economists tell the "first there was barter, and then there was money" story, they almost never care to connect the claim to evidence.

It's like they're laying down premises for an argument rather than making claims about actual humans.

cycomanic• 5 years ago

I know this is a public forum and not a scientific discourse, but considering that you criticising the book for essentially lack of evidence (facts), could you give some some evidence/examples for this?

q1w25• 5 years ago

I think the biggest set of fallacious claims made are made on the "Clovis Point" finds. The author makes broad sweeping statements based on these small finds that are not really supported by the evidence, nor do any of the experts in the field agree.

Additionally, the author goes to great lengths to make the claim that the earliest societies were egalitarian "commune" societies of hunter gatherers, by cherry picking very specific finds, and completely ignoring any counter-examples. He also draws broad conclusions on very weak evidence. For example, he looks at the ruins of certain ancient sites only partially excavated, notes that there's no evidence of a "central large building" and draws the conclusion that these societies had no central gov't or singular leadership.

These are wildly fallacious arguments. It's the sort of thing we see when someone who is very politically active does direct historical research. It's too easy to biased your research if you're specifically looking for evidence to support your modern politics.

JackFr• 5 years ago

I had Dick Sylla as a professor for economic history. Wonderful lecturer with encyclopedic knowledge of the history of finance. Though A History of Interest Rates is thorough, comprehensive and well documented, I must say the writing is pretty dry.

streamofdigits4• 5 years ago

Equating the natural history of "interest rates" with that of debt / credit relations gives a hint of why you might not have liked the Debt book.

Anecdotally, modern day bankers and economists get a real shock when he discusses the long historical relation of debt with slavery. Their further response to the book is generally tainted by that unease.

The rarefied world of high finance and macroeconomics (while well endowed with "research" and sophistry) has generally avoided to take responsibility for both human and physical (environmental) costs of the financial / economic systems they rationalize. That is a societal debt that is now becoming overdue with unknown consequences.

datavirtue• 5 years ago

Hence our deeply rooted tradition of bankruptcy and laws prohibiting debtors' prison.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

A counter argument on Gobekli Tepe (which dates to 9600 BC) to the thesis of David Graeber is:

“Over time, Schmidt believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey—well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe—at exactly the time the temple was at its height.”

From: https://thisviewoflife.com/blog/complex-societies-before-agr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

They have recently found even older settlements like Boncuklu Tarla that even had a sewer system that was over 11,800 years old:

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/archaeologists-unearth-anci...

https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ancient-temple-found-in-ma...

---

Meanwhile they seem to constantly find really old "city" settlements in Turkey today:

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahin_Tepe

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

Tangentially: What do you know about This View of Life?

tarsinge• 5 years ago

It's ironic that Yuval Noah Harari is criticized in the article despite Sapiens being more up to date on Göbekli Tepe (and maybe on others).

kkjjkgjjgg2• 5 years ago

While it sounds like an inspiring read, it also sounds as if it is creating a lot of strawmen. In "The World Before Yesterday", Jared Diamond writes that there were thousands of tribes in New Guinea, and each had different ways of living. So the claim that "traditional research" is unable to fit the things they found in this new book seems flat out wrong.

Also there is a long history of scientists idealizing some traditional societies to prove a point about their desired ways of living. Often they turned out to be far from reality, and in reality far more violence and rape was going on than the researchers claimed (for example Yanomami seem a popular example).

Lately I have read frequently that a majority of women were subject to rape in traditional societies. While I also not necessarily believe it at face value (there are ideological reasons to make that claim, too), it also does not sound extremely unlikely and may serve as a starting point to doubt the idealization of traditional societies.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

I think Jared Diamond in particular is villianized in Anthropology circles for his book Guns Germs and Steel which to a traditional anthropologist seemed to purposefully omit important content to support his argument. He too goes against traditional anthropology research, so I think that the claim stands.

kkjjkgjjgg2• 5 years ago

Maybe, or maybe it is just the normal controversy you can find in most fields? There will always be people who disagree with each other? Is JD universally villainized in Anthropology circles, or just among some Anthropologists?

smitty1e• 5 years ago

I had just seen that Mel Brooks is working on a sequel to The History of the World, Part I:

https://www.westernjournal.com/mel-brooks-announces-sequel-o...

streamofdigits4• 5 years ago

It is extraordinary that Graeber existed, even if for an unfairly short time span.

