237. David Wengrow on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2021

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Shower
0:16.7	Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman.
0:18.7	Before I introduce today's guest,
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0:28.0	Wondrium is the former great courses, the teaching company, and they've not only cataloged all their courses they've adopted
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0:55.0	Bart Ehrman, who I recently had on the show. And his course is 24 lectures on the Triumph of
1:02.0	Christianity from Jesus of Nazareth to the 24 lectures on the triumph of Christianity,
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