What if everything we knew about human history was wrong? Received wisdom is that humans

have been around for two, maybe 300,000 years, but that we only start agriculture from

the last 10 to 12,000. After that, we have cities, astronomy, numbers, civilisation, as

we know it. But according to a book by David Wengrow and the recently deceased David

Graber, that's not quite accurate. They say that cities and what we judge as advanced

human culture actually precedes agriculture, that the story of prehistory is far more complex

and interesting than we thought, and that this has quite remarkable political implications.

Thank you Wengrow. Welcome to Downstream. Thanks for having me on.

You and archaeologists, you teach archaeology at University College London. Is that a job

you always wanted to do when you were a child? No, it isn't. When I left school, I wanted

to be in the theatre, and I'd already done a fair bit of that. I think from the age

of about 14, I fell in love with acting in the stage and I joined up with the National

Youth Theatre, which was a wonderful time, because it was the first time I was a Londoner,

it was the first time I actually met people from all over the country, all over the UK.

And I did it. I left school and got an agent and did that for a while, then did various

other things, and then I fell into archaeology more or less by accident. So how was that?

Wow, a child actor becomes archaeologist. That sounds like a great story. Yeah, I think

there's more of a sort of young adult actor. I mean, I've met child actors and they're

a very specific kind of person, but I've never quite one of those. But what happened basically

after trying various other things, including a little flirtation with journalism, the BBC

Arabic service, and various other things, I wasn't really finding a direction. So I had

good grades from school and I decided to apply to Oxford. Well, that's why I want to go

...