Extraordinary, not because he was genius (though he probably was in some sense) but because there aren't many more like him. He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured and evolved since prehistoric times and propose plausible alternatives about true underlying social mechanisms and phenomena.

Now, all societies fill-in the countless gaps and repaint the past to fit their purposes / justify an existing order. But in our "modern society" that claims to be scientific / fact based the paint job has some flaws so blatant it requires heroic will to pass unnoticed.

When I read criticism of his Debt (and I suspect of this last book as well) I sense people have no idea how monumental the task of re-visiting and re-examining how the past evolved into the present without regurgitating banalities and "self-evident" assertions. Implicit in this program is the debunking of the entire field of modern economics and its associated legal/financial structures.

If he is guilty of biting more than he could chew is because so many of the rest of us are intellectually and morally (and possibly soon also economically) bankrupt.

NuNotNon• 5 years ago

He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured

Give a search for neomarxism and poststructuralism

streamofdigits4• 5 years ago

I have to admit that I am a bit allergic (hence may not have paid proper attention) to anything ending in "-ism" :-). btw that includes Graeber's "anarchism".

To me it seems far more important at this stage to have a more informed "natural history" of economic / social organization that spans out the "phase space" of possibilities rather than strive already for a coherent framework that puts everything in its "proper place".

jmeister• 5 years ago

He was also relatively much more open to engaging with his ideological enemies. See his debate with Peter Thiel or his engagement with Nassim Taleb.

https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-vs-peter-thiel...

(His relationship with NT going from foe to dear friend is one of the most heart-warming things I've seen on Twitter): https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1301570705671237632

In this he was an intellectual in the mould of old-school Brit labor Marxists like Perry Anderson.

q1w25• 5 years ago

I think his biggest fault was that his passionate political views directed his research. He wanted to demonstrate that the earliest societies could exist without hierarchy in "popular councils and citizen assemblies... and were stable features of government", as he puts it, and when you examine archeological sites with this in mind, it tends to bias your perspective and causes you to pre-select data points that support that narrative.

The OP author talks about how Graeber was a genius because he was so well versed in so many diverse subjects and the histories of different cultures, but unfortunately his conclusions are not supported by the experts in those specific cultures' histories. His conclusions about Clovis Points are a great example. He draws a huge number of conclusions from a tiny set of data that most experts don't agree with - conclusions that also support his modern politics.

It reminds me of the fanfare around the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which was immensely popular because it supported modern progressive politics, and put on numerous best seller lists - but actual historians later showed it not to be supported by the historical record and that its conclusions were drawn from scant and/or misinterpreted evidence.

Hard science is boring and tedious. ...and if you're selecting a hundred data points from different areas to construct a narrative that also happens to agree with your activist politics... then it's fair for the community to be skeptical of your methodology and conclusions. ...and that's also why he was dismissed from his roles as professor at two separate institutions.

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

I've not read the article (or book) in full yet, but from the comments I get a "lone academic overturns the accepted truth" vibe. Which I don't like on principle. I just want a well written summary of whatever the current consensus is (including areas of disagreement).

Otherwise it's just very long form clickbait.

netcan• 5 years ago

FWIW, David Graeber was vocally and loyally with you on this.

This isn't a book about the consensus, it's more of a deconstructionist vibe. The paradigms in the crosshairs tend to be the 19th century, modernist, "thought experiment" era. His book on debt challenged that era's (still persistent) "origin of money" hypothesis. This one is more about political history.

