I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and was searching for reviews to see other people's thoughts and help me...
I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and was searching for reviews to see other people's thoughts and help me organize my own, as I must admit I was probably zoning out while listening for significant parts of it.
I stumbled upon this review/essay and thought it was really interesting, specifically the later parts that starts talking about the "Sapient Paradox", i.e. why did we only see rapid development since 10,000 BC if we've been around for 100,000-200,000 years. It's not something I've seen much discussion about (although this is not my field so might just not be aware), and I thought the proposed hypothesis of a "gossip trap" was pretty thought provoking.
A “gossip trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.
And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.
So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?
Another interesting hypothesis from one of the comments is that we suddenly stopped doing large scale migrations. Essentially we'd filled up most of the globe and we couldn't expand outward anymore so we had to start organizing ourselves more. This is probably even more plausible, but I'm sure whatever the reasons it's likely a combination of multiple factors.
I'm interested to hear what other people think and if you've heard any other hypotheses that attempt to explain the "Sapient Paradox", and also what your thoughts were on the book if you've read it.
It’s a good essay, but highly speculative, or should I say imaginative? We should heed the author’s warning that theories about prehistory are political. With ancient history, so little writing...
It’s a good essay, but highly speculative, or should I say imaginative? We should heed the author’s warning that theories about prehistory are political.
With ancient history, so little writing has survived that historians lean heavily on archeological evidence to fill in large gaps, and yet written history tells us things that archeology never could. And it’s even worse when no writing survived, because there wasn’t any.
I know a little about a lot but not enough about anything, so this is speculation: Ancient Aliens? But if you’re an Attorney x Economist, you’d probably say the development of more efficient - in...
I know a little about a lot but not enough about anything, so this is speculation: Ancient Aliens?
But if you’re an Attorney x Economist, you’d probably say the development of more efficient - in an economic sense - legal frameworks and processes. I can’t remember the old Chicago school bros names at the moment, but here’s a random example on SSRN of the kinds of papers out there about it: The Genesis of Liability in Ancient Law.
I thoroughly enjoyed this essay. It makes me want to read the examined book, but also lets me reframe my current readings with a more critical eye. Thanks for posting!
I thoroughly enjoyed this essay. It makes me want to read the examined book, but also lets me reframe my current readings with a more critical eye. Thanks for posting!
I've put a bookmark for this article that I just finished reading today. I absolutely love the article. It's fascinating to read about our history and, by extension, our evolution. When you look...
I've put a bookmark for this article that I just finished reading today.
I absolutely love the article. It's fascinating to read about our history and, by extension, our evolution. When you look at humans from the "animals surviving" perspective, it's amazing the meaning you can find behind organized actions.
The part about breaking the Dunbar barrier and having social media basically unlock universal, international shaming is a chilling thought that I cannot help but agree with.
I’ll try to dig up some citations when I’m out of the office, but I don’t think this statement is believed to be true: If I recall correctly, First Nations in the Pacific Northwest had complex...
I’ll try to dig up some citations when I’m out of the office, but I don’t think this statement is believed to be true:
So we have slave-owning Mafia dons to the north, and meanwhile, ascetics to the south. Despite both being foragers, they ate extremely different diets, with Californian tribes relying on nuts and acorns, while the Northwest Coast societies were sometimes referred to as ‘fisher-kings’ (presumably due to their two loves: aristocracy and fish).
If I recall correctly, First Nations in the Pacific Northwest had complex land claim systems that were largely ignored by colonial powers. Furthermore we continue turning up physical evidence that the land tending practices they claimed to perform (as passed down through oral tradition) — notably, forest gardens and construction of shellfish habitat — were indeed used in anger. They weren’t foragers.
I haven’t read the whole article yet (I was just curious why we’re reframing human civilization w/o agriculture, which afaik was widely accepted as the solution to the bottleneck for civ growth), so maybe that’s a bait and switch paragraph and the authors correct themselves later? A la “aha! You bought our colonialist interpretation of First Nations law and history! In fact they did have agriculture, it just wasn’t practiced like in Europe due to other external factors!”
I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and was searching for reviews to see other people's thoughts and help me organize my own, as I must admit I was probably zoning out while listening for significant parts of it.
I stumbled upon this review/essay and thought it was really interesting, specifically the later parts that starts talking about the "Sapient Paradox", i.e. why did we only see rapid development since 10,000 BC if we've been around for 100,000-200,000 years. It's not something I've seen much discussion about (although this is not my field so might just not be aware), and I thought the proposed hypothesis of a "gossip trap" was pretty thought provoking.
Another interesting hypothesis from one of the comments is that we suddenly stopped doing large scale migrations. Essentially we'd filled up most of the globe and we couldn't expand outward anymore so we had to start organizing ourselves more. This is probably even more plausible, but I'm sure whatever the reasons it's likely a combination of multiple factors.
I'm interested to hear what other people think and if you've heard any other hypotheses that attempt to explain the "Sapient Paradox", and also what your thoughts were on the book if you've read it.
It’s a good essay, but highly speculative, or should I say imaginative? We should heed the author’s warning that theories about prehistory are political.
With ancient history, so little writing has survived that historians lean heavily on archeological evidence to fill in large gaps, and yet written history tells us things that archeology never could. And it’s even worse when no writing survived, because there wasn’t any.
I know a little about a lot but not enough about anything, so this is speculation: Ancient Aliens?
But if you’re an Attorney x Economist, you’d probably say the development of more efficient - in an economic sense - legal frameworks and processes. I can’t remember the old Chicago school bros names at the moment, but here’s a random example on SSRN of the kinds of papers out there about it: The Genesis of Liability in Ancient Law.
Edit: Posner. It was Posner. A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Law.
I thoroughly enjoyed this essay. It makes me want to read the examined book, but also lets me reframe my current readings with a more critical eye. Thanks for posting!
I've put a bookmark for this article that I just finished reading today.
I absolutely love the article. It's fascinating to read about our history and, by extension, our evolution. When you look at humans from the "animals surviving" perspective, it's amazing the meaning you can find behind organized actions.
The part about breaking the Dunbar barrier and having social media basically unlock universal, international shaming is a chilling thought that I cannot help but agree with.
Very interesting read, thank you for sharing!
I’ll try to dig up some citations when I’m out of the office, but I don’t think this statement is believed to be true:
If I recall correctly, First Nations in the Pacific Northwest had complex land claim systems that were largely ignored by colonial powers. Furthermore we continue turning up physical evidence that the land tending practices they claimed to perform (as passed down through oral tradition) — notably, forest gardens and construction of shellfish habitat — were indeed used in anger. They weren’t foragers.
I haven’t read the whole article yet (I was just curious why we’re reframing human civilization w/o agriculture, which afaik was widely accepted as the solution to the bottleneck for civ growth), so maybe that’s a bait and switch paragraph and the authors correct themselves later? A la “aha! You bought our colonialist interpretation of First Nations law and history! In fact they did have agriculture, it just wasn’t practiced like in Europe due to other external factors!”