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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Dawn of Everything

And the Trouble with Its Freedom

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is one of those rare books that is both enormously stimulating and deeply exasperating. It is stimulating because it attacks some of the laziest assumptions about human prehistory: that hunter-gatherers necessarily lived in tiny egalitarian bands, that agriculture automatically produced hierarchy, that cities necessarily required rulers, and that centralized states represent the inevitable culmination of social complexity. It is exasperating because, having successfully demolished several caricatures, Graeber and Wengrow repeatedly seem to assume that they have thereby established their preferred alternative.

They have not.

Published in 2021, shortly before Graeber's death, The Dawn of Everything is an extraordinary act of intellectual ambition. Its nearly 700 pages range across archaeology, anthropology, political philosophy and Indigenous history in an attempt to overturn what the authors call the conventional story of human development. Their central proposition is deceptively simple: human beings have never followed a single evolutionary trajectory from small egalitarian bands through agriculture, hierarchy, cities and states. Instead, they have experimented with an astonishing variety of social arrangements, sometimes deliberately switching between radically different forms of organization.

That basic point is important—and largely uncontroversial among specialists when stated carefully.

The trouble begins when Graeber and Wengrow turn this pluralism into a political philosophy of human freedom, and then retroactively select the archaeological evidence that seems to support it.

The book's great achievement: breaking the inevitability story

The most valuable contribution of The Dawn of Everything is its sustained assault on simplistic historical determinism.

For generations, popular accounts of human history have presented something like a ladder. First came hunter-gatherers. Then agriculture. Then permanent settlements. Then cities. Then social classes, states, bureaucracy and civilization. The details vary, but the general trajectory remains familiar. V. Gordon Childe's influential synthesis of archaeology helped institutionalize versions of this model, although modern archaeology has greatly complicated it.

Graeber and Wengrow are right to insist that the archaeological record is much messier.

Agriculture did not produce hierarchy everywhere at the same time. Large settlements did not necessarily have kings. Some societies combined considerable population density with relatively weak evidence for centralized authority. Seasonal societies could alternate between egalitarian and hierarchical arrangements. People could abandon settlements, disperse, regroup and reorganize. There was no single "Agricultural Revolution" after which humanity suddenly entered a predetermined political destiny.

Ian Morris, while highly critical of the book's reasoning, concedes that it is exceptionally well researched and that its examples are often original and stimulating.

This is important. The book should not be dismissed as simply bad archaeology. Its enormous collection of cases is one of its strengths. Graeber and Wengrow have performed a useful service by reminding general readers that the prehistoric record contains far more variation than the standard textbook narrative suggests.

But showing that history is complicated is not the same thing as showing that history has no directional tendencies.

And this is where the book begins to overreach.

The straw man called "evolutionism"

One of the strangest features of The Dawn of Everything is the ferocity with which it attacks "evolutionary" explanations of human society.

The authors repeatedly portray evolutionary accounts as crude stage theories in which one technological innovation mechanically produces the next level of social organization. Their target appears to be a world in which agriculture automatically produces surplus, surplus automatically produces inequality, inequality automatically produces classes, classes automatically produce states, and states automatically produce civilization.

But serious evolutionary anthropology does not require such a mechanical sequence.

There is an enormous difference between claiming that A necessarily causes B and claiming that A makes B more probable under particular ecological and demographic conditions. Archaeological scholarship has spent decades replacing rigid stage theories with probabilistic, multicausal models.

This distinction matters because Graeber and Wengrow frequently behave as if falsifying the first proposition falsifies the second.

Ian Morris identifies precisely this problem. He argues that the authors provide numerous fascinating cases that complicate evolutionary narratives but never establish a clear criterion by which those cases would actually falsify evolutionary explanations. Their argument is therefore stronger as criticism of crude determinism than as a replacement for evolutionary theory.

This is a crucial distinction.

