The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

A founding block in that old edifice of human social evolution was the allocation of a specific place in history to foraging societies, which was to be the prelude to an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that supposedly changed everything about the course of history. The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is). If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or ‘deviant’ in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventually to wither and die. It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence.