13 ms·

Human History Gets a Rewrite

167 points by yboris 5y ago

makeitdouble 5y ago
> The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Side point: this article is primarily aimed at promoting a (long) book, so readers are expected to enjoying reading for reading, and will appreciate the author's effort to lead them through a syrupous long ride, I guess. This reminded me I don't belong to that camp.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  What I see (and am glad for) as the narraritive being challend is not just the simplistic "our ancestors were dumb", which some people may have, but this other one, that's so widespread that it's often considered "common sense" and seems more "objective": ALL hunter-gatherer societies/culture are fundamentally the same, because the main components are somehow a necessary consequence of being a hunter-gatherer (which is a stable category, which applies to a variety of human cultures throughout history, that can all be summed up as being more or less the same), and therefore we can tell how ancient "hunter-gatherers" lived by looking at contemporary people we call "hunter-gatherers". No, no, no, no, and no. And, in fact, human culture always has and still is various, diverse, and with many possibilities. From the review: > Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. 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. > “How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Other than the "our dumb ancestors dumbly believed their ancestors were dumb" narrative, I don't think I have ever seen this among people who who have actually seriously thought about it. And if you're referring to dumb cavemen hitting everything with clubs "narrative" that's seen in comedy and other entertainment, I don't see why you think this article indicates we're moving away from that. Or really what the problem with it is at all, or why we would want to move away from it. Larson et al. rigorously proved it to be hilarious.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Archaeologists' insistence on defining anything they don't immediately understand as "for ritual purposes" - implying our ancestors were prone to superstition, instead of admitting the archaeologists' own ignorance. Every time we say "civilisation started with X" and then discover a city from before that time. We still don't understand how the Australian Aborigines got to Australia 50K years ago. You can't get to Australia without good boats. Yet there's a blank refusal to admit that this means that early humans had sophisticated boats. It's really common to write off early humans as less sophisticated.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      Are these all things you're just making up? It's a common theory that first people reached Australia with the help of boats (and lower sea levels), for example. Who claims they can not possibly have used boats?
    - bigodbiel 5y ago
      I always considered rituals to be a form of proof of intelligence.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    Well, FWIW, there was this weird guy who claimed our ancestors weren't dumb, they weren't even conscious. And by "our ancestors" he didn't mean Homo erectus, he meant ancient Greeks. (The so-called "bicameral mind" theory.) I think that's completely bonkers but apparently some people like the theory. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316
- jablongo 5y ago
  I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective With what does that agree? Where is that stated?
    - jablongo 5y ago
      It’s just part of respecting the lifestyles and choices that our ancestors made - recognizing that there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        I understand the concept; it was expressed in the GGP as if someone else had said it and you agreed, and I didn't see where else it had been said. > there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group It's essential to understand that people have perspectives, values, and situations outside my own or even outside my own imagination, and that their similarity to my 'system' is not a measure of their validity. That means that making judgments is very error-prone. But that's different than saying all systems are equally valid, or are good, or that goodness is subjective. Making the judgment that system A is equally good and valid as system B by virtue of their existence is far more error prone. It's like saying, when evaluating programming languages for a project, 'I'm not absolutely certain, so I'm scoring them all 100!'.
- akomtu 5y ago
  IMHO, the biggest myth that modern historians adamantly believe in is that human intelligence has mysteriously developed from zero to current level in just 12,000 years. We are supposed to believe that humans were dumb savages, yet with fully functional, but apparently unused brains, and then they suddenly chose to become smart and in a few wild leaps they've gotten to quantum mechanics.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Practically all modern historians? Or even just the major consensus of this field? That's astounding to me, I have trouble believing it without at least some anecdotes. Do you have a link or name of one well respected and cited modern historian who adamantly believes this? And a reference to some of their writings or talks where they explain their ideas? That would be fascinating to read about, thank you.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Especially since this would be the field of anthropology. History is classically constructed as the study of texts and therefore doesn’t really have methods that extend past the development of the written word and the survival of sufficient sources.
