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

We have come to the end of chapter 4 with the most sombre of all conclusions: private property is old and idea as the idea of the sacred. Not sure if a direct connection with religion might be hypothesized here, but a connection of some sort there must be. Hitchens was perhaps right once more when he stated “religion poisons everything”.

As history goes on, the Upper Paleolithic homogeneous “culture” crystallizes from 12000 BC into more local, confined communities that by the Neolithic were recognizable and different on some, or several, cultural aspects. So, now it comes the question: why did this happen? Why people try to set themselves off from other people?

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.