Unstuck in Deep Time.

• Author: Johnson, Charles W.
• Position: BOOKS

THERE'S A SIMPLE story about life before civilization, retold by evolutionary scholars and New York Times bestsellers like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow summarize it skeptically in their big new book, The Dawn of Everything.

Long ago, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, "living...in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small." We did this for hundreds of thousands of years, until an Agricultural Revolution fed an Urban Revolution, which heralded civilization and states. That meant "the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy," but also "patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms."

Or perhaps, interjects Steven Pinker, those bands weren't childlike innocents, but brutal and chaotically violent: We shouldn't regret armies or bureaucrats, but greet them as liberators. Either telling maintains the long arc: We were all one way for so long, until changes came and we were irreversibly another.

Dawn complicates this story, chapter by chapter. It begins not in prehistory but with how the Simple Story captured thinking about prehistory. In Graeber and Wengrow's account, theories of social evolution through stages of material progress first developed "in direct response to the power of the indigenous critique," a trans-Atlantic exchange anticipating the French Enlightenment.

Philosophe ideals of reason and individual liberty, they contend, drew directly from arguments French colonists encountered first in dialogue with Native Americans like Kandiaronk, a charismatic Wendat statesman-philosopher with a taste for skeptical debates and individual liberty. Kandiaronk's dinner table arguments reached Parisian salons through travelogues and Louis-Armand de Lahontan's 1703 Curious Dialogues With a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled. Older histories dismissed the dialogues as exotic literary ventriloquism for Lahontan's own views, but Graeber and Wengrow marshal sources suggesting Lahontan actually conveyed his friend Kandiaronk's characteristic points.

Later European critics exploited technological gaps between French and native societies to sidetrack dangerous debates over liberty onto the social conditions for material equality. Small, simple societies could live like that, these...