  - tremon 5y ago
    I'm not sure whether historians ascribe that to intelligence or to knowledge. My interpretation (not a historian) is that writing (i.e. the development of script) is what gave humans the means to go from the lore model of tribal knowledge to the collectively "smart" societies we developed over the past millennia. Whether you choose to ascribe the quality "savage" to a tribal society is a discussion all of itself; there is evidence of vast (continental-scale) trade networks even from the tribal era, so it wasn't all lets-bash-some-skulls-before-lunch. But being smart can only give you limited sight if you have no giants' shoulders to stand on.
    - akomtu 5y ago
      Why do you believe that writing is a recent invention? Because we can't find samples older than that? Then what makes you think that all we can find is what can be found in principle? If tomorrow a solar flare wipes out our civilization, there won't be much scriptures left in stone and other resilient materials, so we all must be savages today for not engraving granite with equations in sufficient quantities.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  syrupous?
- barrenko 5y ago
  The original meaning of the word "idiot" is someone who doesn't care for their local politics. Our ancestors were of course, the same as us.
invalidname 5y ago
How long does the author take to get to the point. Ugh... And honestly, the point isn't all it's made up to be. Mostly a, well... OK.
- handrous 5y ago
  If you think a book review takes too long to get to the point, do I have some bad news for you about books....
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > If you think a book review takes too long to get to the point, do I have some bad news for you about books.... It's 2021, could you summarize it in a tweet for me? /s
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      @threadreaderapp unroll ...is the modern way to read "books".
      - mathw 5y ago
        Or people could just... read the thread. I don't get why thread reader still exists.
    - lucumo 5y ago
      I've seen tweets that contain more relevant details than some Atlantic articles.
      - makeitdouble 5y ago
        I came to the conclusion that there is a generation shift that we don't often acknowledge. For a long time public written word needed to be both entertainment and informative. Just like us watching documentaries: we kind of expect them to be beautifully shot and mind blowing at the same time. Nowadays we have more written content than ever, but also more entertainment than ever, in all forms and shapes. Some people will still appreciate beautifully written prose on any subject. Most will expect respect for their time and conciseness by default, and entertainment and delight only if that's what they came for in the first place. A lot of publication still strictly cater to the former public.
mcenedella 5y ago
The subject’s book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” was so poorly researched and argued, it’s one of the few books I’ve returned to Amazon in the past two decades. (“A History of Interest Rates” by Homer & Sylla, remains the definitive history of debt among humankind. Originally written in 1963, I’d been hoping to find a modern update to the subject matter.) Similar to this article - lots of claims of greatness, but never actually gets around to using facts to build the case. “All hat and no cattle” as they might say.
- handrous 5y ago
  I didn't evaluate its sources, but thought the writing in Debt was excellent. The typical pattern throughout was for Graeber to introduce an idea in a paragraph, for me to think of several "what about..." and "hm, I dunno"s for it, and for Graeber to spend the next few paragraphs addressing all of those, directly.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    One thing I took away from it that has been true every time I've had occasion to check: When economists tell the "first there was barter, and then there was money" story, they almost never care to connect the claim to evidence. It's like they're laying down premises for an argument rather than making claims about actual humans.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Sort of how economists are always urging more neoliberalism and less of any alternative (socialism, syndicalism, Georgism, whatever): they're talking their own book. If they don't examine the nature of money (for example, the control that capitalists exert over Fed policy etc.) too closely they can pretend that their simplistic models still have some explanatory value.
      - xapata 5y ago
        You haven't met a wide range of economists.
1cvmask 5y ago
A counter argument on Gobekli Tepe (which dates to 9600 BC) to the thesis of David Graeber is: “Over time, Schmidt believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey—well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe—at exactly the time the temple was at its height.” From: https://thisviewoflife.com/blog/complex-societies-before-agriculture-gobekli-tepe/ https://thisviewoflife.com/blog/complex-societies-before-agr... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe -- They have recently found even older settlements like Boncuklu Tarla that even had a sewer system that was over 11,800 years old: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/archaeologists-unearth-ancient-settlement-in-se-turkey/1638247 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/archaeologists-unearth-anci... https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ancient-temple-found-in-mardin-148145 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ancient-temple-found-in-ma... --- Meanwhile they seem to constantly find really old "city" settlements in Turkey today: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahin_Tepe https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahin_Tepe
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Tangentially: What do you know about This View of Life?
- tarsinge 5y ago
  It's ironic that Yuval Noah Harari is criticized in the article despite Sapiens being more up to date on Göbekli Tepe (and maybe on others).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
While it sounds like an inspiring read, it also sounds as if it is creating a lot of strawmen. In "The World Before Yesterday", Jared Diamond writes that there were thousands of tribes in New Guinea, and each had different ways of living. So the claim that "traditional research" is unable to fit the things they found in this new book seems flat out wrong. Also there is a long history of scientists idealizing some traditional societies to prove a point about their desired ways of living. Often they turned out to be far from reality, and in reality far more violence and rape was going on than the researchers claimed (for example Yanomami seem a popular example). Lately I have read frequently that a majority of women were subject to rape in traditional societies. While I also not necessarily believe it at face value (there are ideological reasons to make that claim, too), it also does not sound extremely unlikely and may serve as a starting point to doubt the idealization of traditional societies.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I think Jared Diamond in particular is villianized in Anthropology circles for his book Guns Germs and Steel which to a traditional anthropologist seemed to purposefully omit important content to support his argument. He too goes against traditional anthropology research, so I think that the claim stands.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Maybe, or maybe it is just the normal controversy you can find in most fields? There will always be people who disagree with each other? Is JD universally villainized in Anthropology circles, or just among some Anthropologists?
smitty1e 5y ago
I had just seen that Mel Brooks is working on a sequel to The History of the World, Part I: https://www.westernjournal.com/mel-brooks-announces-sequel-one-beloved-works/ https://www.westernjournal.com/mel-brooks-announces-sequel-o...
streamofdigits 5y ago
It is extraordinary that Graeber existed, even if for an unfairly short time span. Extraordinary, not because he was genius (though he probably was in some sense) but because there aren't many more like him. He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured and evolved since prehistoric times and propose plausible alternatives about true underlying social mechanisms and phenomena. Now, all societies fill-in the countless gaps and repaint the past to fit their purposes / justify an existing order. But in our "modern society" that claims to be scientific / fact based the paint job has some flaws so blatant it requires heroic will to pass unnoticed. When I read criticism of his Debt (and I suspect of this last book as well) I sense people have no idea how monumental the task of re-visiting and re-examining how the past evolved into the present without regurgitating banalities and "self-evident" assertions. Implicit in this program is the debunking of the entire field of modern economics and its associated legal/financial structures. If he is guilty of biting more than he could chew is because so many of the rest of us are intellectually and morally (and possibly soon also economically) bankrupt.
- NuNotNon 5y ago
  > He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured Give a search for neomarxism and poststructuralism
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    I have to admit that I am a bit allergic (hence may not have paid proper attention) to anything ending in "-ism" :-). btw that includes Graeber's "anarchism". To me it seems far more important at this stage to have a more informed "natural history" of economic / social organization that spans out the "phase space" of possibilities rather than strive already for a coherent framework that puts everything in its "proper place".
- jmeister 5y ago