Human societies are certainly products of cultural creativity. But creativity operates within constraints imposed by ecology, demography, technology, energetics, disease, geography, warfare and resource distribution. Rejecting determinism does not require rejecting causation.

Yet The Dawn of Everything sometimes seems to slide from "human beings have choices" to "human beings are largely unconstrained."

That is a much bigger—and much less defensible—claim.

From Hobbes versus Rousseau to Graeber versus inevitability

The intellectual drama of the book is constructed around a familiar opposition: Thomas Hobbes versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hobbes supposedly represents the idea that humans are naturally violent and require the state to restrain them. Rousseau represents the opposite fantasy: humans were originally free and egalitarian until agriculture, property and civilization corrupted them.

Graeber and Wengrow want to escape this binary altogether.

They are right to do so.

Unfortunately, they construct the binary too crudely.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's devastating review pointed out that Graeber and Wengrow's treatment of Rousseau is especially problematic. Rousseau's account of the state of nature was explicitly hypothetical, and his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is considerably more complicated than the Rousseau caricature presented in Dawn. Moreover, Rousseau's own analysis of the emergence of inequality was not simply "everything was wonderful until the state arrived."

The problem is not merely historical pedantry. The Rousseau/Hobbes framing does important rhetorical work for Graeber and Wengrow.

If Hobbes and Rousseau represent two equally simplistic myths—humans as inherently nasty versus humans as originally innocent—then the authors can position themselves as offering the liberating third alternative: human beings have always been creative political agents.

But the third alternative does not require rejecting the first two philosophers by caricaturing them.

Indeed, a more sophisticated synthesis is available: human beings possess extraordinary capacities for cooperation, domination, altruism, violence, reciprocity and political innovation, while the balance among these capacities is affected by material and institutional circumstances.

That position is less exciting than Graeber and Wengrow's, but considerably harder to knock down.

The archaeological evidence: possibility is not proof

The book's most impressive sections describe unusual archaeological sites that complicate conventional assumptions about early complex societies.

The Ukrainian "mega-sites" are particularly important. These enormous settlements appear to have existed without the obvious monumental architecture, royal tombs or palaces that one might expect from conventional state societies. Teotihuacan is another major case: Graeber and Wengrow emphasize interpretations suggesting collective or relatively egalitarian governance rather than conventional kingship.

Such evidence is fascinating.

But "fascinating" is not synonymous with "demonstrated."

Michael E. Smith, an archaeologist specializing in cities and urbanism, has criticized precisely this aspect of the book. He argues that Graeber and Wengrow sometimes present disputed interpretations as if they represented scholarly consensus, while also claiming originality for conclusions that previous researchers had already reached. He particularly objects to their treatment of the Trypillia settlements and Teotihuacan.

Appiah makes essentially the same point from another direction. In their discussion of the Indus Valley and Teotihuacan, he notes that the archaeological literature contains competing interpretations, whereas Dawn sometimes gives readers the impression that specialists have converged on the authors' preferred egalitarian interpretation.

This is perhaps the central methodological weakness of the book.

There is an enormous difference between:

"We cannot demonstrate that this society was hierarchical."

and:

"This society was egalitarian."

The first is an epistemological statement about the limits of archaeological evidence. The second is a substantive historical claim.

Archaeology is particularly vulnerable to this distinction because absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Palaces, monumental tombs and royal inscriptions are relatively easy to recognize. Informal systems of coercion, patronage, status differentiation and political authority are much harder to detect.

Consequently, the disappearance of obvious hierarchy from the archaeological record does not necessarily mean the disappearance of hierarchy from society.

The seduction of the exceptional case

This is where Graeber and Wengrow's storytelling technique becomes both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

They are extraordinarily good at finding the strange case.

Here is a prehistoric settlement that doesn't fit the model.

Here is a city without obvious kings.

Here is a farming community that remained relatively egalitarian.

Here is a society that periodically shifted between hierarchical and egalitarian arrangements.

Here is evidence of enormous collective construction without obvious centralized authority.

Each example is interesting. Collectively, they demonstrate that human history contains more possibilities than a simple linear narrative allows.

But the logical leap comes when these exceptions are treated as evidence against broader causal tendencies.

Suppose agriculture increases population density and creates storable surpluses. It does not follow that hierarchy must appear. But neither does the existence of egalitarian agricultural societies demonstrate that agriculture is irrelevant to the emergence of hierarchy.

The same principle applies to cities and states.

A city without an obvious king is an important anomaly. It does not demonstrate that urbanization generally has no relationship to political centralization.

Walter Scheidel makes a related criticism, arguing that Dawn suffers from an excessively idealist interpretation of historical dynamics and insufficient attention to material processes.

This is the book's recurring sleight of hand: possibility becomes probability, and probability becomes possibility.

The authors demonstrate that something could happen. They then invite the reader to conclude that it could happen routinely.

Those are very different propositions.

Human agency versus material constraints

Graeber and Wengrow's deepest philosophical commitment is not actually archaeology. It is human agency.

They want to rescue human beings from what they regard as the prison of historical inevitability.

Their three fundamental freedoms are telling: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.

This is an attractive political philosophy.

It is also the real heart of the book.

The archaeological material is being mobilized to make a philosophical point: if our ancestors repeatedly reorganized their societies, then our own institutions are not inevitable either.

This is where The Dawn of Everything becomes much more interesting than a conventional archaeology book.

But it also becomes much less convincing as history.

The fact that humans can reorganize their institutions does not tell us how difficult particular transformations are. It does not tell us which institutional arrangements are sustainable at particular population densities. It does not tell us how energy production, food storage, warfare, pathogens or climate affect political organization.

Human agency is real. So are constraints.

A serious theory of human history needs both.

The indigenous critique

One of the book's most ambitious arguments concerns Indigenous intellectual influence on European political thought.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans contributed substantially to European debates about freedom, equality, property and political authority. Their discussion of the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk and the "indigenous critique" is provocative and deserves attention.

There is certainly something important here. European observers did encounter societies whose institutions challenged European assumptions. Indigenous political thought could expose European social arrangements as contingent rather than natural.

But once again the authors push the argument too far.

They suggest that the standard evolutionary narrative itself was substantially constructed as a conservative response to the Indigenous critique: a way of telling Europeans that hierarchy and centralized authority were inevitable and therefore that Indigenous alternatives could safely be dismissed.

This is an enormous historical thesis.

And it is much less securely demonstrated than the archaeological examples on which the book is based.

Appiah points out that the history of European reflection on inequality and political organization was considerably more complicated, and that Indigenous critiques did not simply disappear into a conservative evolutionary conspiracy.

The danger here is that Graeber and Wengrow replace one grand narrative with another.

They criticize grand narratives of human development while constructing a grand narrative about how the West constructed grand narratives in order to suppress Indigenous alternatives.

That is an amusing irony.

The politics hiding in the archaeology

There is no reason to conceal the book's political commitments. Graeber was an anarchist, and his political philosophy permeates The Dawn of Everything.

The authors are trying to establish something politically consequential: domination is not inevitable.

That is a perfectly legitimate philosophical project.

But it creates a methodological problem when the historical evidence is used primarily to establish a political possibility.

The argument effectively runs:

Human beings have lived in many different ways.

Therefore our present institutions are not inevitable.

That conclusion is perfectly sound.

But the book repeatedly seems to want a stronger conclusion:

Human beings have repeatedly lived in large-scale, complex, relatively egalitarian societies without centralized domination.

Therefore comparable societies are readily available as models for the future.

That second conclusion requires considerably stronger evidence.

And here the book becomes vulnerable.

Appiah puts the problem elegantly: the archaeological panorama is exhilarating, but its clarity is sometimes produced through filtration.

The authors have selected historical cases precisely because they are surprising. That makes excellent reading. But a representative sample of human history cannot consist mainly of the cases that most dramatically violate the conventional model.

The material world refuses to disappear

There is a deeper theoretical problem.

Graeber and Wengrow are much more comfortable with political imagination than with material constraint.

They are suspicious of "materialism" and particularly resistant to explanations in which technology, ecology and economic organization shape political possibilities. Yet this resistance creates an odd asymmetry. They are willing to explain hierarchy through ideology, ritual, play, political choice and changing conceptions of freedom, while material explanations are often treated as crude determinism.

But material conditions do not have to be deterministic to matter.

Grain is not merely a cultural symbol. It has particular properties: it can be harvested seasonally, stored, counted, transported and appropriated. Those properties can make taxation and administrative control easier.

Population density is not merely a number. It changes the scale at which coordination problems occur.

Permanent settlement changes patterns of property and territoriality.

Warfare changes the value of organized coercion.

Disease changes the costs and benefits of urbanization.

Energy availability changes what kinds of social systems can be maintained.

None of these factors determines a political outcome. But ignoring them because they might sound "deterministic" would be equally ideological.

A genuinely multidimensional history would integrate material constraints with cultural creativity.

The Dawn of Everything too often treats them as rival explanations.

"Everything" is an unfortunate title

The title itself reveals something about the book's ambition.

The Dawn of Everything promises not merely a new history of civilization but a new history of humanity.

That is too much.

No archaeological record could possibly support such a comprehensive reconstruction. The deeper we move into prehistory, the more fragmentary the evidence becomes. And the farther we generalize from particular archaeological sites to claims about "humanity," the greater the inferential gap.

A more modest title—something like Many Dawns: Archaeology and the Possibilities of Human Society—might actually have made the book stronger.

Because there really are many dawns in this book.

That is its genuine achievement.

Human history did not begin with one institutional template.

A magnificent demolition job without an adequate replacement

The paradox of The Dawn of Everything is that its negative argument is considerably stronger than its positive one.

It is very good at saying:

"It wasn't necessarily like that."

It is much less good at saying:

"This is how it actually was."

And it is weakest when it says:

"Therefore, this is what human beings are capable of becoming."

The first claim is often persuasive.

The second requires careful reconstruction.

The third is political philosophy.

The book repeatedly moves between these three levels without adequately marking the transitions.

This explains why specialists have reacted so differently. Ian Morris considers the book a major, carefully researched intervention while finding its central logic unconvincing. Michael Smith praises some of its substantive observations while criticizing its evidence and argumentative methods. Appiah accepts its ambition but objects strongly to its selective representation of scholarly disagreement.

The disagreement is therefore not simply between people who "believe" Graeber and Wengrow and people who do not.

It is about what counts as a historical argument.

What survives after the critique?

Quite a lot.

The most durable proposition of The Dawn of Everything is not that prehistoric societies were secretly anarchist utopias.

It is something more modest and more important:

Human societies have always been more politically inventive than our conventional narratives suggest.

That insight deserves to survive.

The archaeological record does indeed show experimentation, reversals, hybrid institutions, seasonal changes in political organization and unexpected combinations of population density, agriculture, urbanism and hierarchy. The old image of humanity marching obediently from cave to farm to city to state is inadequate.

But the opposite image is inadequate too: humanity as a species of unconstrained social inventors who can simply choose any institutional arrangement they desire.

We are neither historical automatons nor infinitely free political artists.

We are biological organisms living within ecological and material constraints, capable of extraordinary cultural innovation.

That combination—not either pole alone—is what makes human history interesting.

The real dawn

The irony is that Graeber and Wengrow did not need to prove as much as they tried to prove.

They did not need to demonstrate that large-scale egalitarian societies were ubiquitous. They did not need to establish that agriculture had little connection with hierarchy. They did not need to overturn evolutionary approaches wholesale. And they certainly did not need to rescue Rousseau's intellectual reputation by constructing an alternative mythology around him.

They only needed to show that the history of human social organization contains genuine alternatives.

They succeeded at that.

Their book is therefore best understood not as the definitive "new history of humanity" its title announces, but as an extraordinary provocation: a vast catalogue of anomalies assembled against historical complacency.

Its greatest virtue is its refusal to let us confuse what happened with what had to happen.

Its greatest weakness is its tendency to confuse what could have happened with what actually did.

That distinction matters enormously.

The past does not give us a political blueprint. It gives us a laboratory of possibilities, constraints, failures, adaptations and accidents. The lesson of archaeology is not that humanity was once free and can therefore become free again. Nor is it that hierarchy was inevitable and therefore cannot be escaped.

The more uncomfortable lesson is that both freedom and domination are deeply rooted possibilities of our species—and that human beings have repeatedly invented institutions capable of amplifying either one.

That is a less comforting conclusion than Graeber and Wengrow wanted.

But it may be a more useful dawn.

Appendix: Graeber and Wengrow versus Wilber's Up from Eden

There is an intriguing irony in comparing David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything with Ken Wilber's Up from Eden. At first glance, the two books could hardly be further apart. Graeber was an anarchist anthropologist who wanted to liberate human history from developmental stage theories. Wilber, writing in 1981, wanted to construct precisely such a grand developmental history: a sequence in which human consciousness progressively differentiates itself from archaic embeddedness and eventually moves toward increasingly complex forms of rationality and, ultimately, transpersonal consciousness.

Yet beneath this opposition lies a striking similarity. Both books are less interested in reconstructing the past for its own sake than in using the past to answer a philosophical question about human possibility. Graeber and Wengrow ask: how free have human beings always been? Wilber asks: how has human consciousness evolved? Both therefore transform fragmentary archaeological and anthropological evidence into a much larger story about the human condition.

The comparison is particularly revealing because The Dawn of Everything can almost be read as a massive empirical challenge to the kind of historical narrative Wilber attempted in Up from Eden.

Wilber's developmental ladder

Up from Eden appeared in 1981 as Wilber's ambitious attempt to apply his developmental model of consciousness to the evolution of humanity as a whole. He interpreted anthropological, archaeological, mythological and psychological material through a sequence of stages, beginning with the "Uroboric" condition and moving through the "Typhonic," "Magic," "Mythic" and later rational structures of consciousness.

The underlying architecture is unmistakably developmental. Human history is presented as a phylogenetic analogue of individual psychological development. The human species gradually differentiates body from mind, self from environment, subject from object, and eventually mythic consciousness from rational consciousness. What happens during childhood on the ontogenetic level is, in modified form, projected backward onto the history of the species.

This was already controversial in 1990, when anthropologist Michael Winkelman published a detailed critique of Up from Eden. His conclusion was particularly damaging: the ontogenetic model Wilber used could not adequately account for the phylogenetic evidence. Winkelman argued that Wilber's reconstruction was "simplistically unilineal," relied on outdated nineteenth-century anthropology, and conflicted with contemporary anthropological evidence about the cognitive capacities of early humans and non-Western peoples.

That criticism goes directly to the architecture of Up from Eden. Wilber's stages are not simply descriptions of different cultures. They are stages in the development of consciousness itself.

And that makes the archaeological record enormously important to his argument.

If the historical evidence does not exhibit the sequence he proposes, the whole phylogenetic scaffolding becomes unstable.

Graeber and Wengrow attack the scaffolding

This is where The Dawn of Everything becomes particularly relevant.

Graeber and Wengrow's principal target is what they call "evolutionism": the assumption that human societies move through recognizable developmental stages, from simpler to more complex forms. Ian Morris, in his detailed review of Dawn, defines the target somewhat more carefully as theories in which sociocultural evolution operates through identifiable mechanisms and produces recurrent developmental patterns, often involving stages from egalitarian foraging societies toward increasingly hierarchical and centralized states.

Wilber's model obviously differs from this in important respects. His stages are stages of consciousness, not simply stages of economic organization. He is also interested in transcendence, so his developmental trajectory does not terminate with the modern state. Nevertheless, the structural resemblance is difficult to miss.

Both narratives arrange human history vertically.

There is an earlier condition.

There are transformations.

There are thresholds.

There are new structures of consciousness or social organization.

And there is a later condition that somehow contains capacities unavailable, or insufficiently differentiated, at earlier stages.

Graeber and Wengrow's archaeological pluralism consequently poses a fundamental question to Wilber: what happens to a stage theory when the archaeological record repeatedly refuses to behave in stages?

The problem of "Magic" and "Mythic"

This becomes especially problematic with Wilber's "Magic" and "Mythic" stages.

Wilber associates prehistoric and early historical peoples with particular structures of consciousness. Cave art, ritual, mythology, totemism and early religion become evidence for characteristic modes of cognition. But this requires an inferential leap that archaeology is poorly equipped to support.

A cave painting can tell us that someone painted an animal.

It cannot straightforwardly tell us that the painter possessed a particular "structure of consciousness."

Nor can the existence of mythology establish that an entire population was cognitively organized according to a discrete developmental stage.

This was precisely the problem Winkelman encountered in his review of Up from Eden. Wilber used archaeological and anthropological materials to infer psychological characteristics that the evidence could not securely establish. Winkelman specifically argued that Wilber's interpretation of early Homo sapiens underestimated their cognitive capacities and that his reading of cave art and symbolism could actually be used to demonstrate abilities Wilber's model tended to deny.

Here The Dawn of Everything supplies a useful methodological warning.

Graeber and Wengrow are certainly guilty of their own interpretive overreach, but their insistence on multiple possible social arrangements makes it much harder to assign an entire population to one neat developmental box.

The archaeological record increasingly looks less like a staircase and more like a tangled network.

A crucial difference: consciousness versus social organization

There is, however, an important qualification.

Graeber and Wengrow's argument does not automatically refute Wilber.

A society could conceivably exhibit considerable political flexibility while its members nevertheless share a particular cognitive structure. Conversely, two societies with very similar political institutions might contain individuals operating at different levels of cognitive or moral development.

This is where the comparison needs to be precise.

The Dawn of Everything is primarily a history of social organization.

Up from Eden is primarily a history of consciousness.

Therefore, Graeber and Wengrow's evidence cannot simply be substituted for evidence about cognitive development.

But it does undermine a particular assumption that Wilber needs: that changes in social organization can be straightforwardly mapped onto changes in structures of consciousness.

That assumption is far more vulnerable.

A society can be egalitarian without being "magical." A hierarchical society can contain individuals capable of formal reasoning. A literate civilization can preserve mythological thinking. A hunter-gatherer can engage in sophisticated abstraction. A modern technological society can contain magical, mythic, rational and contemplative modes simultaneously.

The archaeological record therefore resists the one-to-one mapping between social form and consciousness that Up from Eden sometimes suggests.

From "stages" to "possibilities"

This is perhaps the deepest contrast between the two books.

Wilber asks what stage humanity is moving through.

Graeber and Wengrow ask why humanity should be assumed to move through stages at all.

Their critique is therefore potentially devastating to Wilber's historical method even when it says nothing directly about Wilber.

Consider the extraordinary variety of social arrangements documented in Dawn: seasonal alternation between egalitarian and hierarchical structures, enormous settlements without obvious kings, agricultural societies that did not follow a straightforward trajectory toward state formation, and political systems that apparently changed direction.

Such cases make it difficult to identify a single historical sequence.

Ian Morris makes precisely this point in his criticism of Graeber and Wengrow, although he then turns their argument against them: flexible societies do not necessarily falsify evolutionary models, because evolutionary models can incorporate seasonal and situational variation.

That qualification is important for evaluating Wilber too.

