The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures,

Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the

Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.

that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues.

thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power.

This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another.

While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small,17 the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression.18

complex symbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’.

it is almost certainly misguided to think we could ever specify a single, more recent point in time when Homo sapiens ‘emerged’