Humans have been around for at least 200,000 years. Yet until recently, historians believed that cities, astronomy, architecture, and arithmetic didn’t emerge until agriculture emerged some 12,000 years ago.
But what if that’s not true? What if cities predate agriculture, and our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived far more complex lives than we thought?
And if so, what are the implications for modern political theory—which justifies inequality on the basis that we live in a higher, more advanced form of society that was always inevitable?
What if social revolutions occurred before recorded history? And what if humanity had conducted countless experiments on how best to live—including experiments that involved rejecting what we would consider “civilization”?
Aaron Bastani discusses all that and more with archaeologist and co-author of the bestselling Dawn of Everything David Wengrow.
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