Reading “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” brought back memories of college even as it brought me up to date. It’s been a while since I sat in a classroom — not an altogether enlightening or successful experience, as I recall. My long absence from academia at least partially explains why much of the information in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s deeply revisionist and liberating opus was so new to me. “Dawn” is not an easy read, despite its disarming and pleasant style, but it’s an essential and radical one. This disruptive, occasionally arch tome could well be the basis of a humanities course we all should take.

This ambitious, polemical and subversive book, with its charmingly arrogant subtitle, aims to pulverize accepted ideas about history and philosophy. It suggests that the Indigenous people of 17th-century North America fueled what has come to be known as the Enlightenment far more than the European culture importers who “civilized” those people. It debunks the notion that a top-down, hierarchical structure is inherent in the development of cities and those cities’ only legitimate form; that size equals complexity; and that the cliché of the “noble savage” is not only wrong-headed and patronizing but the historical record does not reflect it. It credits women in certain ancient cultures — Crete is the prime example — with far more political, bureaucratic and spiritual power than they’ve been accorded in earlier, patriarchy-oriented anthropological literature. To this dynamic, brainy duo, evolution is anything but linear.

Graeber helped organize the Occupy Wall Street movement and was known as an anarchist. An anti-capitalist, he also was the author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and of “Bulls**t Jobs: A Theory.” Wengrow is a professor of comparative archeology at University College London. He also does archeological fieldwork.

The beauty of this intellectually formidable book by the anthropologist Graeber and the archeologist Wengrow is that it’s all over the place — literally.

The two bring us to recently discovered sites in Mesopotamia, Africa, Ukraine, Turkey, numerous parts of North, Central and South America, and Oceania. They show how these relate and how the development of cities was a worldwide phenomenon. They delve into language, agriculture, war and property.

Stories of increasingly numerous ancient sites and their often-enigmatic yields rarely make it into mass media. Reading this is a good way to catch up on history as it unfolds and its meaning evolves.

As a little kid, I wanted to be an archeologist, and the thrill of discovering and unearthing the ancient structures and wisdom that continue to hover over us remains alluring. The “Dawn” mega-site that grabbed me is Nebelivka, an enormous settlement in Ukraine that dates to the early and middle years of the fourth millennium BC. The authors suggest that Nebelivka and other large prehistoric sites around the Black Sea rarely make a noise in Western media for two reasons: geopolitics in which the work of Eastern Bloc researchers slowed reception of their findings in Western academic circles and, perhaps more important, the absence of centralized government and administration and of a ruling class, all purported evidence of a simple, rather than complex, society at these sites.

On page 292 there’s an astonishing, speculative drawing of Nebelivka showing a circular city, its residences surrounding a large, central space. The function of that space is unknown, and will likely remain so, as there are no written records. The drawing evokes an open mouth. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” the authors ask. They have their reasons.

Graeber, who died in September 2020, and Wengrow have delivered a provocative work that puts concepts like settlement, city, state civilization, slavery and farming back into quotes and back into question. In so doing, they have produced stimulating entertainment fueled by skepticism, a voracious appetite for research and a sense of humor. Their writing style — conversational and tantalizing, even in copious footnotes in which they call out contemporary anthropologists — keeps the reader absorbed no matter how dense the information.

“The research that culminated in this book began almost a decade ago, essentially as a form of play,” they write. “We pursued it at first, it would be fair to say, in a spirit of mild defiance towards our more ‘serious’ academic responsibilities. Mainly we were just curious about how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last 30 years might change our notions of early human history, especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality. Before long, though, we realized that what we were doing was potentially important, because hardly anyone else in our fields seemed to be doing this work of synthesis.”

In achieving such synthesis, they argue for sharing of information rather than the circling of wagons, the “siloing” that besets academia at its least collegial. No doubt some more-entrenched pillars of academia find that threatening. If that’s the small scale of this stimulating book, the larger one is society itself, struggling, as usual, to find happiness. Their quest addresses this question.

“If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck’? …

“How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?”

In reimagining history, “The Dawn of Everything” is fundamentally encouraging. It reminds us to be flexible and improvisational, and that even though we must learn from it, we need not be captive to the past.

Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from Cleveland.

First Published: January 18, 2022, 11:00 a.m.