Were Prehistoric People Childlike?

Diagnosing the incoherence of “The Dawn of Everything”

Image by Hans Splinter, from Flickr

In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow dispute the evolutionist view of history, according to which society passes through progressive stages, from egalitarian bands of naïve, proto-human foragers all the way to hierarchical, farming city states and civilizations of jaded, godlike consumers.

Prehistoric social experimentation

Graeber and Wengrow show that the evidence of social inequality in prehistory is mixed in the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods because prior to the rise of civilization, people were anarchical in their seasonal experimentation with social systems.

The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at…