Sublime

The ‘Anglian’ settlement at West Heslerton was a close-set but organized affair, with discrete areas devoted to animal husbandry and crafts, housing and burial (Figure 3). On either side of the stream that emanated from the spring, dozens of grubenhäuser used for grain storage were enclosed by clearly defined rectangular fenced or ditched pens. A m

When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’.

the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends

As David Graeber and David Wengrow showed us in their book The Dawn of Everything (2021), being an isolated individual is not the norm for human beings; it’s an extraordinary and costly achievement, and a phenomenon tied to particular social conditions.

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

At places like Çatal Hüyük and Jericho, humans and their domesticated plants and animals became for the first time physically and psychologically separate from the life of untamed nature and the howling unknown.