“We are nonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive—who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history.”

The authors make the decision to treat early humans, and their societies, as if they were distinct, specific, and rational beings, rather than as an undifferentiated mass of apolitical groups who possessed no agency in how they determined to build their societies. This has the effect of bringing into sharper focus the evidence for how early human societies conducted the business of everyday life as well as created the forms of governance that reflected their cultural values.

“As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian—or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents, or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.”

The entire book is a rebuttal to most large-scale attempts to describe the development of human history. These conventional narratives claim—without fully examining the range of evidence—that small bands of egalitarian forager-hunter groups eventually settled into agrarian societies, which led to cities, states, and empires, and, ultimately, hierarchical forms of rule. Instead, they offer an alternative story that suggests the development of human societies—and the inexorable drift into inequality—need not be inevitable, as the evidence provides avenues for a variety of possibilities.

“There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged conversations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time—even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking.”

Here, the authors refer to the Indigenous critique, wherein Indigenous thinkers and groups pointed out the contradictions, inequalities, and injustice within European societies. The authors argue that the Europeans learned more about the possibilities for egalitarianism in human societies from the Indigenous peoples than the other way around.