David Wengrow: everything we know about the human story is wrong

Archaeologist David Wengrow has discovered an entirely new way to think about the history of humanity, from the origins of farming, cities, democracy and slavery to civilisation itself.

What sort of world could we create if we stopped believing that inequality is the price of progress?

More than a decade ago, archaeologist David Wengrow started exploring this question with his friend the late David Graeber, an anthropologist.

Together they unearthed a new picture of humanity's past and our shared future.

The two Davids found many examples from human history of societies which flourished without kings, bureaucracies, palaces and poorhouses.

They realised that the notion that humans have to surrender equality for modernity is not only untrue; it's boring, because it fails to recognise how politically creative humans can be.

On Anzac Day in 1935, a tiger shark vomited up a tattooed human arm inside a Sydney aquarium.

When Phil Roope looked into the cold case he found an astounding true tale of Sydney's fascination and horror around sharks in the 1930s, a severed arm emblazed with boxing tattoos, a homicide, police corruption, a Gladstone Bag, and a thriving smuggling racket for drugs, stockings and lead paint.

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Further information

Shark Arm is published by Allen and Unwin

Further information

The Dawn of Everything is published by Penguin

Richard's conversation with David Wengrow was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival