The standard story goes: Small egalitarian bands, then farming, then cities, then inevitable hierarchy and the state. Graeber, an anthropologist, and Wengrow, an archaeologist, spent ten years arguing that basically none of that holds. The evidence shows enormous cities with no palaces and no evidence of rulers, societies that ran hierarchies seasonally and dismantled them in the off season, farming picked up and dropped for millennia, and indigenous critics of European society whose arguments shaped the Enlightenment more than anyone admits. Their point isn’t a better origin story, it’s that people used to experiment constantly with how to live, and somewhere we got stuck. Graeber died weeks after they finished it. If this had been written by Charles C. Mann, who penned 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, it might have been a page-turner. Instead, it’s 700 pages to land on the conclusion: It was complicated.