  He was also relatively much more open to engaging with his ideological enemies. See his debate with Peter Thiel or his engagement with Nassim Taleb. https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-vs-peter-thiel-where-did-the-future-go/ https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-vs-peter-thiel... (His relationship with NT going from foe to dear friend is one of the most heart-warming things I've seen on Twitter): https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1301570705671237632 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1301570705671237632 In this he was an intellectual in the mould of old-school Brit labor Marxists like Perry Anderson.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I've not read the article (or book) in full yet, but from the comments I get a "lone academic overturns the accepted truth" vibe. Which I don't like on principle. I just want a well written summary of whatever the current consensus is (including areas of disagreement). Otherwise it's just very long form clickbait.
- netcan 5y ago
  FWIW, David Graeber was vocally and loyally with you on this. This isn't a book about the consensus, it's more of a deconstructionist vibe. The paradigms in the crosshairs tend to be the 19th century, modernist, "thought experiment" era. His book on debt challenged that era's (still persistent) "origin of money" hypothesis. This one is more about political history. EG, the prevalence of rights, constitutions and such in preindustrial societies.
- rjknight 5y ago
  The "lone academic" factor is undermined by the fact that the book in question was a collaboration between /two/ academics, one of whom is a professor of archaeology.
PaulAJ 5y ago
I've read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". It is not a work of genius. It is a rambling incoherent mess. Graeber cherry-picks bits of real history, anecdotes and random myths, and shoehorns them into some kind of predefined narrative which seems to equate modern notions of debt (with its limited liability, bankruptcy and non-inheritance) with the kind of chattel debt-slavery that existed in the past. I say "seems to" because it is genuinely hard to tell. He will be talking about the temple-banks of ancient Sumer or the customs of the Maori, and then suddenly go off on a long diatribe about how this compares to modern banking. Hidden away in this will be a bald assertion prefixed by "of course" which left me screaming "citation needed!". If you weren't watching for it you might miss it. But once you spot it you realise that the whole of the rest of the chapter just collapsed into meaningless drivel. I cannot think that this guy was a genius.
- q1w2 5y ago
  It's a political book. Graeber, an self-described anarchist, looks through the archeological record for evidence that non-hierarchical societies existed successfully. Everyone in that political area calls him a "genius" because he offers them a rich trove of new "evidence" to support their modern politics. It's an inconvenient truth that the experts in these individual fields don't agree with his conclusions.
ndr 5y ago
I find interesting how uncharacteristically abrasive Tyler Cowen was regarding Graeber over the years: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/what-ive-been-reading-12.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/wh... https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/tuesday-assorted-links-36.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/tu... https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu... And yes, I don't know if this says more about Cowen or Graeber, but Cowen is usually much more coy with his critiques (or straussian, he might say).
zby 5y ago
I don't think anyone would disagree with the thesis that there was a great variety of hunter-gatherer political organisations, that there were up and downs in human history or that the development was different at different places. Humans have been hunter-gatherers for a very very long time - there was lots of time and place to develop all kind of arrangements. """ The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us). """ This is a straw man.
- eevilspock 5y ago
  If it is a straw man, it is a straw man that dominates, that has become the default way of seeing history, that the majority of people embrace, including here on HN. See Steven Pinker, Bill Gate's embrace of Pinker, neoliberalism, the fact that both of the dominant American political parties are essentially conservative (one just less so than the other)... Who are the people that criticize Pinker, et al? They are all thinkers the mainstream would consider radicals, Graeber included.
  - zby 5y ago
    It is a straw man because nobody believes that: - The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse The other parts are not that clear cut - but for most of the list there is no 'mainstream' consensus. For example: progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated) - everybody believes that at least the past civilizations had some good sides and it is now quite mainstream that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian (see also https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...)
    - eevilspock 5y ago
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
A couple of things that may help discussion in this thread: 1) Historians do history, that is the period with a written record. Writing is at most a few thousand years old, whereas "behaviorally modern" humans are starting maybe ~80,000 years ago 2) Anthropology split into those who eschew science and write nonsense (e.g., cultural, social anthropologists) and those who do science (e.g., biological anthropologists) a few decades ago. The anti-science anthropologists are driven by political views. See the Napoleon Chagnon controversy. 3) Mostly, you're actually interested in archaeologists here :-)

