Early in this new tome,10 years in the writing, two British academics (anthropology and archaeology), promise to point out fundamental flaws in the theses of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Since I have read all those books, enjoyed them, and found their accounts of early human development quite convincing, and since I also have an enduring inexplicable (even to myself) interest in the nature and societal organization of our our very ancient ancestors, I read on. But early on I found that there were barely enough dry morsels of brain food to keep me from starving my noggin, or napping.
Starting with the classic contrasting views of Hobbesian hawks waging a war of everyone against everyone and Rosseauian altruistic doves, the authors trash the very concept of this neat dichotomy. The progression of human societies from bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms to states is shown to be far too simplistic and was interrupted by seasonal migrations as was the common narrative of progression from hunter-gatherers to gardeners to farmers to industrial states.
They question the whole concept of human progression, discuss the philosophical conundrum of ‘human agency’ or free will only very superficially, and note that there may never have been an idyllic society of Edenic equality and leisure, and claim that the collection of surpluses whether of food, other resources, or money, leading to gross inequalities, is limited in nature to the human species, and not even universal in us. Even the concept of equality seems problematic to these iconoclasts.
There are 110 pages comparing and contrasting precolonial Californian societies and those of the Pacific Northwest. Is ‘compare and contrast’ still an imperative order in exams in literature at all levels as it was in my school days? This chapter is followed by 99 pages dividing the the so-called Neolithic Fertile Crescent of the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 B.C. into 12 distinct but often interacting societies of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, contradicting Noah Harari’s assertion of wheat cultivation enslaving Homo sapiens, and denying any concept of any smooth ‘Agricultural Revolution’. They question the whole concept of human progress.
After about 600 pages (out of 1734), and heeding advice from an author on CBC’s Q to, during the pandemic, for one’s mental health, only read books that one enjoys, I bailed out and returned this ebook edition to the OPL without reading the rest. Did I miss the best part?
This book may be of value as a reference volume or text for dedicated ethnologists, anthropologists and archeologists, (or perhaps advanced ancient history teachers), but I cannot recommend it for anyone else.
Thanks,
The Atlantic.
The Passionate Reader 