Dawn of Everything: Ch. 3 – Protean Possibilities

Tl;Dr: Chapter 3 argues against the idea that social inequality is our ancestral heritage

It’s easy (and naive these authors argue) to imagine life in the distant past as either

• Small bands of hunter gathers with little need for social hiearchy
• Kingdoms ruled by some kind of monarch

In this chapter, the David’s argue that those conceptions are not supported by current evidence, are likely due to evidential bias from older sources and cultural inertia.

The first argument is: the Pre-historical world was far more diverse than we can imagine. For example:

There was no single ‘Kubric Monkey’ moment, when some lucky soul decided to kill the other tribe. In fact – Sapiens were distributed across Africa in many locations and those Sapiens where wildly physically diverse. Rather than assuming a single origin of society, we should assume that social organizations were also wildly diverse.

They go on to address the Sapient Paradox – the idea that nobel savages were wandering the savanah in “tiny egalitarian forager bands” until relatively recently. In fact, there is evidence of social hierarchy (special funeral treatment for some), long-distance trade, and huge megalithic structure (like Göbekli Tepe) 9,000 years before the common era. There are even older temples, princely burials and centers for trade reaching back into the ice ages – 25k years ago! “So what are we to make of… ” all this evidence?

It feels like a long and meandering path to the punch line of this chapter, here are just a few of the explorations:

• Can we believe that pre-historical humans were capable of political thought? A: Yes
• Do we have evidence for societies that shift their organization over time (seasonally?). A: emphatically yes
• Do pre-historical societies have state-power (governance over large groups of people to cooperate) without ever developing a ‘state’? A: Yes, we can see this in the Plains indians (and should assume it’s a normal part of our pre-history)

The chapter ends asking one of the key questions of the book: If our ancestors lived in such diverse social organizations, why have we (the civilized sapiens of the last 3000 years or so) stuck in our current organizational models?