Graeber and Wengrow's final conclusions and questions: "what happens if we accord significance to the 5000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5000 in which it did?"
What if we looked at how "slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places," or at the fact that "the same is [very possibly] true of war"
"the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age (which is effectively what we have been doing here), they represent the vast majority of human social experience"
"What if we were to [...] look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?"