The last time I was in the Kinneret, we stumbled upon a fascinating museum located on a sleepy kibbutz: the grandly named Museum of Yarmukian Culture. The museum houses a remarkable array of pottery dug up just beyond the kibbutz boundary, by the river Yarmuk. Created some 8,000 years ago, the pottery is the earliest known work in that material in the entire region, consisting largely of bowls and female figures with eyes shaped like cowrie shells, perhaps fertility symbols. Some 20 other sites related to this culture have been found in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank, leading to speculation that there may have been one extensive Yarmukian civilization in the area. The Yarmukians are one of a few such hypothesized cultures in Israel and beyond from prehistory, including the “Lodian” people associated with the area around Lod and Jericho (an earlier site, some 12,000 years ago) and the “Nizzanim,” named after Kibbutz Nitzanim, near Ashdod.
Humanity dates back some 230,000 years, but we know relatively little about the time before writing. However, in the past decades scholars have learned vastly more about the lives of early people, and a recent, modestly titled book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, seeks to assemble that knowledge and present it to a broad audience. Co-written over a decade by two British professors, one an archeologist (David Wengrow) and the other an anthropologist (David Graeber), the book enlists massive amounts of scholarship to answer the questions, What can we know about ancient people, and how does this knowledge impact our conceptions of human history and society?
The book’s main premise is: everything we thought we knew about the development of human society is wrong. It is mind-blowing in all kinds of good ways, challenging assumptions made in the last few hundred years and largely accepted despite little in the way of evidence. Among truisms debunked: human history is neatly divided into separate periods of hunter-gatherers, foragers, agriculture labor etc.; when agriculture arrived, previous means of sustenance rapidly disappeared; the development of agriculture necessitated hierarchical social structure and the creation of the state, more or less unchanged from Tutenkhamen to today.
What the book abundantly shows is that history’s arrow was not simply uni-directional, forms of human social organization have been extremely varied even in earlier times–more varied than today–and are not determined by our material life, and that “prehistoric” societies exhibited great creativity in the remarkable variety of social, political and (less discussed here) religious forms that they developed. For those who have read the breezy, popular overviews of human history by Yuval Noah Hariri (Sapiens) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel), the authors strongly disagree with their presentations.
Not surprisingly, given its title (which sounds tongue-in-cheek but is pretty accurate!), the book is panoramic and comprehensive, covering sites and communities from across the globe in over 500 pages. It begins by laying out some of the main views of early human society prevalent in Western thought over the past several centuries, from Hobbes’ view that human life in the state of nature is “brutish, nasty and short” to Rousseau’s opposite view of the “noble savage” living harmoniously in an egalitarian, free condition before human society enslaved us with laws, customs and hierarchy. It deals with the question of the meaning, origins and role of concepts such as private property, sovereignty, bureaucracy, punishment, identity, freedom and equality, showing how such terms are slippery and elusive when examining a wide range of human societies and that there is no simple story to be told of human progression or progress.
Early on, it introduces us to the remarkable figure of Kandiaronk, a Wendat (today: Huron) chief who came to Europe and impressed intellectuals and nobles with his philosophical acumen and powers of argumentation. Kandiaronk painted a picture of Wendat society based in a lack of private property or classes and shared decision-making arising from reasoned discussion in open councils. A series of dialogues with him were published in France and were highly popular and influential. In reaction, a French economist named Turgot argued for an evolutionist model of human social development that necessitated ever increased complexity and inequality in order to achieve greater prosperity.
Nearly every page brings fresh surprises, information and perspectives. The authors explain that several different species of human relatives existed at the same time in our early history. They present ancient archeological sites, starting from after the retreat of the last ice age ending some 14,000 years ago, from around the globe, including massive sites in Ukraine, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, China, Japan, Mesopotamia and Sudan. They discuss the ancient mound-builders of Louisiana from over 6000 years ago, and the Natchez system of sovereignty encountered there in the 18th century.
As researchers discover and excavate new sites, and use ever new technological tools to analyze discoveries and enrich our understanding, we can learn so much not just about the material life of these communities but also their building structures, social organization, religious and political forms, and more. The authors present societies that lived for part of the year as hunter-gatherers in small bands, and for other parts in towns or small cities, with plots of cultivated land; societies that were part foragers, part farmers; societies that created cities, inhabited them for centuries, then abandoned them; societies that developed agriculture but decided they preferred hunting-gathering. The variety of social organizations, sometimes right near each other as in Mexico, the US Pacific Coast, and Iraq, is mesmerizing and astonishing.
One interesting Jewish angle is to think about how Bereishit telescopes early human history in its early chapters. Is it possible, roughly, to map these early stories onto a conception of early human development? Do the first humans inhabit an “edenic” foraging landscape? Where is Eden, in relation to the rough landscape that follows expulsion? How is agriculture portrayed–is it purely a cursed existence, or also pleasurable (eg, Noah’s vineyard)? How about the growth of cities, nations, kingdoms; metallurgy, ship-building, hunting, construction, shepherding? How do these texts take the raw material of early human civilization and turn it into a sacred story that shapes a culture with its own values and worldview?
… Discoveries keep coming; an article about the history of hunter-gatherers in Europe appeared this week.