Celebrating Diversity: A Selection from David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021)

“We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggeration are often catastrophic. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are. By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable. Whether you go to Bosnia, Japan, Rwanda or the Baffin Islands, you can expect to see people with the same small and gracile faces, chin, globular skull and roughly the same distribution of body hair. Not only do we look the same, in many ways we act the same as well (for instance, everywhere from the Australian outback to Amazonia, rolling one’s eyes is a way of saying ‘what an idiot!’). The same applies to cognition. We might think different groups of humans realize their cognitive capacities in very different ways – and to some extent, of course, we do – but again, much of this perceived difference results from our having no real basis for comparison: there’s no human language, for instance, that doesn’t have nouns, verbs and adjectives; and while humans may enjoy very different forms of music and dance, there’s no known human population that does not enjoy music and dancing at all.

Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case.

For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannahs, as previously thought: our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape. Some of those populations remained isolated from each another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed. The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past. Those elements that make up modern humans – the relatively uniform ‘us’ referred to above – seem only to have come together quite late in the process. In other words, if we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.”—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)