Groucho Marxism

The standard account of human history runs as follows. First, modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Then, for a long time nothing much happened, until about 11,000 years ago when somebody invented agriculture. After that, human civilization took off – and the rest, as they say, is history. There is a glaring problem with this story though: if modern humans evolved 300,000  years ago, why did it take us 290,000 years to invent agriculture? It’s not as though agriculture would be all that difficult to invent! In fact it’s now accepted that after agriculture was invented in the Middle East 11,000 years ago, it was invented again independently on at least four separate occasions. This makes the claim that we went 290,000 years without inventing it before that seem even more fishy.

An alternative possibility is that we did invent agriculture before 11,000 years ago, perhaps many times, but then each time we subsequently forgot how to do it. This is rather implausible though, as if agriculture is relatively easy to invent, it is even easier keep doing it once it has been invented. Another possibility is that we invented agriculture before, but each time we invented it, for some reason civilization failed to develop. However, this also seems rather implausible, as almost every time agriculture has been invented in recent history, a civilization has subsequently followed. Agriculture was invented independently in the Middle East, China, Central America, and South America in the last 11,000 years, and in all these regions great civilizations then rose up.

There is another possibility: we invented agriculture many times, and civilizations did follow, but then these civilizations subsequently fell into decline, leaving no trace. On the face of it this seems equally implausible. Surely any reasonably advanced civilization would have leave some sort of evidence for its existence that would have been discovered by now? Well, not necessarily. If our current civilization ended tomorrow, vegetation, storms, fires, frost, rust, earthquakes and burrowing animal activity would erase most of our visible traces within a thousand years. It is therefore quite possible that civilizations could have risen and fallen several times within the past 300,000 years and left no evidence behind – in fact, given the timescale involved, it seems more likely than not.

Another reason that we may not have found any trace of previous civilizations is that the evidence may all be hidden underwater. Over the past 300,000 years, global sea levels have fluctuated significantly, with a rise of over 120 meters during inter-glacial cycles due to the growth and decay of ice sheets. If previous civilizations developed when sea levels were significantly lower then we wouldn’t have found any evidence for them, as it is very difficult to find archaeological evidence at the bottom of the ocean, and even more difficult to extract it! Perhaps flood-related myths like the city of Atlantis and Noah’s Ark aren’t myths at all, but are instead folk memories passed down through generations of events that actually occurred at some time in the distant past.

The idea that human civilization might be much older than generally thought was recently brought to my attention by a YouTuber named Michael Button. I highly recommend that you check out his channel! Button’s thesis is very similar in spirit to the thesis put forward in a 2021 book by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development of civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. According to Graeber and Wengrow, social emancipation can be found through this more accurate understanding of human history.

In particular, Graeber and Wengrow argue that narratives of social development in which western civilization is self-appointed to be the highest point of achievement to date in a linear progression are largely myths. They suggest that our central question is how modern societies have lost the qualities of flexibility and political creativity that were once more common. Their argument is backed up by scientific evidence that has come to light only in the last few decades. Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis is a helpful antidote to ‘Capitalist Realism’, the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

Those who argue that capitalism is the only viable system are guilty of what might be called the ‘argument from personal incredulity’. This argument takes the form: ‘I can’t personally imagine how X could happen, therefore X couldn’t happen!’. The truth is that there are many possible alternatives to capitalism. Just because it is difficult to imagine what these alternatives might be doesn’t demonstrate that they don’t exist; all that demonstrates is a lack of imagination. The work of Button on one hand, and Graeber and Wengrow on the other, opens our eyes to the possibility that human civilizations existed in the past that were structured in entirely different ways to our modern society. This, in turn, should give us hope that capitalism can be defeated and replaced with something better.