Astral Codex Ten

The Dawn Of Everything

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The Dawn Of Everything

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The Dawn Of Everything is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between May 23, 2022 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review)”; “Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum”; “just several weeks before The Dawn of Everything was published”. It most often appears alongside Consciousness and the Brain, Jimmy Carter, Making Nature.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: May 23, 2022
  • Last seen: August 11, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Thread 225
May 23, 2022 · Original source
1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim just six months ago, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS.
It’s a co-authored book by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Davids. First, we have David Graeber, anthropologist, famed author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, notable figure in the 2008 Occupy Wall Street movement, a playful but snarky writer, almost certainly the reason for the section titles being the way they are, and now deceased at the relatively young age of 59, just several weeks before The Dawn of Everything was published, victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis. The surviving David, David Wengrow, is lesser known but more erudite, more pragmatic, classically academic both in his pedantry but also in his impressive armament of archeological knowledge, and it’s Wengrow who’s been trying to fill the shoes of the more famous Graeber by making the post-publishing media whirlwind tour, sometimes to visible discomfort as he goes on long-winded lectures while the hosts try hastily to cut to the next segment.
What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities).
Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
The Dawn Of Everything (ancient hunter-gatherers)
Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.
Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything, The Revelations, The Intrinsic Perspective
Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
In theory, this could suggest that no ancient civilization reached a tech level where it started mining lead, ie the tech level the Phoenicians had in 1000 BC. This is in theory only, because I can’t find a clear record of anyone checking. I assume ice core scientists would have noticed if it happened, but there’s no publicly available dataset with lead levels 10,000 years before present, nor is there a paper titled “We Checked To See If There Were Anthropogenic Lead Emissions In 10,000 BC And There Definitely Weren’t”. Here is a paper that looks at lead level in human bones. They don’t do a great job explaining how lead makes it into human bones, but it seems like a mix of the kind of lead pollution that makes it to Greenland ice cores, plus personally wearing or consuming things that have touched lead. This study investigates skeletons from 12,000 BC onwards, and finds that lead levels start rising in 5,000 BC, when people developed “cupellation”, a technique for using lead to purify gold and silver (it then goes up much further between 1000 - 500 BC, probably the same spike the Greenland cores found). So this presents some very weak evidence against significantly elevated lead from 12,000 BC onward. But it doesn’t rule out small amounts of lead mining far away from the bones’ previous owners, and doesn’t rule out a civilization lasting from 15,000 - 13,000 BC. A Great Britain-level civilization would be expected to raise lead levels a lot, and this pretty strongly rules it out. I would expect an Egypt-level civilization to at least invent cupellation, but I don’t know if its lead would necessarily make it to wherever these bones came from. A Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization isn’t ruled out at all. Conclusion I think there’s pretty strong evidence against lost Egypt- or Great Britain- level Ice Age civilizations. I don’t want to rule out a lost Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe level civilization, but there’s not much positive evidence, and there’s some negative evidence. Stonehenge was built by Neolithic farmer-pastoralists, who had lots of domesticated crops and animals. Gobekli Tepe was built right next to the area where wheat was domesticated at around the same time. Existing early monuments mostly suggest a story where sedentary city- and temple- building civilizations either require domesticated agriculture, or invent it very quickly. None of this means Ice Age people didn’t have fascinating cultures of their own which were advanced in other ways - interesting laws, taboos, mythologies, customs, oral traditions. Tyler Cowen says that everything started earlier than you think, and this is what we’ve been finding about various forms of human culture too (cf. Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything). I just don’t expect lost Ice Age cities or giant monuments. I think Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case is weak, relies on a still-controversial rejection of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, and generally leans too much on the absurdity heuristic without moving the needle one way or the other. All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel: 20% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to Gobekli Tepe, dating from before 11,000 BC.
Inline links: Here is a paper, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SS8H!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b5de41a-38d8-4145-821d-5e2f6d2de228_534x215.png, Against The Grain, The Dawn Of Everything, Michael Shermer’s attempt to argue the same case, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
(if you haven’t already, consider reading Erik Hoel’s review of The Dawn Of Everything, especially the last few parts on “the gossip trap”)
Inline links: Erik Hoel’s review of
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
I’ve been suggesting a critique, or waving my hand in the direction of one, but let me tell you how much there is in this book. There’s the introduction to the basic theory of cultural evolution – the psychology that lets humans have cultures and how ideas can transmit themselves down generations. There’s the definition of WEIRD psychology, including dispositionalism (the tendency to explain people’s actions by their innate character), and the tendency to categorize rabbits with cats not carrots; and the fact that even the famous Big Five traits of personality psychology don’t generalize very well beyond the WEIRD countries. There’s a taxonomy of the institutions that help human groups scale up their cooperation, starting with unilineal clans – the basic unit of intensive kinship, and the blind alley that most human societies got stuck in, on Henrich’s account – and including segmented lineages, age sets and premodern chiefdoms and states. (This is a very scientific, comparative approach to anthropology. I would love to hear a debate between Henrich and David Wengrow, whose book The Dawn of Everything, reviewed in ACX here, takes a much more voluntarist approach, starting from the view that there are many ways to organize a society, and that rational collective institutional design is pretty much a human universal.)
Inline links: here