167 points by yboris 5y ago

> The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Side point: this article is primarily aimed at promoting a (long) book, so readers are expected to enjoying reading for reading, and will appreciate the author's effort to lead them through a syrupous long ride, I guess. This reminded me I don't belong to that camp.

jrochkind1 5y ago
What I see (and am glad for) as the narraritive being challend is not just the simplistic "our ancestors were dumb", which some people may have, but this other one, that's so widespread that it's often considered "common sense" and seems more "objective": ALL hunter-gatherer societies/culture are fundamentally the same, because the main components are somehow a necessary consequence of being a hunter-gatherer (which is a stable category, which applies to a variety of human cultures throughout history, that can all be summed up as being more or less the same), and therefore we can tell how ancient "hunter-gatherers" lived by looking at contemporary people we call "hunter-gatherers". No, no, no, no, and no. And, in fact, human culture always has and still is various, diverse, and with many possibilities. From the review: > Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. 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. > “How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”?
throwawaylinux 5y ago
> I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Other than the "our dumb ancestors dumbly believed their ancestors were dumb" narrative, I don't think I have ever seen this among people who who have actually seriously thought about it. And if you're referring to dumb cavemen hitting everything with clubs "narrative" that's seen in comedy and other entertainment, I don't see why you think this article indicates we're moving away from that. Or really what the problem with it is at all, or why we would want to move away from it. Larson et al. rigorously proved it to be hilarious.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Archaeologists' insistence on defining anything they don't immediately understand as "for ritual purposes" - implying our ancestors were prone to superstition, instead of admitting the archaeologists' own ignorance. Every time we say "civilisation started with X" and then discover a city from before that time. We still don't understand how the Australian Aborigines got to Australia 50K years ago. You can't get to Australia without good boats. Yet there's a blank refusal to admit that this means that early humans had sophisticated boats. It's really common to write off early humans as less sophisticated.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Are these all things you're just making up? It's a common theory that first people reached Australia with the help of boats (and lower sea levels), for example. Who claims they can not possibly have used boats?
  - bigodbiel 5y ago
    I always considered rituals to be a form of proof of intelligence.
- yongjik 5y ago
  Well, FWIW, there was this weird guy who claimed our ancestors weren't dumb, they weren't even conscious. And by "our ancestors" he didn't mean Homo erectus, he meant ancient Greeks. (The so-called "bicameral mind" theory.) I think that's completely bonkers but apparently some people like the theory. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316
jablongo 5y ago
I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective With what does that agree? Where is that stated?
  - jablongo 5y ago
    It’s just part of respecting the lifestyles and choices that our ancestors made - recognizing that there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      I understand the concept; it was expressed in the GGP as if someone else had said it and you agreed, and I didn't see where else it had been said. > there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group It's essential to understand that people have perspectives, values, and situations outside my own or even outside my own imagination, and that their similarity to my 'system' is not a measure of their validity. That means that making judgments is very error-prone. But that's different than saying all systems are equally valid, or are good, or that goodness is subjective. Making the judgment that system A is equally good and valid as system B by virtue of their existence is far more error prone. It's like saying, when evaluating programming languages for a project, 'I'm not absolutely certain, so I'm scoring them all 100!'.
akomtu 5y ago
IMHO, the biggest myth that modern historians adamantly believe in is that human intelligence has mysteriously developed from zero to current level in just 12,000 years. We are supposed to believe that humans were dumb savages, yet with fully functional, but apparently unused brains, and then they suddenly chose to become smart and in a few wild leaps they've gotten to quantum mechanics.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Practically all modern historians? Or even just the major consensus of this field? That's astounding to me, I have trouble believing it without at least some anecdotes. Do you have a link or name of one well respected and cited modern historian who adamantly believes this? And a reference to some of their writings or talks where they explain their ideas? That would be fascinating to read about, thank you.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Especially since this would be the field of anthropology. History is classically constructed as the study of texts and therefore doesn’t really have methods that extend past the development of the written word and the survival of sufficient sources.
- tremon 5y ago
  I'm not sure whether historians ascribe that to intelligence or to knowledge. My interpretation (not a historian) is that writing (i.e. the development of script) is what gave humans the means to go from the lore model of tribal knowledge to the collectively "smart" societies we developed over the past millennia. Whether you choose to ascribe the quality "savage" to a tribal society is a discussion all of itself; there is evidence of vast (continental-scale) trade networks even from the tribal era, so it wasn't all lets-bash-some-skulls-before-lunch. But being smart can only give you limited sight if you have no giants' shoulders to stand on.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Why do you believe that writing is a recent invention? Because we can't find samples older than that? Then what makes you think that all we can find is what can be found in principle? If tomorrow a solar flare wipes out our civilization, there won't be much scriptures left in stone and other resilient materials, so we all must be savages today for not engraving granite with equations in sufficient quantities.
chrisweekly 5y ago
syrupous?
barrenko 5y ago
The original meaning of the word "idiot" is someone who doesn't care for their local politics. Our ancestors were of course, the same as us.

