Reading chapter 7, “The Ecology of Freedom” (249-275) in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, we explore how Graeber and Wengrow dismantle the myth that agricultural adoption inevitably led to hierarchy and state formation. Drawing on evidence from 14+ independent centers of domestication worldwide, they demonstrate that early farming societies pursued radically diverse pathways—some successful, others catastrophic failures—challenging teleological narratives that assume our present arrangements were predetermined 10,000 years ago.
Flexibility Over Specialization: The Ecology of Freedom
Rethinking the Fertile Crescent: Reluctant Farmers and Common Land
Graeber and Wengrow begin by revisiting the Fertile Crescent, one of the most intensively studied archaeological regions outside Europe. Rather than confirming a simple narrative of agricultural origins leading directly to state formation, decades of research have revealed increasing complexity. Early farmers in the Fertile Crescent maintained diverse subsistence strategies, drawing heavily on wild resources even as they experimented with domesticating plants and animals in ecological niches across lowland and upland zones.
The authors emphasize what they call “reluctant first farmers”—people who did not stake everything on agricultural production but maintained flexibility through flood retreat agriculture and diverse foraging. Crucially, early land tenure systems featured communal ownership rather than private property, with open field principles and commonly held pasture lands. This pattern appears globally across many early agricultural societies, contradicting assumptions about the “tragedy of the commons” and challenging the notion that farming inevitably meant the inception of private property, territoriality, and hierarchy.
Fourteen Centers of Domestication: Rejecting the Diffusionist Model
The standard narrative once held that agriculture arose in four to five core regions—the Fertile Crescent, Mesoamerica, South America, and Asia—from which crops and farming rapidly diffused outward, quickly spawning population centers, cities, and states. This story has been almost completely revised. Archaeological and botanical evidence now demonstrates at least 14 independent centers of plant and animal domestication worldwide, including regions in India, West Africa, Papua New Guinea, eastern North America, and Japan.
Moreover, agriculture did not spread uniformly or inevitably. In some regions, people actively rejected farming despite proximity to agricultural societies and knowledge of cultivation techniques. California’s Indigenous peoples, for instance, chose not to adopt corn, beans, or squash from neighboring regions, even though they cultivated tobacco and clearly understood agricultural principles. (For more on Pacific Coast peoples’ deliberate rejection of agriculture as schismogenesis, see Chapter 5.) Archaeological evidence suggests that in the American Southwest, some societies actually moved away from intensive farming toward increased hunting and gathering, possibly influenced by expanding Californian foraging traditions.
This selective adoption and rejection of agriculture contradicts Jared Diamond’s hypothesis that farming spread rapidly along latitudinal lines due to similar climates but slowly along longitudinal axes. Maize cultivation spread from Mexico to the northeastern United States within 2,000-2,500 years, crossing dramatic climate zones. If latitude alone determined agricultural diffusion, California would not have rejected crops that thrived in similar climate zones. The pattern suggests cultural choice rather than environmental determinism.
Ecological Imperialism and the Anthropocene
Graeber and Wengrow argue that our mental model of agricultural spread derives largely from the last 500 years of European ecological imperialism—the creation of “neo-Europes” through the displacement of Indigenous peoples, introduction of Old World crops and livestock, and massive environmental transformation. New England serves as the paradigmatic example, where European colonizers recreated familiar landscapes by clearing forests and establishing agricultural systems that resembled the English countryside.
This process of ecological transformation coincided with catastrophic depopulation of the Americas through disease, violence, and displacement. Some scholars date the beginning of the Anthropocene to 1610, marking the first measurable global climate change caused by human activity—specifically, the mass death of Indigenous peoples in the Americas combined with the forced trans-oceanic movement of enslaved Africans. (For the full argument about when the Anthropocene began and why blaming human nature lets colonial extractivism off the hook, see Anthropocene Anthropology.) This model of rapid agricultural expansion linked to imperial conquest, however, bears little resemblance to the slow, experimental, and often reversible agricultural adoptions of 10,000 years ago.
The Holocene: A Golden Age for Hunters and Gatherers
Why did agriculture only emerge around 10,000 years ago if humans were cognitively capable of farming much earlier? The answer lies partly in climate. The Eemian interglacial period 130,000 years ago provided suitable conditions for agriculture, but Homo sapiens populations remained concentrated in Africa and had not yet dispersed to regions where farming would later develop. The Holocene warming period that began roughly 12,000 years ago provided both favorable climate conditions and widespread human populations across diverse environments.
Critically, Graeber and Wengrow characterize the Holocene as a golden age not for farmers, but for hunters, gatherers, and especially fishers. Warming climates created expanded river systems, productive marine environments, and rich terrestrial ecosystems. Hunting and gathering populations expanded into these prime territories, while early farmers—whom the authors call “cultural underdogs”—moved into marginal lands that foragers found less desirable. This inverts the modern pattern where agricultural societies have pushed hunter-gatherers into the world’s most inhospitable environments.
Three Patterns of Early Agricultural Expansion
Graeber and Wengrow examine three early farming traditions that spread into new territories: the Linear Pottery culture of central Europe (circa 5500 BCE), the cattle-herding societies of the Nile Valley, and the Lapita Horizon of the Pacific. Despite vast differences in geography, crops, and cultural practices, these three cases shared significant commonalities.
First, all three represented serious agricultural commitments—populations heavily dependent on specific crops or livestock rather than maintaining diverse subsistence strategies. Second, all three expanded into territories not dominated by established hunter-gatherer populations, avoiding direct competition for prime foraging lands. The Linear Pottery culture settled in the less desirable interior regions of Europe rather than the rich maritime zones. The Lapita Horizon sailors, who accomplished the remarkable feat of deep-ocean voyaging with outrigger canoes, spread across Pacific islands but notably did not colonize Australia with its established foraging populations. Nile Valley herders focused on cattle pastoralism along the river system, developing what would become the cultural foundations of ancient Egypt deep in the African interior.
Third, these societies maintained relatively rigid cultural boundaries, traveling as coherent groups with shared languages and cultural packages rather than intermixing extensively with neighboring populations. The Linear Pottery culture, however, experienced catastrophic failure—archaeological evidence points to violence, massacres, and even cannibalism before cereal farming in the region paused for another thousand years. Their collapse may have resulted from over-dependence on a narrow range of crops, making their agricultural system brittle and vulnerable to environmental or social stress.
The Amazon Alternative: Flexible Agriculture Without Boundaries
In contrast to these bounded agricultural expansions, Amazonian societies practiced a fundamentally different form of farming. Rather than committing exclusively to agriculture, they maintained seasonal variation between farming, hunting, and gathering—the pattern Lévi-Strauss documented among the Nambikwara with their alternating political systems. Amazonian peoples did not domesticate large animals but kept captured forest animals as pets, blurring Western distinctions between wild and domestic. They viewed forest animals not as “wild” but as controlled by spirits and equally “tamed” within their conceptual framework.
Agricultural practices in the Amazon involved soil enrichment through methods not entirely understood today, distinct from the slash-and-burn techniques now common in the region. Societies spread along river systems, establishing trading networks rather than colonizing territories or displacing existing populations. The distribution of Arawak languages illustrates this pattern: small centers along waterways connected through exchange rather than territorial expansion. This represents agriculture intermixed with other modes of production, maintaining what Graeber and Wengrow call the “ecology of freedom.”
The Ecology of Freedom: Flexibility as Social Value
Taking their chapter title from Murray Bookchin’s work, Graeber and Wengrow argue that early agricultural societies—and perhaps most societies throughout history—prioritized flexibility over specialized commitment to any single mode of production. People valued the ability to hunt here, farm there, fish elsewhere, shifting strategies seasonally or as circumstances changed. Even societies that intensified agricultural production often maintained foraging values and practices, refusing total dependence on domesticated resources.
This flexibility principle helps explain both the success and failure of different agricultural experiments. Societies that maintained diverse subsistence strategies proved more resilient than those committed to narrow sets of crops or techniques. The catastrophic collapse of the Linear Pottery culture may exemplify the dangers of agricultural over-specialization, reducing ecological diversity and social adaptability in ways that made populations vulnerable to cascading failures.
The Dangers of Teleological Reasoning
In their concluding section, “Why Does It All Matter,” Graeber and Wengrow confront what they call teleological reasoning—the assumption that historical outcomes were predetermined from the beginning, as if history ran on fixed tracks toward inevitable destinations. A skeptic might argue that regardless of diverse pathways, agriculture ultimately unlocked land’s carrying capacity, enabled large population centers, necessitated hierarchical governance, and required agricultural surpluses to feed administrators. From this view, the endpoint justifies dismissing thousands of years of historical complexity as mere detours on a predetermined route.
Graeber and Wengrow identify two critical dangers in this reasoning. First, teleological narratives fundamentally misrepresent history, transforming actual complexity and contingency into simplified fairy tales or myths. By erasing 3,000 years of agricultural societies without states and the genuine diversity of human social experimentation, we lose understanding of the real range of human political and economic possibilities.
Second—and perhaps more insidiously—teleological reasoning about the past forecloses possibilities for the future. If we accept that agriculture inevitably produces hierarchy, and acknowledge that returning to universal hunting-gathering is impossible, we declare that hierarchical domination is inescapable. This closes off entire realms of political imagination and practical possibility. If history could have been different—if societies made genuine choices about social organization—then future societies can make different choices too.
Cities Without Rulers: The Question Ahead
The chapter concludes by posing the question that will drive the next section of the book: Do large, densely populated settlements really require mayors, governors, police forces, and bureaucracies to rule over them? The assumption that scaling up society necessitates command-and-control hierarchies has been treated as axiomatic in much social science and popular thought. But Graeber and Wengrow frame this as an open question, preparing to present archaeological and historical evidence of cities organized on very different principles—what they provocatively call “imaginary cities” in the sense that we can barely imagine their non-hierarchical organization today.
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