1 . Concerns have existed long about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots as partly a by-product of living in large, urban populations. The bigger the crowd, from this perspective, the greater the distance is between the wealthy and those left wanting.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the assumption that bigger societies surely produce a range of inequalities. Using examples from past societies, the pair also rejects the popular idea that social development occurred in stages.
Such stages, according to conventional wisdom, began with humans living in small hunter-gatherer bands where everyone was on equal footing. Then an agricultural revolution (变革) about 12, 000 years ago fueled population growth and the appearance of tribes (部落) and eventually states.
This assumption makes no sense to Graeber and Wengrow. Their research, which extends for 526 pages, paints a more hopeful picture of social life over the last 30, 000 to 40, 000 years. Hunter-gatherers have a long history of changing social systems from one season to the next, the authors write. About a century ago, researchers observed that native populations in North America and elsewhere often operated in small, mobile groups for part of the year and formed large, settled communities the rest of the year. For example, each winter, Canada’s Northwest Coast Kwakiutl hunter-gatherers built wooden structures while in summers, they separated, and fished along the coast in less formal social ranks.
Social flexibility and experimentation, rather than a revolutionary shift, also characterized ancient transitions (转变) to agriculture, Graeber and Wengrow write. Middle Eastern village sites now indicate that the domestication (驯化) of crops occurred on and off from around 12, 000 to 9, 000 years ago. Ancient Fertile Crescent communities regularly gave farming a go while still hunting, gathering, fishing, and trading. Early people were in no rush to treat land as private property or to form political systems headed by kings, the authors conclude.
1. What might The Dawn of Everything mainly deal with?| A．Historic stages. | B．Social inequalities. |
| C．Historic revolution. | D．Social development. |
| A．They progressed in stages. | B．They started with inequality. |
| C．They began with small tribes. | D．They benefited from population growth. |
| A．By listing figures. | B．By offering examples. |
| C．By giving a definition. | D．By making a comparison. |
| A．A fixed political system. | B．Flexibility of society. |
| C．A regular revolutionary shift. | D．Improvement of crops. |
