state & statism Archives

The New Yorker

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

ALTERNATIVES

The case against civilisation: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?

5th October 2017

From The New Yorker: Recent research shows a gap of 4000 years separating the “two key domestications,” of animals and cereals, from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt it; because the life they lived was remarkably abundant….

Education/Awareness

The domestication of humankind

27th July 2017

From Pragati: Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, governed by precursors of today’s states? Anirudh Kanisetti reviews James Scott’s lucid Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, which provides surprising new evidence that refutes mainstream narratives of how civilization came into being….