Dawn of Everything Chapter 3 Notes

"Unfreezing the Ice Age"

Graeber and Wengrow say, "distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies. (78)." I think this is an interesting thought about the apparent urge to make myths. We seem to have given ourselves more license to do this in "prehistory" where for the longest time it was assumed that nothing could REALLY be known for sure. But G&W also rightly point out that prehistory itself is modern and "only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858" (79).

Their description of a VERY diverse population of humans in our distant past is interesting. Contact with cousins such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo naledi, and even Homo erectus must have been fairly regular. The idea of an environment peopled by "elves, dwarves, and men"suggests to the imagination that there was some type of social interaction. It's worth noting that these earlier species of humans left Africa up to a million years before sapiens and probably populated as much of the world as they could get to. "Peking Man" and "Java Man" date from between a million and a half million years ago in China and Indonesia.

Pure speculation, here, but the peak of "Ice Volume" during the last ice age that lowered sea levels by about 360 feet, exposing Beringia for thousands of years, ALSO happened about 120,000 years ago, 340,000 years ago, and 440,000 years ago. During each of these periods, Asia and the Americas were connected for hundreds of generations. That's no proof that earlier peoples reached the Americas. But they seem to have reached just about everywhere else. And we're gaining increasingly suggestive hints that these earlier humans weren't that dumb. Erectus had fire and tools. Neanderthals seem to have even done art and music.

But back to G&W's story. They're challenging the idea that although at least Homo sapiens had the mental capabilities we have today pretty much from the start, they avoided any types of social complexity until the last 5,000 or 10,000 years. This does seem a bit absurd, when stated that way.

G&W sort-of make an example of Christopher Boehm (1931-2021), whom they suggest discovered some interesting differences between humans and apes, but then lacked the insight or courage to imagine people using these differences until the consensus has said they did. They also "savage" Pinker again (to use the words of a reviewer) for choosing to compare stone age human behavior with chimps and bonobos rather than biker gangs and hippies. Once again a "palpable hit", to quote Osric. And I think their point is well taken. But I suspect others will not agree, and they may have leaned a bit too far here, into celebrating Graeber's stereotype.

The passages on monuments and elaborate burials are FULL of citations. There certainly seems to be a whole lot of new evidence that supports the claim that archaeologists are changing their understanding of the stone-age past and the rest of the disciplines are not keeping up. It's fun to imagine a grand mammoth hunting season, where hundreds of people came together, shared food, probably married their children to people outside their band, told stories around fires, and then built a monument out of the bones. And the burial of so many medically compromised individuals (often after laboriously helping keep them alive) suggests something interesting and very deliberate is going on. There does seem to be some value placed on eccentricity.

G&W also make a really interesting observation about the time when we are able to focus our attention and avoid going on "autopilot" seems to be when we are talking with someone else. Dialogue seems to be how we hold our attention on a topic. I wonder whether this has always been the case, as they suggest? In any event, the idea they ridicule seems accurate, of the silliness of assuming a "rational Western individual" was automatically more self-aware than a "primitive". Paul Radin's 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher is probably worth a look.

Also very interesting is the idea that seasonality was important because it reminded people that both social institutions and status relationships were mutable.

Another interesting detail, that the Britons who built Stonehenge had abandoned grain cultivation and reverted to collecting hazelnuts as their staple starch. I have semi-wild hazelnuts on my land. They were probably planted between the trees of windrows by some farmer a half-century ago, but they've been thriving on their own since then. When we think of hunter-gatherers as part-time farmers, we should be careful to remember perennials and tree-crops as well as annuals like wheat, rice, and maize.

I like the ideas that seem to be implied in G&W's discussion of different seasonal arrangements, that not only is there a lot of variation between the different groups they look at, but that the decisions on social organization usually seem to be *functional*; to have a reason in the need for quick, coordinated action, cooperation, and putting aside the impulse to stop and talk over every decision to work together on a goal that has been agreed to previously. Temporarily, though; and then when it's possible to be more deliberative and consensus-based, people reverted to that. I don't think they make a conclusive argument that this is ALWAYS the case, but just showing that it happened sometimes and that there was a lot of variation seems to be their goals. I think they also make a strong case that the social evolution model based on stages of subsistence is inadequate to explain all this variation.

The question of "how did we get stuck?" does seem to have a potential answer in the lack of seasonal variation and that opportunity to try on different ways of organizing one's time, labor, and social relations. I'm reminded of E.P. Thompson's 1967 article on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749).