Donato Colangelo’s Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity > Status Update

Don’t understand why people complain this book is based on fanciful speculation, while the text is riddled with references (and recent ones too).
3rd chapter is illuminating, though. Seasonality as a regulator of society’s organization, with all the variation possible among different human groups and population. Now comes the main question: how did humans get stuck with just one system of social order?
Cool!

Surprising to read about the probable return to hunter-gathering from some populations of ancient Britain. Besides, no clear proof of a stratified, hierarchical order of societies seems to exist up to the Upper Paleolithic. Each corner of the Earth has surely its own prehistory and the point is clear: there is no clear, linear progression among human groups...

Interesting discussion about egalitarianism vs hierarchy in society. Bohem conclusion to his research about the first human societies land on the same conclusion other researchers arrived at before him: humans were egalitarian (“political”) animals, up to the discovery of agriculture. From that point on, inequality became a defining character of our society.

Ok, this book will surely destroy some key foundations of my understanding of recent history. I had no idea that interactions with the Americans before Enlightenment provided some (if not many, we will see as I read further) defining elements of such movement, one of the most momentous shifts in human history.
But, again, the goal of the book is to rethink human history, so…

I am on page 20 and I already love this book.
I was drawn to read it by the persistent critique of J. Diamond works and indeed some discussion about his vision of history is reported in the first chapter here.
To make it short: the book promises to change the way we understand human history and strongly criticizes modern authors who have proposed an old and not fact-based version of it (Diamond being among them).