The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Harari starts off with a perfectly reasonable observation: that our knowledge of early human history is extremely limited, and social arrangements probably varied a great deal from place to place. True, he overstates his case (he suggests we can really know nothing, even about the Ice Age), but the basic point is well taken. Then we get this: The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing … scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos. So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’.