invalidname 5y ago

How long does the author take to get to the point. Ugh... And honestly, the point isn't all it's made up to be. Mostly a, well... OK.

handrous 5y ago
If you think a book review takes too long to get to the point, do I have some bad news for you about books....
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > If you think a book review takes too long to get to the point, do I have some bad news for you about books.... It's 2021, could you summarize it in a tweet for me? /s
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    @threadreaderapp unroll ...is the modern way to read "books".
    - mathw 5y ago
      Or people could just... read the thread. I don't get why thread reader still exists.
  - lucumo 5y ago
    I've seen tweets that contain more relevant details than some Atlantic articles.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I came to the conclusion that there is a generation shift that we don't often acknowledge. For a long time public written word needed to be both entertainment and informative. Just like us watching documentaries: we kind of expect them to be beautifully shot and mind blowing at the same time. Nowadays we have more written content than ever, but also more entertainment than ever, in all forms and shapes. Some people will still appreciate beautifully written prose on any subject. Most will expect respect for their time and conciseness by default, and entertainment and delight only if that's what they came for in the first place. A lot of publication still strictly cater to the former public.

mcenedella 5y ago

The subject’s book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” was so poorly researched and argued, it’s one of the few books I’ve returned to Amazon in the past two decades. (“A History of Interest Rates” by Homer & Sylla, remains the definitive history of debt among humankind. Originally written in 1963, I’d been hoping to find a modern update to the subject matter.) Similar to this article - lots of claims of greatness, but never actually gets around to using facts to build the case. “All hat and no cattle” as they might say.

handrous 5y ago
I didn't evaluate its sources, but thought the writing in Debt was excellent. The typical pattern throughout was for Graeber to introduce an idea in a paragraph, for me to think of several "what about..." and "hm, I dunno"s for it, and for Graeber to spend the next few paragraphs addressing all of those, directly.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  One thing I took away from it that has been true every time I've had occasion to check: When economists tell the "first there was barter, and then there was money" story, they almost never care to connect the claim to evidence. It's like they're laying down premises for an argument rather than making claims about actual humans.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Sort of how economists are always urging more neoliberalism and less of any alternative (socialism, syndicalism, Georgism, whatever): they're talking their own book. If they don't examine the nature of money (for example, the control that capitalists exert over Fed policy etc.) too closely they can pretend that their simplistic models still have some explanatory value.
    - xapata 5y ago
      You haven't met a wide range of economists.

1cvmask 5y ago

A counter argument on Gobekli Tepe (which dates to 9600 BC) to the thesis of David Graeber is: “Over time, Schmidt believes, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at Göbekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey—well within trekking distance of Göbekli Tepe—at exactly the time the temple was at its height.” From: https://thisviewoflife.com/blog/complex-societies-before-agriculture-gobekli-tepe/ https://thisviewoflife.com/blog/complex-societies-before-agr... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe -- They have recently found even older settlements like Boncuklu Tarla that even had a sewer system that was over 11,800 years old: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/archaeologists-unearth-ancient-settlement-in-se-turkey/1638247 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/archaeologists-unearth-anci... https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ancient-temple-found-in-mardin-148145 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ancient-temple-found-in-ma... --- Meanwhile they seem to constantly find really old "city" settlements in Turkey today: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahin_Tepe https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahin_Tepe

wolverine876 5y ago
Tangentially: What do you know about This View of Life?
tarsinge 5y ago
It's ironic that Yuval Noah Harari is criticized in the article despite Sapiens being more up to date on Göbekli Tepe (and maybe on others).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

While it sounds like an inspiring read, it also sounds as if it is creating a lot of strawmen. In "The World Before Yesterday", Jared Diamond writes that there were thousands of tribes in New Guinea, and each had different ways of living. So the claim that "traditional research" is unable to fit the things they found in this new book seems flat out wrong. Also there is a long history of scientists idealizing some traditional societies to prove a point about their desired ways of living. Often they turned out to be far from reality, and in reality far more violence and rape was going on than the researchers claimed (for example Yanomami seem a popular example). Lately I have read frequently that a majority of women were subject to rape in traditional societies. While I also not necessarily believe it at face value (there are ideological reasons to make that claim, too), it also does not sound extremely unlikely and may serve as a starting point to doubt the idealization of traditional societies.

twobitshifter 5y ago
I think Jared Diamond in particular is villianized in Anthropology circles for his book Guns Germs and Steel which to a traditional anthropologist seemed to purposefully omit important content to support his argument. He too goes against traditional anthropology research, so I think that the claim stands.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Maybe, or maybe it is just the normal controversy you can find in most fields? There will always be people who disagree with each other? Is JD universally villainized in Anthropology circles, or just among some Anthropologists?

smitty1e 5y ago

I had just seen that Mel Brooks is working on a sequel to The History of the World, Part I: https://www.westernjournal.com/mel-brooks-announces-sequel-one-beloved-works/ https://www.westernjournal.com/mel-brooks-announces-sequel-o...

streamofdigits 5y ago

It is extraordinary that Graeber existed, even if for an unfairly short time span. Extraordinary, not because he was genius (though he probably was in some sense) but because there aren't many more like him. He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured and evolved since prehistoric times and propose plausible alternatives about true underlying social mechanisms and phenomena. Now, all societies fill-in the countless gaps and repaint the past to fit their purposes / justify an existing order. But in our "modern society" that claims to be scientific / fact based the paint job has some flaws so blatant it requires heroic will to pass unnoticed. When I read criticism of his Debt (and I suspect of this last book as well) I sense people have no idea how monumental the task of re-visiting and re-examining how the past evolved into the present without regurgitating banalities and "self-evident" assertions. Implicit in this program is the debunking of the entire field of modern economics and its associated legal/financial structures. If he is guilty of biting more than he could chew is because so many of the rest of us are intellectually and morally (and possibly soon also economically) bankrupt.

NuNotNon 5y ago
> He was one of the very few persons that dared to question prevailing narratives about how society and economic structures (in particular) were structured Give a search for neomarxism and poststructuralism
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  I have to admit that I am a bit allergic (hence may not have paid proper attention) to anything ending in "-ism" :-). btw that includes Graeber's "anarchism". To me it seems far more important at this stage to have a more informed "natural history" of economic / social organization that spans out the "phase space" of possibilities rather than strive already for a coherent framework that puts everything in its "proper place".
jmeister 5y ago
He was also relatively much more open to engaging with his ideological enemies. See his debate with Peter Thiel or his engagement with Nassim Taleb. https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-vs-peter-thiel-where-did-the-future-go/ https://davidgraeber.org/videos/david-graeber-vs-peter-thiel... (His relationship with NT going from foe to dear friend is one of the most heart-warming things I've seen on Twitter): https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1301570705671237632 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1301570705671237632 In this he was an intellectual in the mould of old-school Brit labor Marxists like Perry Anderson.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I've not read the article (or book) in full yet, but from the comments I get a "lone academic overturns the accepted truth" vibe. Which I don't like on principle. I just want a well written summary of whatever the current consensus is (including areas of disagreement). Otherwise it's just very long form clickbait.

