Undomesticated: A Brief History of the Search for Human Nature

Many believe that we became human by creating civilization. We do not think highly of our savage ancestors. We imagine them as brutal half-animals, dirty, swaggering, promiscuous, and plagued with diseases. Anthropologists, who have studied contemporary hunter-gatherer people for more than a century, have shown the opposite. Hunter-gatherers, who followed the lifestyle of our prehistoric ancestors, had better health and a longer lifespan than civilized humans ever had before the last two centuries, and their average work week lasted about 15 hours. This gave rise to the view that some 10,000 years ago our species took a wrong evolutionary step by trapping itself in an agro-complex, or Domus, an anthropocentric ecosystem hostile to the rest of the biosphere. In essence, by surrounding itself with domesticated species, homo sapiens itself became domesticated. Since then civilized humanity has been suffering from evolutionary dysphoria, an unconscious pressure of the evolutionary misstep on the psyche. Evolutionary dysphoria brought humans to invent gods to guide and comfort them on their path to extinction, and caused them to desperately search for an explanation of human nature.
This book sketches a genealogy of answers to the question "What is the human being?" arriving at the notion of an ancestral baseline of human behavior that can be learned from our non-domesticated ancestors. Authenticating ourselves through the hunter-gatherer lifestyle does not mean becoming cavemen again; it means opening our minds to our ancestors to develop beneficial cultural mutations that might restore our species to a long evolutionary future.
The book owes a lot to anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer peoples of the 20th century, and to recent reconstructions of late prehistory by James C. Scott (Against the Grain) and David Graeber & David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything), and of prehistoric sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (Sex at Dawn). Despite its serious tone, it is not a scholarly monograph and does not claim to establish scientific truth. It is rather a provocative narrative that tries to integrate the immense effort of our species to understand what the hell we are. You'll love this book if you liked Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari or The Dawn of Everything by Graeber & Wengrow.