My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publicatio

My understanding was that they published a pile of papers to establish the skeleton of the narrative before it made it into the book. David Wengrow's publication history has a number of papers which rhyme with things in the book, like this one: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1519520/1 --- History also has a strong bias towards the status quo. If a new theory is proposed which explains the available evidence with equal ability, the pre-existing idea will typically remain the accepted version of the story. The net effect is that we're prone to get stuck with versions of history originally proposed by phrenologists and worse... When common sense fills in the blanks in the story, you might get stuck with some very bad version of common sense, completely alien to the historical people it's being applied to. We really should approach history with a bit of the spirit of Rashomon. When we look at it with a too narrow lens, we wind up underestimating the breadth of what's possible.