The Dawn of Everything

Picture a Wendat philosopher named Kandiaronk sitting across from French colonial officers in the early 1700s, systematically dismantling every European assumption about civilization, progress, and human nature. His critiques were so compelling they sparked debates in Parisian salons and influenced Enlightenment thinkers for generations. Yet most of us have never heard his name, and we continue telling ourselves the same story about human history that he so brilliantly refuted three centuries ago.

This story goes like this: humans lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands for most of our existence, then agriculture arrived and inevitably led to cities, states, and civilization, but also to inequality and oppression. It's a tale of paradise lost, where progress came at freedom's expense. But what if this entire narrative is not just wrong, but actively harmful to how we imagine human possibilities today? What if our ancestors were far more politically sophisticated and free than we've been told, and the real question isn't how inequality began, but how we became trapped in systems that would have seemed absurd to most people throughout history?

The encounter between European colonists and indigenous North American intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries represents one of history's most profound philosophical exchanges. When Mi'kmaq observers told French missionaries that Europeans lived like slaves under their superiors, they weren't making romantic appeals to primitive innocence. They were offering systematic critiques based on sophisticated political values that prioritized individual autonomy and collective decision-making.

Figures like Kandiaronk didn't simply reject European ways; they articulated detailed alternatives based on the principle that no one should have the power to give arbitrary orders to anyone else. These indigenous societies had successfully maintained large populations through confederations and councils, managing complex political relationships without coercive authority. Their leaders were speakers and facilitators rather than commanders, and their legitimacy depended on ongoing consent rather than inherited privilege.

The impact on European thought was immediate and profound. Indigenous critiques sparked the very questions that would define the Enlightenment: What is the origin of inequality? Are humans naturally free or servile? The irony is that European philosophers, in trying to answer these questions, often ended up defending the systems their indigenous critics had exposed as absurd. Turgot and others developed theories of social evolution specifically to argue that inequality was the inevitable price of progress.

This intellectual encounter reveals something crucial about human political consciousness. The indigenous critics weren't trapped in traditional thinking; they were actively reflecting on different forms of social organization and making conscious choices about how to live. Their societies represented sophisticated experiments in maintaining human freedom while coordinating complex activities, demonstrating that political arrangements are choices rather than natural laws.

Long before agriculture, Ice Age societies conducted remarkable experiments in social organization that challenge everything we think we know about primitive life. Archaeological evidence from sites like Sunghir in Russia reveals elaborate burials with thousands of ivory beads dating back 30,000 years, suggesting not just wealth accumulation but complex social hierarchies. Yet these weren't the permanent class systems we might expect.

Evidence suggests that Ice Age societies regularly shifted between different organizational forms depending on the season. During times of abundance, when mammoth herds migrated through river valleys, people would gather in large settlements, construct monumental buildings, and apparently accept temporary forms of authority. When resources became scarce, these same societies would disperse into smaller, more egalitarian bands. This pattern required remarkable political sophistication—the ability to consciously construct and then dismantle hierarchical institutions.

The seasonal variation in social structure was still visible among groups like the Inuit and Plains Indians into the modern era. The Lakota would appoint police with genuine coercive powers during buffalo hunts, but only for the hunt's duration. Once the season ended, these temporary authorities returned to being ordinary members of egalitarian bands. Such arrangements demonstrate a level of political self-awareness that we, trapped in permanent institutions, might well envy.

What made this flexibility possible was the understanding that no particular social arrangement was natural or inevitable. Ice Age peoples treated political systems like seasonal clothing—useful for specific purposes, but not something you'd want to wear year-round. This suggests a political consciousness far more sophisticated than our own, one that understood power as a tool to be used and then set aside rather than a prize to be permanently grasped.

The development of agriculture was neither the sudden revolution we often imagine nor an inevitable step toward inequality and state formation. Archaeological evidence reveals that many of the world's first farming communities were organized along remarkably egalitarian lines, while some of the most hierarchical societies in human history were based entirely on hunting, fishing, and gathering. The transition to agriculture was a gradual, 3,000-year process driven largely by women's botanical knowledge and conscious experimentation.

Women appear to have been the primary innovators in this slow agricultural revolution, as they typically managed plant gathering and processing in foraging societies. The detailed knowledge required to transform wild grasses into domesticated cereals accumulated over generations of careful observation. This wasn't desperate adaptation to scarcity, but conscious experimentation by people who understood plant biology perfectly well and chose to incorporate cultivation into complex seasonal rounds.

