The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

By David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin)

Anthropologist David Graeber, famous for summing up several millennia of economic history in his best-selling Debt: The First 5000 Years, spent the past decade collaborating with the archaeologist David Wengrow on another ambitious project. The two scholars sifted through evidence from 200,000 years of human history in an effort to understand how inequality began. Their exhaustive research has come to fruition in The Dawn of Everything ,a fascinating argument about why humans today are ‘‘stuck’’ in rigid, hierarchical states that would have appalled our ancestors. ‘‘Something has gone terribly wrong with the world,’’ they write. ‘‘A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.’’ Sadly, this is also Graeber’s last work. The famed anarchist philosopher, a major figure in the Occupy movement as well as an influential scholar, died in late 2020. This final work is a fitting capstone to his career. – Annalee Newitz, Washington Post