The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’.

any interpretations on offer are more likely to be projections of our own assumptions about women, gender or fertility than anything that would have made sense to an inhabitant of Neolithic Anatolia.

It’s not just the idea of ‘primitive matriarchy’ that’s become such a bugaboo today: even to suggest that women had unusually prominent positions in early farming communities is to invite academic censure.

Gimbutas in fact never argued outright for the existence of Neolithic matriarchies. Indeed, the term seems to mean very different things to different authors. Insofar as ‘matriarchy’ describes a society where women hold a preponderance of formal political positions, one can indeed say this is exceedingly rare in human history.

In any case, another term – ‘gynarchy’, or ‘gynaecocracy’ – describes the political rule of women. The word ‘matriarchy’ means something rather different. There is a certain logic here: ‘patriarchy’, after all, refers not primarily to the fact that men wield public office, but first and foremost to the authority of patriarchs, that is, male heads of household – an authority which then acts as a symbolic model for, and economic basis of, male power in other fields of social life. Matriarchy might refer to an equivalent situation, in which the role of mothers in the household similarly becomes a model for, and economic basis of, female authority in other aspects of life (which doesn’t necessarily imply dominance in a violent or exclusionary sense), where women as a result hold a preponderance of overall day-to-day power.

Seasonal variations of social structure18 were alive and well at Çatalhöyük, and these carefully balanced alternations seem central to understanding why the town endured.

what exactly is, or was, the Fertile Crescent? First, it’s important to note that this is a completely modern concept, the origins of which are as much geopolitical as environmental.

Partly because of the close ties between archaeology, ancient history and the modern institutions of empire, the term became widely adopted among researchers to describe an area from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean (modern Palestine, Israel and Lebanon) to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains (roughly the Iran–Iraq border), crossing parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq on the way.

Yet in ecological terms, it’s really not one crescent but two

Both regions, too, have produced varying degrees of evidence for plant cultivation and livestock management, within a broader spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. Yet there are also cultural differences, some so striking as to suggest a process of schismogenesis,

Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labour-intensive and no doubt freighted with symbolic meaning; and the resulting foods were incorporated into their ceremonial lives.

In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance.

Harari’s retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it’s based on any evidence, but because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we’re back in the Garden of Eden. Except now, it’s not a wily serpent who tricks humanity into sampling the forbidden fruit of knowledge. It’s the fruit itself (i.e. the cereal grains).

Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies, we might expect to find evidence of a relatively quick or at least continuous transition from wild to domestic forms of cereals (which is exactly what terms like the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ lead us to think), but in fact this is not at all what the results of archaeological science show. And despite the Middle Eastern setting, those findings do not add up to anything remotely resembling a Garden of Eden-type story about how humans haplessly stumbled their way into a Faustian pact with wheat. Just how far we are (or should be) from that kind of story was already clear to researchers some decades ago, once they began comparing actual prehistoric rates of crop domestication to those achieved under experimental conditions.

Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain. Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round.

As people intensified the harvesting of wild grasses for straw (either by sickle or simply uprooting), they also produced one of the key conditions for some of these grasses to lose their natural mechanisms of seed dispersal.

the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC.35 Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken – if, that is, humans really had stumbled blindly into the whole process, following the trajectory dictated by changes in their crops.36 To be clear: that’s 3,000 years of human history, far too long to constitute an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ or even to be considered some kind of transitional state on the road to farming.

this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation – and as we’ve seen, there’s nothing unusual or anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming, in just the ways Plato would have despised – but in no way enslaving themselves to the needs of their crops or herds.

‘flood retreat’, ‘flood recession’ or décrue farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers. Flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops.

In terms of labour, flood-retreat farming is not only pretty light, it also requires little central management.

No form of human ecology is ‘innately’ egalitarian, but much as Rousseau and his epigones would have been surprised to hear it, these early cultivation systems did not lend themselves to the development of private property.

Early cultivators, it seems, were doing the minimum amount of subsistence work needed to stay in their given locations, which they occupied for reasons other than farming: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more.

Apart from being a story about the loss of primordial innocence, the Book of Genesis is also one of history’s most enduring charters for the hatred of women,

When today’s writers speculate about ‘wheat domesticating humans’ (as opposed to ‘humans domesticating wheat’), what they are really doing is replacing a question about concrete scientific (human) achievements with something rather more mystical.

Instead, we find ourselves waxing lyrical about the temptations of forbidden fruits and musing on the unforeseen consequences of adopting a technology (agriculture)

Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity,

True, archaeological evidence of any kind is hard to come by, because aside from charred seeds, very little of what was done culturally with plants survives from prehistoric times. But where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things.45

Women’s association with such knowledge extends back to some of the earliest surviving depictions of the human form: the ubiquitous sculpted female figurines of the last Ice Age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts made of cord.

part of the problem with conventional approaches lies in the very terms ‘agriculture’ and ‘domestication’. Agriculture is essentially about the production of food, which was just one (quite limited) aspect of the Neolithic relationship between people and plants. Domestication usually implies some form of domination or control over the unruly forces of ‘wild nature’. Feminist critiques have already done much to unpack the gendered assumptions behind both concepts, neither of which seems appropriate to describe the ecology of early cultivators.49

botany or even gardening?

What it really seems to have been about is creating garden plots – artificial, often temporary habitats – in which the ecological scales were tipped in favour of preferred species.

Instead of fixed fields, they exploited alluvial soils on the margins of lakes and springs, which shifted location from year to year. Instead of hewing wood, tilling fields and carrying water, they found ways of ‘persuading’ nature to do much of this labour for them.

This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful.

an obvious connection between Neolithic ecology and the visibility of women in contemporary art and ritual.

Whether one calls these figures ‘goddesses’ or ‘scientists’ is perhaps less important than recognizing how their very appearance signals a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.

most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals, and so on – were made under precisely those other (Neolithic) sorts of conditions.

becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays,

as vehicles of abstract thought.

clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals.

Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.

Neolithic farming began in Southwest Asia as a series of local specializations in crop-raising and animal-herding, scattered across various parts of the region, with no epicentre. These local strategies were pursued, it seems, in order to sustain access to trade partnerships and optimal locations for hunting and gathering, which continued unabated alongside cultivation. As we discussed back in Chapter One, this ‘trade’ might well have had more to do with sociability, romance or adventure than material advantage

considering the close proximity of the two cultural patterns, and how the groups responsible for them exchanged goods and were keenly aware of each other’s existence, it is equally possible, and perhaps more plausible, to see what happened as the result of mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis,

‘the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization – may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.’

It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic forager to Neolithic farmer.

while agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception.

it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property.

if the adoption of farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination, what went wrong?

It is difficult, for instance, to make any sort of convincing argument that warfare was a significant feature of early farming societies in the Middle East, as by now one would expect some evidence for it to have shown up in the record. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence for the proliferation of trade and specialized crafts, and for the importance of female figures in art and ritual.

Certainly, it’s wrong to assume that planting seeds or tending sheep means one is necessarily obliged to accept more unequal social arrangements, simply to avert a ‘tragedy of the commons’. There is a paradox here. Most general works on the course of human history do actually assume something like this; but almost nobody, if pressed, would seriously defend such a point because it’s an obvious straw man.

In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant