Anthropologist and Archaeologist
David Graeber (1961 to 2020) was an American anthropologist and activist at the London School of Economics, celebrated for his influential works including Debt: The First 5,000 Years. David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London, and together they co-authored The Dawn of Everything, a sweeping reinterpretation of human history.
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Graeber and Wengrow set out to dismantle the linear progress narrative shared by popular big-history books, arguing that prehistoric humans experimented with radically varied forms of social organisation rather than marching inexorably from egalitarian bands to hierarchical states. Drawing on recent archaeology, they attack the Hobbes-vs-Rousseau framing and insist that inequality was a choice, not an inevitability of scale.
The books David Graeber and David Wengrow references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Yuval Noah Harari
Harari traces how Homo sapiens conquered the planet not through physical strength but through shared fictions, money, religion, nations. These collective myths let strangers cooperate at scales no other species can match.
by Jared Diamond
Diamond argues that geography, not racial superiority, explains why some civilizations dominated others. Differences in domesticable plants, animals, and continental axes gave certain societies an insurmountable head start.
by Steven Pinker
Pinker marshals centuries of data to argue violence has declined dramatically across every measurable dimension. Reason, commerce, empathy, and the state drove this underappreciated progress.
by Jared Diamond
Diamond investigates why some societies collapse while others endure, tracing destruction to environmental damage and failed group decision-making. The past warns the present.
Who David draws from, and who draws from David — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.