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And thank you.

I'm Christopher Leiden, this is Open Source.

Make way this hour for the news of our human prehistory.

Could it be that our Stone Age ancestors were just as smart as we are

as playful and strong?

If anything more inventive and adaptive than we,

as they settle the whole planet and seed it a great variety of civilizations over 10,000 years.

The questions come from a surprise best seller, the dawn of everything.

It's a 600 page brick of a book by an anthropologist and an archaeologist

sharing fresh evidence and best guesses in a new history of humanity.

The sadness in reading it is that the American co-authored David Graber

died as he was finishing the great work of his life.

The relief is that his writing partner in London, David Wingo,

is still grappling with the puzzles they posed.

Welcome David Wingo.

The dream in this book of yours is that we could reinvent ourselves in the 2020s,

certainly in this century, in the same liberated, searching,

unconquerable spirit of the past.

Where is that hope in the converging crises of today?

...