netcan 5y ago
FWIW, David Graeber was vocally and loyally with you on this. This isn't a book about the consensus, it's more of a deconstructionist vibe. The paradigms in the crosshairs tend to be the 19th century, modernist, "thought experiment" era. His book on debt challenged that era's (still persistent) "origin of money" hypothesis. This one is more about political history. EG, the prevalence of rights, constitutions and such in preindustrial societies.
rjknight 5y ago
The "lone academic" factor is undermined by the fact that the book in question was a collaboration between /two/ academics, one of whom is a professor of archaeology.

PaulAJ 5y ago

I've read "Debt: The First 5,000 Years". It is not a work of genius. It is a rambling incoherent mess. Graeber cherry-picks bits of real history, anecdotes and random myths, and shoehorns them into some kind of predefined narrative which seems to equate modern notions of debt (with its limited liability, bankruptcy and non-inheritance) with the kind of chattel debt-slavery that existed in the past. I say "seems to" because it is genuinely hard to tell. He will be talking about the temple-banks of ancient Sumer or the customs of the Maori, and then suddenly go off on a long diatribe about how this compares to modern banking. Hidden away in this will be a bald assertion prefixed by "of course" which left me screaming "citation needed!". If you weren't watching for it you might miss it. But once you spot it you realise that the whole of the rest of the chapter just collapsed into meaningless drivel. I cannot think that this guy was a genius.

q1w2 5y ago
It's a political book. Graeber, an self-described anarchist, looks through the archeological record for evidence that non-hierarchical societies existed successfully. Everyone in that political area calls him a "genius" because he offers them a rich trove of new "evidence" to support their modern politics. It's an inconvenient truth that the experts in these individual fields don't agree with his conclusions.

ndr 5y ago

I find interesting how uncharacteristically abrasive Tyler Cowen was regarding Graeber over the years: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/what-ive-been-reading-12.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/wh... https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/tuesday-assorted-links-36.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/11/tu... https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu... And yes, I don't know if this says more about Cowen or Graeber, but Cowen is usually much more coy with his critiques (or straussian, he might say).

zby 5y ago

I don't think anyone would disagree with the thesis that there was a great variety of hunter-gatherer political organisations, that there were up and downs in human history or that the development was different at different places. Humans have been hunter-gatherers for a very very long time - there was lots of time and place to develop all kind of arrangements. """ The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us). """ This is a straw man.

eevilspock 5y ago
If it is a straw man, it is a straw man that dominates, that has become the default way of seeing history, that the majority of people embrace, including here on HN. See Steven Pinker, Bill Gate's embrace of Pinker, neoliberalism, the fact that both of the dominant American political parties are essentially conservative (one just less so than the other)... Who are the people that criticize Pinker, et al? They are all thinkers the mainstream would consider radicals, Graeber included.
- zby 5y ago
  It is a straw man because nobody believes that: - The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse The other parts are not that clear cut - but for most of the list there is no 'mainstream' consensus. For example: progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated) - everybody believes that at least the past civilizations had some good sides and it is now quite mainstream that hunter-gatherers were egalitarian (see also https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...)
  - eevilspock 5y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

A couple of things that may help discussion in this thread: 1) Historians do history, that is the period with a written record. Writing is at most a few thousand years old, whereas "behaviorally modern" humans are starting maybe ~80,000 years ago 2) Anthropology split into those who eschew science and write nonsense (e.g., cultural, social anthropologists) and those who do science (e.g., biological anthropologists) a few decades ago. The anti-science anthropologists are driven by political views. See the Napoleon Chagnon controversy. 3) Mostly, you're actually interested in archaeologists here :-)