EG, the prevalence of rights, constitutions and such in preindustrial societies.

rjknight3• 5 years ago

The "lone academic" factor is undermined by the fact that the book in question was a collaboration between /two/ academics, one of whom is a professor of archaeology.

PaulAJ3• 5 years ago

I've read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". It is not a work of genius. It is a rambling incoherent mess. Graeber cherry-picks bits of real history, anecdotes and random myths, and shoehorns them into some kind of predefined narrative which seems to equate modern notions of debt (with its limited liability, bankruptcy and non-inheritance) with the kind of chattel debt-slavery that existed in the past.

I say "seems to" because it is genuinely hard to tell. He will be talking about the temple-banks of ancient Sumer or the customs of the Maori, and then suddenly go off on a long diatribe about how this compares to modern banking. Hidden away in this will be a bald assertion prefixed by "of course" which left me screaming "citation needed!". If you weren't watching for it you might miss it. But once you spot it you realise that the whole of the rest of the chapter just collapsed into meaningless drivel.

I cannot think that this guy was a genius.

q1w25• 5 years ago

It's a political book. Graeber, an self-described anarchist, looks through the archeological record for evidence that non-hierarchical societies existed successfully.

Everyone in that political area calls him a "genius" because he offers them a rich trove of new "evidence" to support their modern politics.

It's an inconvenient truth that the experts in these individual fields don't agree with his conclusions.

ndr• 5 years ago

I find interesting how uncharacteristically abrasive Tyler Cowen was regarding Graeber over the years:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/wh...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/tu...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

And yes, I don't know if this says more about Cowen or Graeber, but Cowen is usually much more coy with his critiques (or straussian, he might say).

zby2• 5 years ago

I don't think anyone would disagree with the thesis that there was a great variety of hunter-gatherer political organisations, that there were up and downs in human history or that the development was different at different places. Humans have been hunter-gatherers for a very very long time - there was lots of time and place to develop all kind of arrangements.

""" The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us). """ This is a straw man.

eevilspock3• 5 years ago

If it is a straw man, it is a straw man that dominates, that has become the default way of seeing history, that the majority of people embrace, including here on HN. See Steven Pinker, Bill Gate's embrace of Pinker, neoliberalism, the fact that both of the dominant American political parties are essentially conservative (one just less so than the other)...

Who are the people that criticize Pinker, et al? They are all thinkers the mainstream would consider radicals, Graeber included.

zby2• 5 years ago

It is a straw man because nobody believes that:

- The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

The other parts are not that clear cut - but for most of the list there is no 'mainstream' consensus. For example: progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated) - everybody believes that at least the past civilizations had some good sides and it is now quite mainstream that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian (see also https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...)

q1w25• 5 years ago

I agree. Almost all historians acknowledge the persistent existence of nomadic and hunter gatherer societies living at the same time as agricultural based societies.

The problem with Graeber is that, as a self-described anarchist, he specifically looks for evidence of non-hierarchical hunter gatherer societies in his review of research and draws broad conclusions based on select data points.

It's the same danger anyone encounters when they're very passionate politically, and go to great lengths to look for evidence to support their modern politics in the historical record.

eevilspock3• 5 years ago

Doesn't the mainstream view do the same? You don't think the status quo has a built-in confirmation bias as well? Why would the mainstream appear passionate when their take is already accepted as "common sense"?

Compare Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

NoImmatureAdHom• 5 years ago

A couple of things that may help discussion in this thread:

1) Historians do history, that is the period with a written record. Writing is at most a few thousand years old, whereas "behaviorally modern" humans are starting maybe ~80,000 years ago

2) Anthropology split into those who eschew science and write nonsense (e.g., cultural, social anthropologists) and those who do science (e.g., biological anthropologists) a few decades ago. The anti-science anthropologists are driven by political views. See the Napoleon Chagnon controversy.

3) Mostly, you're actually interested in archaeologists here :-)

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