INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality―and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. 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. In their major New York Times bestseller, The Dawn of Everything , David Graeber and David Wengrow fundamentally challenge these assumptions and recast our understanding of human history. We will never again see the past in the same way. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, Graeber and Wengrow reveal 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. Destined to be a classic, The Dawn of Everything signals a paradigm shift, profoundly transforming our understanding of the human past and making space to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual and political range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and hopefulness. "Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring . . . It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity." ― William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic "[An] iconoclastic and irreverent new book . . . an exhilarating read." ― David Priestland, The Guardian (UK) "An instant classic . . . Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages . . . [ The Dawn of Everything ] sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading . . . If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar caliber in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively." ― Giulio Ongaro, Jacobin "A boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages . . . entertaining and thought-provoking . . . an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature." ― Andrew Anthony, The Observer (UK) " The Dawn of Everything is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past . . . It disavows the intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity, the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors’ improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance." ― Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker "[ The Dawn of Everything ] took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies . . . [the book] aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that haven’t made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness." ― Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times "A fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of humanity. It seeks nothing less than to completely upend the terms on which the Standard Narrative rests . . . erudite, compelling, generative, and frequently remarkably funny . . . once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop." ― Emily M. Kern, Boston Review "Our forebears crafted their societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental, electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything . It’s a book that refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Inste