The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Woodburn conducted research among the Hadza, a forager society of Tanzania. He also drew parallels between them and the San Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies, as well as a number of other small-scale nomadic forager societies outside Africa, such as the Pandaram of south India or Batek of Malaysia.8 Such societies are, Woodburn suggests, the only genuinely egalitarian societies we know of, since they are the only ones that extend equality to gender relations and, as much as is practicable, to relations between old and young.

egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but Woodburn adds a twist: the real defining feature of such societies is, precisely, the lack of any material surplus. Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored.

any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers.

feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’.

Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.15

Turgot and Smith began writing this way in the 1750s. They referred to the apex of development as ‘commercial society’, in which a complex division of labour demanded the sacrifice of primitive liberties but guaranteed dazzling increases in overall wealth and prosperity.

Sahlins’s essay, perhaps the last truly great example of that genre of ‘speculative prehistory’ invented by Rousseau, first appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes.18 It made the argument that, at least when it comes to working hours, the Victorian narrative of continual improvement is simply backwards. Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, he argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, Sahlins insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance.

Sahlins argued, most known foragers are rich. The fact that many hunter-gatherers, and even horticulturalists, only seem to have spent somewhere between two and four hours a day doing anything that could be construed as ‘work’ was itself proof of how easy their needs were to satisfy.

The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes. It was as though in manufacturing as well as in food production there was no point at which further expenditure of effort in the production of more of the same items was felt to be superfluous.’25 Not only did the Kwakiutl surround themselves with endless piles of possessions, but they also put endless creativity into designing and crafting them, with results so striking and intricately beautiful as to make them the pride of ethnographic museums the world over. (Lévi-Strauss remarked that turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl were like a society where a dozen different Picassos were operative all at the same time.) This, surely, is a kind of affluence.

Which, then, more resembled the original state of human affairs: the easy-going Hadza, or the industrious foragers of northwestern California? By now it will be clear to the reader that this is just the kind of question we shouldn’t be asking. There was no truly ‘original’ state of affairs. Anyone who insists that one exists is by definition trading in myths (Sahlins, at least, was fairly honest about this). Human beings had many tens of thousands of years to experiment with different ways of life, long before any of them turned their hands to agriculture. Instead we might do better to look at the overall direction of change, so as to understand how it bears on our question: how humans came largely to lose the flexibility and freedom that seems once to have characterized our social arrangements, and ended up stuck in permanent relations of dominance and subordination.

Seen from the air – a ‘god’s-eye’ view – Poverty Point’s standing remains look like some sunken, gargantuan amphitheatre; a place of crowds and power, worthy of any great agrarian civilization. Something approaching a million cubic metres of soil was moved to create its ceremonial infrastructure, which was most likely oriented to the skies, since some of its mounds form enormous figures of birds, inviting the heavens to bear witness to their presence. But the people of Poverty Point weren’t farmers. Nor did they use writing. They were hunters, fishers and foragers, exploiting a superabundance of wild resources (fish, deer, nuts, waterfowl) in the lower reaches of the Mississippi. And they were not the first hunter-gatherers in this region to establish traditions of public architecture. These traditions can be traced back far beyond Poverty Point itself, to around 3500 BC – which is also roughly the time that cities first emerged in Eurasia.

As archaeologists often point out, Poverty Point is ‘a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone’, so the staggering quantities of lithic tools, weapons, vessels and lapidary ornaments found there must all have been originally carried from somewhere else.27 The scale of its earthworks implies thousands of people gathering at the site at particular times of year, in numbers outstripping any historically known hunter-gatherer population. Much less clear is what attracted them there with their native copper, flint, quartz crystal, soapstone and other minerals; or how often they came, and how long they stayed. We simply don’t know.

Today, Poverty Point is a National Park and Monument and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite these designations of international importance, its implications for world history have hardly begun to be explored. A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state, Poverty Point makes the Anatolian complex of Göbekli Tepe look like little more than a ‘potbelly hill’ (which is, in fact, what ‘Göbekli Tepe’ means in Turkish). Yet outside a small community of academic specialists, and of course local residents and visitors, very few people have heard of it.

