The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Such findings suggest that the more ubiquitous female figurines, while clearly not all objects of worship, weren’t necessarily all dolls or toys either. Goddesses? Probably not. But quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an interest in female elders.

Individual houses were typically in use for between fifty and 100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astonishing, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.

Arable crops were most likely sown late in the spring on the receding floodplain of the Çarşamba, where they could ripen in as little as three months, with harvesting and processing in the late summer: fast-growing grains, in the season of Adonis.

It is in fact quite likely that what we are seeing in the surviving remains of Çatalhöyük’s built environment are largely the social arrangements prevalent in winter, with their intense and distinctive ceremonialism focused upon hunting and the veneration of the dead. At that time of year, with the harvest in, the organization required for agricultural labour would have given way to a different type of social reality as the community’s life shrank back towards its houses, just as its herds of sheep and goats shrank back into the confines of their pens.

As Çatalhöyük’s art and ritual suggests, wild cattle and boar were highly valued as prey, and probably had been for as long as anyone could remember. In terms of prestige, there was much to be lost, perhaps especially for men, by the prospect of surrounding these dangerous animals with more docile, domestic varieties.

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.

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a ‘fairly comfortable life’, subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life – of surplus and luxury, of living like gods – we had to go and tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.

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.

they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and the temper that transformed mud and clay from so much friable matter into a vital tectonic resource, used to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch.

the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.

Flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops. The work of soil preparation is given over mostly to nature. Seasonal flooding does the work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. This was garden cultivation on a small scale with no need for deforestation, weeding or irrigation, except perhaps the construction of small stone or earthen barriers (‘bunds’) to nudge the distribution of water this way or that. Areas of high groundwater, such as the edges of artesian springs, could also be exploited in this way.

Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get.

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. Theirs was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome.

The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism – and vice versa.

Eurasia, as these authors point out, has few equivalents to the sharp climatic variations of the Americas, or indeed of Africa. Terrestrial species can travel across the breadth of the Eurasian continent without crossing boundaries between tropical and temperate zones. Continents whose extremities tilt north to south are a different proposition, and perhaps less amenable to such ecological transfers.

With perhaps 90 per cent of the indigenous population eliminated by the effects of conquest and infectious disease, forests reclaimed regions in which terraced agriculture and irrigation had been practised for centuries. In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to change the Earth System and bring about a human-driven phase of global cooling.

Around estuaries, deltas and lake margins, annual rounds of fishing and foraging took place at increasingly close range, leading to sustained patterns of human aggregation quite unlike those of the glacial period, when long seasonal migrations of mammoth and other large game structured much of social life.14

New forms of personal adornment employed cosmetic pigments and minerals, prospected from the adjacent deserts, and a dazzling array of beadwork, combs, bangles and other ornaments made of ivory and bone, all richly attested in Neolithic cemeteries running the length of the Nile valley, from Central Sudan to Middle Egypt.

Second, all three cases involved a targeted spread of farming to lands largely uninhabited by existing populations. The highly mobile Neolithic of the Nile valley extended seasonally into the adjacent steppe-desert, but avoided regions that were already densely settled, such as the Nile delta, the Sudanese gezira and the major oases (including the Fayum, where lakeside fisher-foragers prevailed, adopting and abandoning farming practices largely as it suited them).

Cultivation was a relaxed affair, with little effort spent on keeping different species apart. And as the dry season commenced, these tangled house gardens were abandoned altogether. The entire group dispersed into small nomadic bands to hunt and forage, only to begin the whole process again the following year, often in a different location.

Many rainforest groups carry with them what can only be described as a small zoo comprising tamed forest creatures: monkeys, parrots, collared peccaries, and so on.

‘Master’ or ‘Mistress of the Animals’ figures are actually very common in hunting societies; sometimes they take the form of a huge or perfect specimen of a certain type of beast, a kind of embodiment of the species, but at the same time they appear as human or humanlike owners of the species, to whom the souls of all deer, or seals, or caribou must be returned after hunters take them. In Amazonia, what this means in practice is that people avoid intervening in the reproduction of those particular species lest they usurp the role of spirits.

Arawak-speaking groups were famed in recent centuries as master blenders of culture – traders and diplomats, forging diverse alliances, often for commercial advantage.

Such ancient plant nurseries rested on special soils (or, more strictly, ‘anthrosols’), which are locally called terra preta de índio (‘black earth of the Indians’) and terra mulata (‘brown earth’): dark earths with carrying capacities well in excess of ordinary tropical soils. The dark earths owe their fertility to absorption of organic by-products such as food residues, excrement and charcoal from everyday village life (forming terras pretas) and/or earlier episodes of localized burning and cultivation (terras mulatas).

Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).

Cereal-farming, as it turns out, underwent some important changes during its transfer from Southwest Asia to central Europe via the Balkans. Originally there were three kinds of wheat (einkorn, emmer and free threshing) and two kinds of barley (hulled and naked) under cultivation, but also five different pulses (pea, lentil, bitter vetch, chickpea and grass pea). By contrast, the majority of Linear Pottery sites contain just glume wheats (emmer and einkorn) and one or two kinds of pulse. The Neolithic economy had become increasingly narrow and uniform, a diminished subset of the Middle Eastern original.

Cereal-farming fed the community. Its by-products – chaff and straw – provided fuel, fodder for their animals, as well as basic materials for construction, including temper for pottery and daub for houses. Livestock supplied occasional meat, dairy and wool, as well as manure for gardens.55 With their wattle-and-daub longhouses and sparse material culture, these first European farming settlements bear a peculiar resemblance to the rural peasant societies of much later eras. Most likely, they were also subject to some of the same weaknesses – not just periodic raiding from the outside, but also internal labour crunches, soil exhaustion, disease and harvest failures across a whole string of like-for-like communities, with little scope for mutual aid.

Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would almost inevitably develop writing or something like it, together with administrators, storage and redistribution facilities, workshops and overseers. Before long, they would also start dividing themselves into social classes. ‘Civilization’ came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge.

Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them. New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers – drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu3 – shows that residential groups turn out not to be made up of biological kin at all;

It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism

Aristotle, for example, insisted that Babylon was so large that, two or three days after it had been captured by a foreign army, some parts of the city still hadn’t heard the news. In other words, from the perspective of someone living in an ancient city, the city itself was not so entirely different from earlier landscapes of clans or moieties that extended across hundreds of miles. It was a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.

One way to think about this would be to imagine a vast regional system, of the kind that once spanned much of Australia or North America, being squeezed into a single urban space – while still maintaining its virtual quality.

in the first cities small-scale gardening and animal-keeping were often at least as important; so too were the resources of rivers and seas, and for that matter the continued hunting and collecting of wild seasonal foods in forests or in marshes.

in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves, not in the idiom of kinship or ethnic ties, but simply as ‘the people’ of a given city (or often its ‘sons and daughters’), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar, which always involves at least some occasions for popular festivity.

The great city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was already attracting residents from such distant areas as Yucatán and the Gulf Coast in the third or fourth century AD; migrants settled there in their own neighbourhoods, including a possible Maya district.

This was the origin of those great fan-like deltas we see today at the head of the Mississippi, the Nile or the Euphrates, for instance.15 Comprising well-watered soils, annually sifted by river action, and rich wetland and waterside habitats favoured by migratory game and waterfowl, such deltaic environments were major attractors for human populations.

Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds.

This way of life was by no means ‘simple’. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans.

It’s as if every household was an artists’ collective which invented its own unique aesthetic style.

It follows that households cannot simply schedule their daily labour in line with their own needs. They also have to consider their obligations to other households, which in turn have their own obligations to other, different households, and so on. Factoring in that some tasks – such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds – may require the combined efforts of ten different households, and that households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment, we begin to get a sense of the complexities involved.

rather than governing themselves through communal assemblies (which earlier generations of Basque townsfolk famously created in places like Guernica), they rely on mathematical principles such as rotation, serial replacement and alternation.

The flood-myth Atrahasis – the prototype for the Old Testament story of Noah – tells how the gods first created people to perform corvée on their behalf. Mesopotamian gods were unusually hands-on, and had originally worked themselves. Eventually tiring of digging irrigation canals, they created minor deities to do the work, but they too rebelled, and – receiving a much more favourable hearing than Lucifer would in Heaven – the gods conceded to their demands and created people.

Royal hymns describe the ‘happy faces’ and ‘joyous hearts’ of corvée workers. No doubt there’s an element of propaganda here, but it’s clear that, even in periods of monarchy and empire, these seasonal projects were undertaken in a festive spirit, labourers receiving copious rewards of bread, beer, dates, cheese and meat. There was also something of the carnival about them. They were occasions when the moral order of the city spun on its axis, and distinctions between citizens dissolved away.

Times of labour mobilization were thus seen as moments of absolute equality before the gods – when even slaves might be placed on an equal footing to their masters – as well as times when the imaginary city became real, as its inhabitants shed their day-to-day identities as bakers or tavern keepers or inhabitants of such and such a neighbourhood, or later generals or slaves, and briefly assembled to become ‘the people’ of Lagash, or Kish, Eridu, or Larsa as they built or rebuilt some part of the city or the network of irrigation canals that sustained it.

But when dealing with loyal subjects they were strikingly hands-off, often granting near-total autonomy to citizen bodies that made decisions collectively.

Murder trials, divorce and property disputes seem to have been mostly in the hands of town councils.

So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely.

Most of these public buildings seem to have been great communal assembly halls, clearly modelled on the plan of ordinary households, but constructed as houses of the gods.65 There was also a Great Court comprising an enormous sunken plaza, 165 feet across, entirely surrounded by two tiers of benches and equipped with water channels to feed trees and gardens, which offered much-needed shade for open-air gatherings.