10 November 2021. Societies | Astronomy

What you know about early human history may be wrong; Some breath-taking astronomy photos

Nov 10, 2021

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#1: What you know about early human history may be wrong

My corner of the internet seems mostly to be quite excited by the arrival of David Graeber’s final book, The Dawn of Everything, co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow and completed just weeks before Graeber’s sudden and untimely death last year in Venice.

Graeber was an anthropologist and an anarchist, or in another version of this an academic and an activist, and in some ways The Dawn of Everything can be seen as a kind of a cousin to his radically revisionist history of debt (Debt: the First 5,000 Years), which was a surprise best-seller when it was published.

The Dawn of Everything, judging from the articles about it, traces a similar path. It goes back to the records that we have and challenges the received wisdom about the way that societies evolve.

This is how that conventional history is described in a surprisingly fan-boyish review article about the book in The Atlantic:

Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men. Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires.

As William Deresiewicz observes in the article, these stages are linear, in that the stages are followed in order; they are uniform (they work the same way everywhere); progressive, working from lower to higher, or from more primitive to more complex; deterministic, because driven by technology; and teleological, in that it ends with the way way we are as people and societies today. Graeber and Wengrow also argue that this is just plain wrong.

It’s a vast book, covering tens of thousands of years of human history, and taking a global perspective. According to Deresiewicz’s review, here are some of the ways in which this might be plain wrong:

“Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring.”
“(H)unter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work)... They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.”
And about agriculture: “In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably... (Early farming) was also what the authors call “play farming”: farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture. Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculture—not, as we’ve thought, the reverse.

Of course, there’s also some discussion of cities here, in particular writing against the idea that the scale of cities led inevitably to inequality of wealth and power.

Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth.... And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

There’s always a bit of a wrinkle in Graeber’s work, as a generally sympathetic review in The Nation observes:

The readers of Graeber’s previous work will recognize this provocative style; he was a wildly creative thinker who excelled at subverting received wisdom. But he was better known for being interesting than right... In The Dawn of Everything, this interpretative brashness feeds off our lack of firm knowledge about the distant past. When only potsherds remain, conjecture can run wild. Graeber and Wengrow dutifully acknowledge the need for caution, but this doesn’t stop them from dismissing rival theories with assurance.

(Putting together the pieces from the potsherds. Image: Davidbena, via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The reviewer, Daniel Immelwahr, notes that in his own area of expertise, around exchanges between North America’s indigenous nations and settlers, a claim made by Graeber and Wengrow is wrong—even a misreading of the paper that they cite.

He’s not sure that this matters; the point of the book is to disrupt the way think about the past, and perhaps, as he suggests, thereby to open up more possibilities about the future. But for Immelwahr, it still leaves a bit of a question—one which the authors might have been keeping for one of the later volumes they planned.

The question is this: if states and hierarchies aren’t inevitable, why are they all around us? For big picture thinkers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, the answer is that we didn’t realise that, “The sequence of farming, private property, war, and states was a trap... Humans entered it without realizing they wouldn’t be able to leave, and for most of history, all they found was despotism and disease.”

And neither Diamond nor Harari, to be fair to them, is a big fan of the consequences of agriculture.

But this makes human history seem a little like a lobster trap; once in, there’s no way back out. And, by Immelwahr’s account, Graeber and Wengrow push back at this:

(T)hey’re wary of Diamond’s and Harari’s fatalism, of the suggestion that State Street runs only one way. In Graeber and Wengrow’s rendition, agriculture was, like everything else, a considered and revocable choice. The Dawn of Everything thus tells of people “flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming”—taking it up, putting it down—without thereby “enslaving themselves.”

But:

People went from creatively experimenting with kings and farms to getting “stuck” with them. That metaphor—being stuck in states rather than evolving to them—is useful, in that it suggests people might get unstuck.

There’s also a useful and largely descriptive review by David Wineberg at his Medium page, The Straight Dope.

#2: Astronomy photos that are breath-taking

The winners of the annual Royal Museums Greenwich astronomy photography competition have been announced, and the winners, and actually pretty much anyone who has been shortlisted, are absolutely stunning.

The online presentation is a bit all over the place (I think they’re hoping that people will make it to Greenwich to see the photos for themselves, but here are some links to help guide you through.

The winning photograph, The Golden Ring, by Suchan Dong, shows an annular solar eclipse, seen from Tibet.

The winners in the Galaxies category are here.

The Skyscapes category is here.

The Sun category, including the winning photo, is here.

And the Moon category is here.

There’s not a dud among them. And that’s only about half of the categories. Keep scrolling right for aurorae, planets, comets and asteroids, people and space, stars and nebulae, and the best newcomer.

There’s also a 40 minute video of the awards ceremony, which is fortunately long on photography and short on speeches.

j2t#204

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