F.N. Welcome to Navarro FM. I'm your host Eleanor Penny. Let's start at the very beginning. Humanity was once banded

together in loose tribes of hunter-gatherers living a primitive existence of

depending on who you ask, pre-Lapsarian innocence or unrestrained savagery.

Then at some point we discover agriculture, our original sin,

and this causes us to gather in ever larger conurbations, eventually cities and then

states.

From this we get civilization as we know it.

Science, literature, organized religion, medicine, culture, progress with a capital P.

We also get domination, hierarchy, and inequality.

The price of the former is the latter, and one way or another to challenge these social arrangements would be to deny essential facts about human history.

It's a very neat story, one that we've heard a thousand times before, and one that structures

and justifies much contemporary political thought about what is and isn't possible.

There's just one problem. It's not true. That is what David Griver and David Wengrow

set out in their extraordinary work The Dawn of Everything, which upends received wisdom about

the origins of the current moment, peering into the mists of history to scribe

for clues as to how humanity has arranged its societies and its civilizations, how we structured

our relationship to each other and to the natural world.

They find not one monolithic history where the dawn of agriculture locks us into the

doom of the present from which there is no escape, but a complex multifaceted history of human experimentation

with the question of how to live. This is the result of a decade-long friendship and

collaboration between the late great anthropologist David Graber and David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

In its thorough routing of this received wisdom about how civilization began, what it is and what we talk about when we talk about the origins of inequality, this book challenges ideas fundamental to neoliberal mythology, ideas about Homo-economicus,

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