The failure of a rigid stage sequence does not establish that there is no development.

It establishes that development must be modeled more carefully.

And this is where Wilber's later formulations might appear more defensible than Up from Eden itself. His mature Integral Theory increasingly distinguishes stages from states, lines, types and cultures. Development becomes less a simple ladder and more a multidimensional framework.

But that later sophistication should not be projected backward onto the 1981 book.

Up from Eden really did present a much more sweeping historical-developmental narrative.

The curious convergence: both books are anti-reductionist

There is another unexpected similarity.

Both books are reactions against reductionism.

Wilber objects to explanations of humanity that reduce consciousness to biology, economics or social conditioning. Graeber and Wengrow object to explanations that reduce human political history to subsistence strategies, technology, population pressure or economic stages.

Both insist that human beings are more than mechanisms.

For Wilber, what gets lost is consciousness.

For Graeber and Wengrow, what gets lost is freedom.

This makes their disagreements almost philosophical mirror images.

Wilber says, in effect:

You cannot understand human history without understanding the development of consciousness.

Graeber and Wengrow say:

You cannot understand human history if you assume that human beings are trapped within predetermined developmental stages.

The first emphasizes emergence.

The second emphasizes agency.

The interesting question is whether we can have both.

The missing synthesis

Perhaps the most productive conclusion is that neither book quite provides it.

Wilber's great weakness is that he tends to infer psychological structures from historical and cultural patterns. He takes developmental psychology and projects it onto human history. This gives his narrative an elegant architecture, but elegance is not evidence.

Graeber and Wengrow commit the opposite error. They are so determined to protect human agency that they sometimes underplay the recurrent effects of material, ecological and demographic constraints. Walter Scheidel has criticized precisely this "excessively idealist" approach to historical dynamics.

The two books consequently represent two different forms of overcorrection.

Wilber risks turning history into developmental necessity.

Graeber and Wengrow risk turning history into political possibility.

A better model would recognize both.

Human beings inherit biological predispositions and cognitive capacities. They operate within ecological and technological constraints. They acquire cultural traditions. They invent institutions. Those institutions alter the selection pressures acting upon subsequent generations. And individuals can sometimes consciously modify the institutions they have inherited.

That is neither strict determinism nor unrestricted freedom.

It is evolutionary-cultural feedback.

What The Dawn of Everything does to Up from Eden

Seen from this perspective, Graeber and Wengrow's book does not simply "disprove" Wilber.

It does something more interesting.

It changes the burden of proof.

If Wilber wants to claim that human consciousness passed through a definite sequence of Uroboric, Typhonic, Magic, Mythic and Rational structures, he cannot simply point to archaeological periods and assume that each period corresponds to one structure.

He needs independent evidence for the psychological stages themselves.

That evidence is much harder to obtain.

And once contemporary anthropology shows that human populations have repeatedly combined apparently different social, symbolic and cognitive characteristics, the neat phylogenetic staircase becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

In that sense, The Dawn of Everything is almost an accidental critique of Up from Eden.

Graeber and Wengrow did not set out to refute Wilber. They are operating within a different intellectual tradition and pursuing a different political objective. But their insistence on historical contingency, social experimentation and institutional reversibility attacks precisely the kind of unilinear historical imagination on which Wilber's early model depends.

The irony is delicious.

The anarchist anthropologist and the integral philosopher both wanted to tell a grand story about humanity.

One said: humanity has been freer than you think.

The other said: humanity has developed further than you think.

The archaeological record may be telling us something more complicated.

Human beings have always been simultaneously constrained and inventive, embedded and reflective, cooperative and competitive, traditional and experimental. There may be developmental tendencies in human history without there being a single developmental script.

That distinction is the point at which The Dawn of Everything becomes most useful for reading Up from Eden.

It does not abolish development.

It abolishes the illusion that development is synonymous with a straight line.

And that, ironically, may be the most important lesson Wilber's early evolutionary narrative still has to learn.