הבנה חדשה להיסטוריה האנושית ושורשיו של אי השוויון

In this book, which took us 10 years to complete, my co-author David Graeber and I lay foundations for a new understanding of human history, challenging long-held ideas about social evolution, from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy and inequality.

There’s a long-held perception that our ancestors spent their lives in small hunting and gathering groups of a few dozen closely related people, and that human cognition evolved to cope with life in such tiny groups. The authors of this study show why there is no particular reason to believe this was the case, and their findings dovetail with our arguments from the archaeological evidence.

This was the essay where we first outlined a new vision of human history based on the evidence of contemporary archaeology and anthropology: one which doesn't begin with everyone living in tiny, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, and where the invention of agriculture and cities was not, in fact, a fall from grace.

Why do we so readily associate "civilization" with hierarchy and power? In this essay I write about some of the themes discussed in my TED Talk, and how we might think about the concept of civilization in entirely different ways.

It's often suggested we evolved to live in small groups, so that living in cities must pose all kinds of special social challenges and psychological obstacles. Here I discuss how the latest evidence from psychology and anthropology challenges that assumption, and how this plays out in the archaeological evidence of early cities around the world.

Learn in more detail about those remarkable egalitarian cities of prehistoric Ukraine, often referred to as "megasites," from archaeological experts Bisserka Gaydarska, Marco Nebbia and John Chapman.

We are taught to pride ourselves on living in a democracy. At the same time, in a thousand subtle ways, we are taught that true democracy is probably impossible. In this essay, the anthropologist David Graeber and I discuss how new and different histories of democracy are emerging from the Indigenous history of the Americas, and consider some wider implications.