"The Beginning of Everything" is a new history of humanity, which undermines many persistent beliefs. According to author David Wengrow, our narrow view of history leads to a lack of political imagination.
When prehistoric humans lived in small groups and roamed as hunter-gatherers, they could coexist peacefully without being dominated. There were hardly any major conflicts or outbreaks of violence and there was no private property. The moment agriculture made its appearance, the first large landowners appeared on the scene, cities sprang up and autocratic rulers soon seized power. The beginning of inequality, large-scale violence and oppression. But also of writing and arithmetic, culture, more complex technology, in short:civilization.
This is – very briefly – the prevailing view of human history. It is the narrative of Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, and even the optimistic Rutger Bregman ("Most people are good") follows this scenario broadly.
But what if the beginnings of human society were very different in many places? “In prehistoric times there were also complex forms of society, complete cities, in which no central authority was present,” says David Wengrow coolly in the lobby of an Amsterdam hotel. “Writing and large-scale agriculture played no part in this, but tens of thousands of people lived peacefully and I dare say democratically together – without princes, rulers, oppression or wars.”
Archaeologist David Wengrow (1972) collaborated with anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020) for more than ten years on a book in which the history of mankind is enriched with a completely different storyline. Graeber, who was a professor at the London School of Economics and founder of Occupy Wallstreet as an activist and public intellectual, died shortly after the book was completed. David Wengrow, professor of comparative archeology at University College London, is now touring single-handedly to deliver their remarkable message. With great success:the book is published in many countries and ends up high in the bestseller lists.
One of your central propositions is that scaling up in prehistoric times did not always lead to oppression and inequality. What are you basing this on?
“We have an awful lot of evidence of hunter-gatherer societies where agriculture had not yet been introduced, in the Middle East for example, where huge numbers of people lived together with no clear hierarchy. On the American continent, we have monumental sites of cultures – in Louisiana – where thousands of people lived together in cities long before the introduction of agriculture, even without rulers.”
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But when agriculture makes its appearance, will most people still have freedom?
“The old story actually says that agriculture has always led to private property and thus to (large) land ownership and inequality. But that's not true either. We now know that plants and herbs were cultivated independently of each other in at least ten places in the world. But the consequences were not the same everywhere. In some places it led to cities tightly run by aristocratic families, such as in parts of China, where bureaucracy and central authority also grew. But in a surprisingly large number of other places, agriculture brought a more egalitarian culture than what preceded it – including in Eastern and Southern Asia.”
But if there are no traces of something – such as rulers or central authorities – then you are still not sure that it wasn't there?
“What archaeologists do to gain clarity is make comparisons. Looking at different sites and excavations you can always see and understand more than you might conclude from looking at just one place or region. When it comes to central authority, such as ruling royal families, it's not that complicated. If autocratic leaders throughout all time share one universal quality, it is that they are happy to tell you that they are there. Museums are full of them. Look at Egypt:when there are powerful rulers, they always make sure that you cannot easily overlook them.”
And there is also evidence to the contrary:early forms of democracy?
"Secure. In what is now Ukraine, for example, scientists already discovered enormous cities a few decades ago – by the way, this is now also done by walking over the fields with radar equipment and then making digital reconstructions, without digging. This area is still one of the most fertile regions in the world, which is why we now have a grain crisis. At the time of the large cities in the Middle East (Mesopotamia) there were also cities in present-day Ukraine, which are much less known. Huge expanses of houses built in circular shapes. No palaces and no temples have been found, but each circular “district” did have its own central place, a kind of square. It has functioned like this for at least 800 years, with no rulers or families standing above it.”
And this also applies to several continents?
"Secure. For example, in Central America was the multi-ethnic mega-city of Teotihuacan. In its heyday, it had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, comparable to Imperial Rome. When archaeologists started digging here, they first thought they had found palaces and villas, everything was so spacious and well set up. But gradually it turned out that everyone here lived in a “palace”; the people shared huge, comfortable buildings with a few families. Here, too, there were communal places for each section to gather. Those societies may not have been perfectly egalitarian as we would define them – there may have been gender inequality and some sort of age division of authority – but no central authority, and all the inhabitants lived in pleasant, spacious housing.”
It sounds too good to be true:complex societies were not always hierarchical and oppressive. Where does all that new evidence suddenly come from?
“Our story is new, but the data we use to substantiate it has not been discovered by us. The evidence we use in our book comes from well-known scientific sources. Archaeologists will hardly find anything in it that they do not already know.”
How is it that the general public has never heard of such evidence, such as reconstructions of matriarchates and peaceful, early-democratic prehistoric cities?
“Many of these resources are not easily accessible to the public, they are behind paywalls of scientific journals. They know the specialists, but they don't always talk well with each other, let alone with the public. Moreover, heaps of new data from the past thirty to forty years really go against some very deeply entrenched paradigms of human history, such as the connection between agriculture, land tenure and oppression. Scientific paradigms can be activating, but they can also act as blinders. A horse with blinders follows one track, but cannot look sideways and therefore passes many without noticing.”
And so the historiography also thunders in one direction?
"Yes. But gradually, the evidence that undermines the paradigm continues to pile up. Eventually you reach a tipping point, there's so much evidence that doesn't fit with the dominant narrative, that the paradigm starts to look a little shaky. What we argue in our book is that we are now at this point. Some of the central anchors on which the old story is built are no longer tenable. The idea of the agricultural revolution, for example, and the origin of the state, can no longer be sustained in the light of all these data from the last decades.”
Sceptics will say you are guilty of wishful thinking.
“I think it is precisely the existing history books that impose an idea on the past, and subordinate the facts to it. If people feel a strong aversion to our story, they feel it precisely because of ideological conviction, because we are not arguing without undisputed scientific substantiation. What we show is that the early history of man in complex societies was much richer and more varied than previously believed. That is important for us to realize, to dare to see it. If we can't, it shows a lack of imagination with which we can look at societies – including our own.”