Across the Japanese archipelago, between 14,000 and 300 BC, centennial cycles of settlement nucleation and dispersal came and went; monuments shot up in wood and stone, and then were pulled down again or abandoned; elaborate ritual traditions, including opulent burials, flourished and declined; specialized crafts waxed and waned, including remarkable accomplishments in the arts of pottery, wood and lacquer. In traditions of wild food procurement, strong regional contrasts are evident, ranging from maritime adaptations to acorn-based economies, both using large storage facilities for gathered resources. Cannabis came into use, for fibres and recreational drug use. There were enormous villages with grand storehouses and what seem to be ritual precincts, such as those found at Sannai Maruyama.33

HOW THE MYTH THAT FORAGERS LIVE IN A STATE OF INFANTILE SIMPLICITY IS KEPT ALIVE TODAY (OR, INFORMAL FALLACIES)

As we’ve seen, indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, caught in the rhetorical moment, would frequently overstate their case, even playing along with the idea that they were blissful, innocent children of nature. They did this in order to expose what they considered the bizarre perversions of the European lifestyle. The irony is that, in doing so, they often played into the hands of those who argued that – being blissful and innocent children of nature – they also had no natural rights to their land.

Here it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune already to be living in territories coveted by European settlers. This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth-century jurists came to call the ‘Agricultural Argument’, a principle which has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations. Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it.

By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal. Confronted with such cases, adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly.

IN WHICH WE DISPOSE OF ONE PARTICULARLY SILLY ARGUMENT THAT FORAGERS WHO SETTLE IN TERRITORIES THAT LEND THEMSELVES WELL TO FORAGING ARE SOMEHOW UNUSUAL

Those who today describe people like the Calusa as ‘atypical’ because they had such a prosperous resource base want us to believe, instead, that ancient foragers chose to avoid locations of this kind, shunning the rivers and coasts (which also offered natural arteries for movement and communication), because they were so keen to oblige later researchers by resembling twentieth-century hunter-gatherers (the sort for which detailed scientific data is available today). We are asked to believe that it was only after they ran out of deserts and mountains and rainforests that they reluctantly started to colonize richer and more comfortable environments. We might call this the ‘all the bad spots are taken!’ argument.

As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’.

It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals. As ethnographers also note, such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected.59 In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind we discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal – thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth – but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.

What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.

Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.

Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours. It is curious how little anthropologists speculate about why this whole process of subdivision ever happened.

All this led to the construction of a series of linguistic family trees, and eventually an attempt – still highly controversial – to trace virtually all Eurasian languages to a single hypothetical ancestor called ‘Nostratic’. Nostratic was believed to have existed sometime during the later Palaeolithic, or even to have been the original phylum from which every human language sprang.

organize them into regional clusters.5 Though the last of these seemed most arbitrary, it proved to be the one that really worked best. Art and technology from different Eastern Woodlands tribes, for instance, appeared to have much more in common than material from, say, all speakers of Athabascan languages;

He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.

Is it possible to see indigenous Californians and peoples of the Northwest Coast as defining themselves against each other, rather in the manner that Californians and New Yorkers do today? If so, then how much of their way of life can we really explain as being motivated by a desire to be unlike other groups of people? Here, we need to bring back our earlier discussion of schismogenesis, which we introduced to help make sense of the intellectual encounter between seventeenth-century French colonists and the Wendat people of North America’s Eastern Woodlands. Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC.

Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted … Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.22

But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment? These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries, and probably will be for centuries to come. To put the matter more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organizational imperatives or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. There’s no consensus, however, on how far back the indigenous practice of slavery actually went there. The first European accounts of the region in the late eighteenth century speak of slaves, and express mild surprise in doing so, since full-fledged chattel slavery was quite unusual in other parts of aboriginal North America. These accounts suggest that perhaps a quarter of the indigenous Northwest Coast population lived in bondage – which is about equivalent to proportions found in the Roman Empire, or classical Athens, or indeed the cotton plantations of the American South. What’s more, slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.30

If a Roman legionary was captured in battle and enslaved, then managed to escape and return home, he had to go through an elaborate process of restoring all his social relationships, including remarrying his wife, since the act of enslaving him was considered to have severed all previous relationships. The West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to this as a condition of ‘social death’.35

If slavery is the theft of labour that other societies invest in bringing up children, and the main purpose to which slaves were put was caring for children, or attending to and grooming a leisure class, then, paradoxically, the main objective of slave-taking for the ‘capturing society’ seems to have been to increase its internal capacity for caring labour. What was ultimately being produced here, within Guaicurú society, were certain kinds of people: nobles, princesses, warriors, commoners, servants, and so on.42

Amerindian societies typically referred to themselves by some term that can be roughly translated as ‘human beings’ – most of the tribal names traditionally applied to them by Europeans are derogatory terms used by their neighbours (‘Eskimo’, for example, means ‘people who don’t cook their fish’, and ‘Iroquois’ is derived from an Algonkian term meaning ‘vicious killers’). Almost all these societies took pride in their ability to adopt children or captives – even from among those whom they considered the most benighted of their neighbours – and, through care and education, turn them into what they considered to be proper human beings.

Optimal foraging theory is a style of predictive modelling that originates in the study of non-human species such as starlings, honeybees or fish. Applied to humans, it typically frames behaviour in terms of economic rationality, i.e.: ‘foragers will design their hunting and collecting strategies with the intention of obtaining a maximum return in calories, for a minimum outlay of labour.’ This is what behavioural ecologists call a ‘cost-benefit’ calculation. First you figure out how foragers ought to act, if they are trying to be as efficient as possible. Then you examine how they do in fact act. If it doesn’t correspond to the optimum foraging strategy, something else must be going on. From this perspective, the behaviour of indigenous Californians was far from optimal. As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labour to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust. At the same time, fish are found in abundance from the Pacific Coast inland at least as far as the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable...

Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.

Rather than defining the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Coast of North America as ‘incipient’ farmers or as examples of ‘emerging’ complexity – which is really just an updated way of saying they were all ‘rushing headlong for their chains’ – we have explored the possibility that they might have been proceeding with (more or less) open eyes, and found plenty of evidence to support it.

probably the most famous Neolithic site in the world, Çatalhöyük.

Over the last few years, the analysis of ancient DNA – unavailable in Gimbutas’s time – has led a number of leading archaeologists to concede that at least one significant part of her reconstruction was probably right. If these new arguments, put forward on the basis of population genetics, are even broadly correct, then there really was an expansion of herding peoples from the grasslands north of the Black Sea around the time Gimbutas believed it to have happened: the third millennium BC. Some scholars are even arguing that massive migrations took place out of the Eurasian steppe at that time, leading to population replacement and perhaps the spread of Indo-European languages across large swathes of central Europe, just as Gimbutas envisaged. Others are far more cautious; but either way, after decades of virtual silence, people are suddenly talking about such issues, and hence about Gimbutas’s work, again.9

What were the underlying realities of social life and labour at Çatalhöyük? Perhaps the most striking thing about all this art and ritual is that it makes almost no reference to agriculture. As we’ve noted, domestic cereals (wheat and barley) and livestock (sheep and goats) were far more important than wild resources in terms of nutrition. We know this because of organic remains recovered in quantity from every house. Yet for 1,000 years the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging.

In fact, 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.34

in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, 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.

We need to understand 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. So long as it didn’t become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments. Separating wild and domestic plant populations need not have been a major concern for them, even if it appears that way to us.37

Cultivating domestic cereals, as the ‘affluent’ foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work.38 Serious farming meant serious soil maintenance and weed clearance. It meant threshing and winnowing after harvest. All these activities would have got in the way of hunting, wild food collection, craft production, marriages and any number of other things, not to mention storytelling, gambling, travelling and organizing masquerades. Indeed, to balance out their dietary needs and labour costs, early cultivators may even have strategically chosen practices that worked against the morphological changes which signal the onset of domestication in plants.39

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.44

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. With no written sources to guide us, the clearest evidence we can find for such mutual oppositions is when things get (quite literally, in our case) turned on their head, as when one group of people seems to make a great display of going against some highly characteristic behaviour of their neighbours.

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.

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.

it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the Agricultural Revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity.