Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history. We talked about this whole canard before,

who was right? Hobbes was life, nasty, brutish and short, before we gave into the viphone,

let the state control our every move, swapped liberty for security, or was Rousseau right?

That rather colorful 18th century philosoph, who says that man was born free and is ever

in chains, who's become associated with the time noble, savagery, typically born so

now, she actually never wrote that phrase himself, but he's the philosopher that we remember,

particularly connected with the theory that in a state of nature, we're free, we were

nice to each other, we collaborated. And we've had various wonderful thinkers, like David

Runsman at Cambridge, like Rukka Breggman, thinking about that kind of central issue of

our existence, which is, what are we actually like? How have we decided to live like this?

And who put these guys in charge of us? It's a big question. Well now it's been another

big contribution to this sort of field of study. It's been written by David Graber and

David Wengro. Sadly, David Graber died just before it was completed, so I've got David Wengro

on the podcast now. He is the professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of

Archaeology University College London. And he got a bit bored of everybody, various political

theorists, historians, jokers, writing about our prehistory without actually knowing anything

about it. So David is coming on to talk about what we are actually learning about our prehistoric

ancestors to deal with in a certain way, today human ingenuity, you provide all sorts of

different and competing ways to live with each other in a group. Do we hunt and gather?

Should we farm? Do we do both? David addresses the very biggest issues of all. It was a great

treat to having all the parts stretched in your brain, going for the biggest topics and

one that allows to think very differently, like all the best history about our present

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