As a contemporary archaeologist, I may appear a strange reviewer for David Graeber and David Wengrow's welcome tome The dawn of everything, which deals, at eye-watering scale, with Neolithic and Palaeolithic archaeology, pre- and post-European invasion. Strange, except that this intellectual bounty is foremost about why human freedom is still possible. The authors’ ‘Three Freedoms’—freedom of movement, freedom to disobey and freedom to shape new social realities—could hardly be more relevant to our present time. Eagerly anticipated from first whisperings of preparation—more so following the truly tragic death of David Graeber—in just weeks, this brave, largely anarchist revision of the origins of human social organisation has had enormous impact on how archaeologists and, arguably more crucially, non-specialists think about the origins of humankind. Such is the barrage of critical interest, the volume has already received multiple reviews, including in podcasts and the international press. This review focuses on the wider contribution that the book makes to feminist revisions of the development of knowledge and how it provides much needed hope for the future.

It is evident that this book arose from playful conversations between two eminently qualified friends. The written style is convivial and full of humour. Social scientific jargon is clarified in plain English as the authors set out to persuade the reader that received understandings of the broad sweep of human history are mostly wrong, and to offer less linear interpretations of a huge global and temporal range of archaeological evidence. The first part of the book is a riotous ride that takes no prisoners—Pinker, Harari and Diamond join Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau in taking a battering. Convincingly, the authors propose that the rehearsed narrative that human freedoms were inevitably lost as societies grew bigger, was invented (via the Enlightenment) predominantly to neutralise Indigenous critique of ‘Western’ conceptions of the world. As someone untrained in prehistoric archaeology, I leave others to comment on the hard science. As an ethnographic archaeologist working with contemporary, displaced people who are often forced to survive in the diminishing cracks of global capitalism, however, I am wholly convinced by the authors’ argument that humans have the capacity (if not, today, the legal right) to reflect on the consequences of a particular direction that could be taken and to choose a different path. Given their relative freedom of movement and freedom to disobey, compared with people today, isn't it entirely plausible that those in the deep past developed, abandoned, resisted and reconfigured societies until there was nowhere left to go?

Throughout the book, women—not only white women—are properly recognised as scientists and agents in the development of knowledge, past and present. Raising the thorny possibility of Neolithic matriarchies, the authors offer validation of previously dismissed scholarly work by American feminist and Indigenous rights defender, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898), who argued that ‘caring’ institutions were modelled on the relationship of mother to child, and Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), who argued for women's autonomy in the Middle Eastern and European Neolithic. The authors propose that mathematics probably grew from plant-based knowledge first obtained by non-white women, referring not only to an awareness of how plants could be used, for example, for food, medicine and pigment, but also to plant fibre-based industries, which likely generated abstract concepts of time and space.

Chapters 8–10 read as a manifesto of hope for the future, galvanising claims that archaeology and anthropology have clear relevance to present-day global inequalities, from Black Lives Matter to the environmental crisis. From Ukrainian mega-sites to self-governing Mesopotamian urbanites, the seemingly non-violent Uruk expansion to potentially the world's first documented social revolution in Taosi, and the Indigenous origins of social housing in Mesoamerica, the authors provide compelling evidence for the existence of egalitarian social organisation at large urban scales. Diverse examples of urban gatherings, coupled with robust explanation for why the state has no origin, invite the reader to imagine, revitalising hope that there are alternatives to the iniquitous shambles of global capitalism and violent nationalism. While much remains unknown, this book poses serious challenges to evolutionary assumptions that there are causal connections between the origins of cities, the rise of state apparatuses, and inequalities.

My one major criticism is that, although Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that they “follow in their footsteps” (p. 31), they fail to justly cite enough work by contemporary Indigenous scholars, whose labour contributes to the intellectual ground upon which this book is founded. For a book that concludes it is not improbable that the Enlightenment began in sixteenth-century Turtle Island (North America), it is frustrating that contemporary Indigenous scholarship is not centred (highlighted in bold, font size 48!). Countless reading groups dedicated solely to discussing this book levy the criticism that this is ‘two white men writing humanity's history (again)’. I do not fully agree. To criticise white men for being white men is racist and sexist. But it is undeniably true that archaeological interpretation was dominated by white male perspectives for some time. Everyone must prioritise the amplification of diverse voices as they contribute to the shared project of liberation.

Graeber and Wengrow recognise the geographical limitations of their research, which is entirely understandable, given the scope of the book. They also note several gaps which could usefully be addressed. Two of these are urban development in Sub-Saharan Africa before the spread of Islam, and the lack of any critical introductory guide to Francisco Cervantes de Salazar's unfinished Crónica de la Nueva España (1558–1563), rediscovered in Madrid in 1911 by archaeologist, Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (1857–1933). To my mind, these are vital future research projects to be led by Black and Indigenous scholars. It is imperative that the courageous, radical train of thought set in motion eloquently by Graeber and Wengrow speeds on, collating evidence for human freedom at large urban scales from every past that science can access.