In what follows, I take evolutionists to be scholars who see some conceptual continuity between human history and biological evolution, who consider sociocultural evolution to be governed by identifiable mechanisms functioning somewhat like natural selection, who see these mechanisms as involving adaptation to the environment, who believe that the mechanisms operate on all societies regardless of time and space, and—usually, but not always—who recognize stages of social and cultural evolution, from egalitarian foraging bands through hierarchical agricultural empires and pastoral tribes, to modern fossil-fuel-based nation-states.

Where Harari and Diamond offered evolutionist accounts of history,3 Graeber and Wengrow are explicitly anti-evolutionist. Dawn deserves admiration for being the most extended and detailed rebuttal to evolutionism this century—and it provokes exasperation for precisely the same reason.