The book is of theme similar to Hariri’s “Sapiens”, but they take a contrarian approach to the standard model of how human society evolved to what we have today. They discuss a lot about the pre-Columbus Americas that I’ve never been exposed to. A heavy read. (Partly, the authors’ political bias is counter to mine, so it’s sometimes grating. Graeber in particular is hard-left. He was one of the organizers of the “occupy wall street” movement).
Graeber wrote another book called “Debt”. I got interested last year in trying to understand the hype around Bitcoin, which led to trying to understand the history of money. The Debt book suggests that debt came before money. Person-to-person debt was normal in small groups of humans. Money was “invented” to keep track of debt, and then debt became more and more impersonal. Again, a contrarian approach.