Having read the book:Pro:It's a great question and mission.I'm sympathetic to their general critiques and main points e.g.:
- prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us
- there's a ton to learn from them.
- there is not enough evidence to accept an inevitable path to a state with ever growing power.
- prehistoric people tried a bunch of different societal types we can hardly conceive of.
- We should strive to be as experimental and playful.
- There is interesting new evidence in there (e.g. about potentially non-authoritarian per-historic societies)
Con:
- Evidence / word ratio very low
- Authors have a HUGE Ax to grind. even if I like some portion of that axe, I can't afford to trust them, they are more biased than the folks they attack (not that I like Yuval Harari so much either...)
- Poor reasoning processes: 1)X is conceivable 2) Y might be evidence of X, 3) (Much later) As we demonstrated: X is True
- Super repetitive
So net, I'd say read a few reviews (e.g. Tides of History) and skip the actual book, and hope we can find some better avatars for this mission.
Go listen to some Mike Duncan podcasts.
- prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us
- there's a ton to learn from them.
- there is not enough evidence to accept an inevitable path to a state with ever growing power.
- prehistoric people tried a bunch of different societal types we can hardly conceive of.
- We should strive to be as experimental and playful.
- There is interesting new evidence in there (e.g. about potentially non-authoritarian per-historic societies)
Con:
- Evidence / word ratio very low
- Authors have a HUGE Ax to grind. even if I like some portion of that axe, I can't afford to trust them, they are more biased than the folks they attack (not that I like Yuval Harari so much either...)
- Poor reasoning processes: 1)X is conceivable 2) Y might be evidence of X, 3) (Much later) As we demonstrated: X is True
- Super repetitive
So net, I'd say read a few reviews (e.g. Tides of History) and skip the actual book, and hope we can find some better avatars for this mission. Go listen to some Mike Duncan podcasts.