Many societies actively chose to reject full agricultural dependence even after developing farming knowledge. The indigenous peoples of California, despite being aware of maize cultivation for thousands of years, systematically refused to adopt it. They weren't prevented by environmental constraints but made conscious choices to maintain existing lifestyles they found more satisfying. Similarly, many European groups abandoned farming during certain periods, returning to hunting and gathering when it suited them better.

The real agricultural revolution wasn't farming itself, but the much later development of systems that could transform agricultural surpluses into political power. This required specific institutional innovations—storage and redistribution systems, record-keeping methods, and ideologies justifying why some should control resources while others produced them. Even then, the process was neither automatic nor irreversible, as the builders of Stonehenge demonstrated by deliberately abandoning cereal agriculture in favor of mixed economies.

The world's first cities present a puzzle that challenges our basic assumptions about the relationship between scale and hierarchy. Conventional wisdom suggests large populations inevitably require authoritarian management, but archaeological evidence reveals numerous examples of cities that governed themselves without kings, bureaucrats, or ruling classes for centuries. These urban experiments demonstrate that complexity and equality are not mutually exclusive.

The Ukrainian mega-sites of the fourth millennium BCE housed tens of thousands of people in carefully planned settlements showing no evidence of central authority. Sites like Taljanky were larger than the earliest Mesopotamian cities, yet operated on apparently egalitarian principles for over 800 years. Each household maintained unique artistic styles while participating in city-wide resource sharing and collective decision-making systems. These weren't primitive villages that happened to grow large, but sophisticated urban experiments in democratic living.

In Mesopotamia, the earliest cities like Uruk appear to have been governed by popular assemblies rather than kings. The Epic of Gilgamesh actually begins with descriptions of these assemblies, where young men and elders debated important decisions. Royal palaces and kingship apparatus only emerged around 2800 BCE, and even then, Mesopotamian cities maintained strong traditions of citizen participation that persisted throughout their history.

The Indus Valley civilization presents perhaps the most striking example of urban equality. Cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro show remarkably even distributions of wealth, with high-quality housing and sanitation available to all residents. There are no royal palaces, no monuments to individual rulers, and no evidence of the social stratification we associate with early states. Instead, we find a civilization organized around principles of cleanliness, order, and collective welfare that sustained urban life for over a millennium.

The emergence of permanent domination wasn't an inevitable consequence of social complexity, but resulted from specific historical circumstances where three distinct forms of power—control over violence, monopolization of knowledge, and charismatic authority—converged and reinforced each other. Understanding this convergence helps explain how relatively egalitarian societies transformed into the hierarchical kingdoms and empires that would dominate subsequent history.

Control over violence provided the most direct but unstable path to power. Early warrior-kings might terrorize immediate surroundings, but their authority rarely extended beyond personal presence. More sophisticated was the monopolization of esoteric knowledge, whether religious secrets, technical skills, or administrative expertise. Priests and bureaucrats could extend influence across vast distances by controlling crucial information, creating networks of dependence more durable than simple coercion.

Charismatic authority, based on personal magnetism and competitive display, provided a third route to power visible in elaborate elite burials, monumental architecture showcasing royal power, and complex ceremonial systems surrounding ancient rulers. Charismatic leaders needed constant spectacular displays to prove their worth, making their authority both dramatic and precarious. The most successful early states combined two or more elements, like ancient Egypt's fusion of divine sovereignty with bureaucratic administration.

The real tragedy wasn't the emergence of these power systems, but the gradual loss of humanity's capacity to imagine alternatives. For most of our species' existence, people moved fluidly between different political arrangements, constructing hierarchies when useful and dismantling them when not. The hardening of cultural boundaries, development of permanent settlements, and emergence of ideologies portraying particular arrangements as natural made it increasingly difficult to exit unsatisfactory systems or imagine that things could be different.

The archaeological record reveals not inevitable progress toward hierarchy and domination, but a continuous struggle between different visions of social organization. For most of human existence, people lived in societies prioritizing freedom, equality, and collective decision-making. The emergence of kings, states, and permanent inequalities represents a relatively recent departure from these patterns, one often resisted and sometimes reversed by people who understood what they were losing.

Our ancestors were neither noble savages living in primitive equality nor ruthless competitors driven by selfish genes. They were intelligent, creative people who consciously experimented with different social forms, sometimes embracing hierarchy when it served purposes, sometimes rejecting it when it didn't. They built cities without rulers, practiced agriculture without destroying freedom, and created complex societies maintaining commitments to human dignity. Their experiments offer both inspiration and practical guidance for reimagining our own arrangements in an age when old certainties no longer serve us well. The question isn't whether alternatives are possible, but whether we have the courage to pursue them.