The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity
(Playaway)

Title from container.

"Light."

Previously released by Macmillan Audio, ?2021.

Release date supplied by publisher.

Issued on Playaway, a dedicated audio media player.

One set of earphones and one AAA battery required for listening.

Read by Mark Williams.

"For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this dialectic has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors illustrate how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume."--,Provided by publisher.