To call “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow a “new history of humanity” — its subtitle— undersells the project considerably.

The book begins by rethinking questions we should be seeking to answer in history. A passion project for the two scholars, the book draws on new literature across social sciences, including archeology, history and anthropology, to write a history not of the origins of inequality, but of how Western political philosophy moved from a medieval cosmology that celebrated inequality to treating it as a social problem.

It is a huge, looping book — over 500 pages — that takes what seem like long diversions in each chapter. At times it feels more like a collection of essays rather than a cohesive argument. There are chapters on when European philosophers started talking to Wendat philosophers, the self-conscious splits in culture between northern and central native Pacific groups, why there is very little evidence for princes in the stone age, and why there was no agricultural revolution.

Out of these seemingly divergent chapters, though, emerges a clear point: that people throughout history were familiar with a broad range of options for societal organization and often self-consciously choose their political and religious systems, rather than being forced into them by particular modes of production.

In prehistory and modern history alike, we have archeological and anthropological evidence of groups moving between different systems of government throughout the year, from centralized to decentralized and back again. People knew how to grow plants for thousands of years before grains took over as the main source of calories, and massive Mayan cities moved between noble or priestly rulers to something that looked much more like councils, complete with public housing. Their answer to why modern western thinkers ask questions about equality and inequality is in part because Haudenosaunee philosophers, not far removed from their own brush with authoritarian government, had honed critiques of unequal societies which they turned on European society. The Europeans had to find a way to respond.

This is a book opposed to a teleological or materialist view of history. It uses each chapter to make a series of black swan arguments — if there have been egalitarian cities and autocracies of hunter gatherers, then it is hard to argue that societies progress in lockstep, with larger and more hierarchal social organizations as they unlock technologies. States with sovereignty and an administration to organize things for that sovereign are, the authors argue, neither inevitable or all that common outside of relatively recent times in Eurasia. Instead, they argue, people throughout history have debated, attempted, rejected and embraced a variety of ways to organize society. It leaves an impression of times and places without history (in the technical sense of surviving written documents) not as static, simplistic societies but dynamic, even playful ones.

If all the book did was provide some idea of what humanity was up to outside of recorded history, it would be well worth reading. But as the authors make explicit, this expanded view of social possibility ones has important consequences for not only our history, but our future as well. If our ancestors could play with their society, perhaps we can too.