What if everything we thought we knew about the origins of human civilisation is a myth?

The collaborator of the late, legendary anthropologist David Graeber joins Yanis Varoufakis to overturn everything you think you know about the history of human civilisation.
We all know how the story of humankind begins. Our remote ancestors were primitive and childlike, living in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. Then came farming and property, priests and kings, wealth and its unavoidable consequence: inequality.

Drawing on cutting edge archaeological evidence, the late David Graeber and his collaborator David Wengrow have told an ambitious and revelatory new history of the world – one that overturns the notion of Rosseau’s innocent Noble Savage and the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives of Thomas Hobbes alike.

Now, in conversation with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, David Wengrow will take us from egalitarian early cities in Mexico and Mesopotamia to part-time kings and queens in Ice Age Europe, and challenge our assumptions about the origins of cities, democracy, slavery, and civilisation itself.

This livestream event will transform your understanding of our past and offer a powerful, playful, and extraordinarily original vision of our future.

Yanis Varoufakis is the author of the bestselling Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism and two previous books. Born in Athens in 1961, Yanis Varoufakis was for many years a professor of economics in Britain, Australia and the USA before he entered politics. He is co-founder of the international grassroots movement, DiEM25, and in 2019 won election as one of its representatives in the Greek Parliament. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of three books, including What Makes Civilization? Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.


(Recorded in January 2022)