**The Book**
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, David Wengrow

**How this works**
\- We read a chapter a week\.
\- Come to the discussion with your questions and observations and we'll start from there\.
\- This is pretty low\-key\, expect to have fun\.
\- Join us for one\, a few or all chapters\.

**Calendar of Chapters**
List of Maps and Figures vii
September 11 - Chapter 1 Farewell to Humanity's Childhood Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality
September 18 - Chapter 2 Wicked Liberty The indigenous critique and the myth of progress
September 25 - Chapter 3 Unfreezing the Ice Age In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics
October 2 - Chapter 4 Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not necessarily in that order)
October 9 - Chapter 5 Many Seasons Ago Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Californian neighbors didn't; or, the problem with 'modes of production'
October 16 - Chapter 6 Gardens of Adonis The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture
October 23 - Chapter 7 The Ecology of Freedom How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world
October 30 - Chapter 8 Imaginary Cities Eurasia's first urbanites - in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China - and how they built cities without kings
November 6 - Chapter 9 Hiding in Plain Sight The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas

November 13 - Chapter 10 Why the State Has No Origin The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics till page 399: HOW CARING LABOUR RITUAL KILLING AND "TINY BUBBLES" ALL CAME TOGETHER IN THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

November 20 - Chapter 10 Why the State Has No Origin The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics from page 399: HOW CARING LABOUR RITUAL KILLING AND "TINY BUBBLES" ALL CAME TOGETHER IN THE ORIGINS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

November 27 - Chapter 11 Full Circle On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique

December 4 - Chapter 12 Conclusion The dawn of everything

**About the book**
*Notes From Your Bookseller*
David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropologist and an archaelologist, join forces to dig deep and long through 30,000 years of human history, looking to explain anew who we are and how we got from there to here. Immersive, commanding and incendiary, Dawn of Everything brings to mind the works of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari and Stephen Pinker, and then “takes them on.” Get yourself a seat at the showdown, and tuck into an extraordinary work of discovery.

*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.

Mensa / San Francisco Region

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Every week on Wednesday until November 27, 2024

Book Discussion | The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | One Chapte

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Book Discussion | The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | One Chapte

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