'I'm Certainly Open to Criticism': David Wengrow and the Trouble with Rewriting Human History - The Guardian

One of last year's most exciting works on the human past has drawn both acclaim and criticism from academics. Andrew Anthony talks to David Wengrow about his collaboration with the late David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Covered: the book, its criticism, and the "public conversation about change" that he hopes comes from their collaboration. Andrew Lawler's 2021 book Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City is itself not contentious, but includes The Controversial Quest to Find the Ancient Ark of the Covenant. Referencing Lawler's work, reporter Patricia Claus describes an expedition whose composition and antics seem so comedic they draw some attention away from their serious consequences. A major evolutionary bone of contention is the subject of Ruth Schuster's Archaeologists Detect Hominin Use of Fire a Million Years Ago in Israel. New spectroscopic techniques employing artificial intelligence indicate fire usage at a spectacularly prehistoric occupation site. This raises questions about how the fire was created and contributes to the debate about fire's possible role in human physical development. Fire also figures in a discovery connected with human organizational development, as the World's 'Earliest Domestication' of Fruit Trees Reveals 'Complex Society' in the Jordan Valley. Nir Hasson explains the significance of charcoal analysis from a c. 5000 BCE site. (WM)

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from THE ANOMALIST https://bit.ly/3HHs85m