Were Prehistoric People Childlike?

Diagnosing the incoherence of “The Dawn of Everything”

In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow dispute the evolutionist view of history, according to which society passes through progressive stages, from egalitarian bands of naïve, proto-human foragers all the way to hierarchical, farming city states and civilizations of jaded, godlike consumers.

Prehistoric social experimentation

Graeber and Wengrow show that the evidence of social inequality in prehistory is mixed in the Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods because prior to the rise of civilization, people were anarchical in their seasonal experimentation with social systems.

The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial…that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders.

The pair of authors points out that although we’ve gotten stuck in our political and economic hierarchies, there are still echoes of that prehistoric and anarchic (anti-authoritarian) experimentation in festivals that celebrate the overturning of the social order.

In the European Middle Ages, to take a familiar example, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest…, and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at ‘turning the world upside down.’ In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.

According to Graeber and Wengrow,

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Moreover, in explaining the paradoxical nature of ritual, “that rituals are simultaneously moments where social structure is manifested and moments of ‘anti-structure’ in which new social forms can pop up,” the authors cite a distinction between the transcendental and the transactional realms, and an “argument that ritual creates a ‘subjunctive’ or ‘as if’ domain of order, consciously set apart from a reality that is always seen in a contrasting light, as fragmented and chaotic. Ritual creates a world which is marked off as standing apart from ordinary life, but is also where essentially imaginary, ongoing institutions (like clans, empires, etc.) exist and are maintained” (my emphasis).

The upshot is that we’ve been asking the wrong questions such as whether our species is “inherently cooperative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil.” If anything, our distinctive capacity is “to negotiate between such alternatives…We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Levi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers.”

Indeed, Graeber and Wengrow are emphatic that the anarchical social experimentation isn’t inferior to what we call civilization, contrary to a progressive reading of human social evolution. Our prehistoric ancestors “grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do,” and they “understood them — at least the most reflexive among them — just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature.” They were “‘just people, like us’ equally perceptive, equally confused.”

Childlike prehistory and civilization’s cultural entrenchment

This, however, strikes me as self-contradictory. While our prehistoric ancestors were surely “just people, like us,” Graeber’s and Wengrow’s analysis of the evidence itself confirms that there’s a dividing line between the prehistoric social experimentation and our having gotten “stuck,” as the authors say, in hierarchical civilization. And while prehistoric people grappled with some similar problems, with comparable intelligence, ingenuity, and competence, there’s one facet of human character which they seem to have excelled in which modern adults collectively lack, namely childlike naïvety.

Again, Graeber and Wengrow wanted to undermine the progressive interpretation of history, but they end up supporting a version of it. After all, children are the masters of playful experimentation. They play not just to learn but because they haven’t any established, socially recognized responsibility and because they’re ignorant of many discouraging facts. Only when children grow up and acquire much more experience do they build up the kind of social roles and background knowledge that typically make adults less adventurous.

There’s an analogous asymmetry on the collective level in prehistory’s relation to history. Before the invention of writing, for example, the world was shrouded in myth and prejudice because knowledge wasn’t so easily accumulated. Each generation had to start anew with little but their elders’ tall tales and their natural wits to guide them. Our species “grew up” over the millennia as we gathered more experience and knowledge that we could save and transmit to future generations. That amassed culture is the equivalent of an individual’s memory, or of her background knowledge that we say matures her.

Of course, Graeber and Wengrow are offended by the stereotype that prehistoric people were immature in the sense that they were allegedly less than fully human. But the value judgment is a separate question from the objective asymmetry. The fact is that the authors’ assessment of the anthropological and archeological evidence supports this very distinction between the playfulness of prehistory and the seriousness or rigidity of civilized history. Whether either period is better or more human than the other is up for subjective interpretation. We can condescend to children, mocking their ignorance or we can view them nostalgically, wishing to recapture the bliss of their ignorance and bemoaning our adult jadedness.

For example, the authors point out that “Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectual to imagine a society of equals.” The reason is that “Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation.” These festivals still play “much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness,” and serving “as laboratories of social possibility.” But crucially, Graeber and Wengrow go on to say that “The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings.”

Yet what sort of person could have indulged in so much playful experimentation, the ignorant, naïve, and childlike kind, or the knowing, jaded, and entrenched one? Indeed, the increasing social maturation of our species could be interpreted both as our empowerment and as our being bogged down by tradition, knowledge, and established responsibilities.

