The Dawn of Everything:
A New History of Humanity
David Graeber and David Wengrow
February 19: Anthropology and Social Justice: Reflections on the link between social activism and knowledge production as seen in The Dawn of Everything. Based on Chapters 1-5 in the book.
Presenter: Oystein LaBianca: recently retired from Andrews University, leader of the archeological dig at the Hesbon Site in Jordan.
February 26: Deep Time and Deeper Time: a paleobotanist ponders the dawn of everything. Based on Chapters 6-9 in the book.
Presenter: Kirk Johnson: geologist, paleobotanist, and the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History
March 5: The Challenge of building a stable and supportive human society: Some early human examples based on Chapters 9-11 and Conclusion.
Presenter: J. Mailen Kootsey: retired multidisciplinary scientist and Sabbath Seminars class technology leader.
For three weeks starting February 19, the LLUC Sabbath Seminars discussion class will be considering the book named above. In the past, our class has read Harari’s Sapiens and other works describing a linear evolution model for the development of human societies from hunter-gatherers to industrial societies. Graeber and Wengrow disagree with that hypothesis, based on a large volume of anthropological data. Presenting this book in three sessions will necessitate some selections because the book text totals over 500 pages. It is well written, however, and the many examples are fascinating.
If you don’t wish to tackle 500+ pages, Amazon offers about a dozen summaries€ of this book. Most of these are junk, apparently written by individuals for whom English is a second language. The Summaries unfortunately do not include the many examples in this book. The three passable ones are as follows:
Oliver Gary, author. 97 pages. Unfortunately, this summary only covers eight of the twelve chapters.
From Rapid Reads, 29 pages.
From Quick Reads, 30 pages
. Since the passing of our former class member Erv Taylor, we no longer have a professional anthropologist to lead out in discussing a book of ancient human history. We will, however, be introducing two new presenters that have other professional connections to ancient human history; We know you will enjoy these two individuals
You may obtain The Dawn of Everything at:
Amazon (hardcopy or Kindle download)
Sabbath Seminars
Room 3208
Centennial Complex of Loma Linda University Sabbath Morning 10:30-12:30