In the same vein, the authors say, “Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.”

Who, then, is more notorious for being stubborn and for rebelling against authority than tantrum-throwing children? True, children instinctively mimic their elders to learn how to adapt to circumstances, but they’d also always rather be playing than working.

Thus, when Graeber and Wengrow argue that prehistoric people weren’t naïve in their playful social experimentations but were deliberately opposed to authority and were thus implicitly anarchical, that too is consistent with this evolutionist view. After all, children are often deliberately hostile to authorities — namely when the latter deprive children of what they want or tell them “No” — because children are naïve about the scope of their freedom and even about their importance in the world.

The incoherence of “The Dawn of Everything”

Graeber and Wengrow spend several chapters trying to solve this riddle: “Why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens — supposedly the wisest of apes — allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?”

But the answer is both:

• implicit in their presentation of the mixed evidence (suggesting social experimentation in coordination with seasonal and environmental variations), as I’ve said, and
• it’s evolutionary, notwithstanding the authors’ distaste for that sort of explanation.

Natural evolution requires the stability of genes, and social evolution depends on the stability of language and culture, the latter being augmented by technological advances such as writing, the printing press, cameras, microphones, computers, and so on. Prior to those advances, our prehistoric ancestors must have lacked the oppressive weight of stored collective wisdom.

That asymmetry explains much of this social contrast that Graeber and Wengrow seize on. Our prehistoric ancestors could afford to play, to imagine societal possibilities, and to confuse their imagination with reality, not because they lived a sheltered life like overprotected civilized children, but because they couldn’t have known any better: although they may have been as inherently intelligent as us, those ancestors had no reliable way of storing and transmitting their discoveries.

Prehistoric people’s cultures were unavoidably solipsistic and anthropocentric in reflecting their local preoccupations and the mythic dimension of what it felt like for them to be alive, because they couldn’t see into deep time or space to situate themselves objectively in the universe. Moreover, those ancestors were under no divine commandments and had to invent social norms by playful experimentation, to adapt to the variety of conditions that were thrown up by the wilderness in which they were immersed.

On the individual level, the adult objectifies the world and belittles the imagination more than does the child because the adult learns over more trials and errors how natural regularities work; her mental representations thus calcify, as it were, to better reflect the world.

By contrast, the child’s mind hasn’t yet rigidified; on the contrary, the child’s brain is still in flux, still growing and adjusting to its foundational experiences. Babies are born with instincts and with zero information. If they couldn’t store memories to commemorate their cumulative experience, they’d live their whole adult life mentally as naïve babies, alternating between states of overcorrecting fear and blissful ignorance.

How could it have been otherwise on the collective level, then, for humans in the Upper Paleolithic? Relative to us, even the adults among those prehistoric people were collectively childlike in the narrow way I’ve outlined, just as any average individual adult — even a prehistoric one — is more mature (more experienced, settled, serious, and jaded) than the average child.

Note that “childish” can be used pejoratively to refer to mere silliness, but that’s not what’s at issue here. Playfulness can evidently be serious business too. There’s reckless frivolity that’s done for the purposes of procrastination and of avoiding responsibilities, and then there’s play for the sake of surviving in a state of enforced ignorance, and of exulting in your native talents and freedom.

Prehistoric people weren’t likely childish in the sense of being especially silly; obviously the wilderness wouldn’t tolerate such frivolity. Rather, prehistoric people were childlike in that, despite all the hardships they faced without much scientific or technological protections, they had much greater freedom to play, largely because they weren’t burdened with the albatrosses of having to farm for large numbers of people and to manage a sprawling civilization.

Incorporating Graeber’s and Wengrow’s point, then, we should say that if prehistoric societies were based on playful experimentation, that playfulness must have called for a social state of childlike naivety — not for moral innocence but for an objective ignorance and dearth of collective memory. This, however, conflicts with those authors’ repudiation of “evolutionary” explanations of society, and with their suggestion that we ought to “bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man.’”

On the contrary, by highlighting the extent of prehistoric playfulness, The Dawn of Everything shows there must have been such a collective childhood in prehistory, albeit not necessarily a pejorative or condescending one. The evidence they present is thus at least consistent with an evolutionary, developmental analysis of how history emerged from prehistory.