I’m conflicted about this one. It was a fun read and the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” definitely deserves the type of debunking the author is attempting. The lives of our hunter/gatherer forbears were not as nasty, brutish, or short as the proponents of the myth of progress would have us all believe. However, their lifestyles were not as idyllic, peaceful, and sustainable as the author would have us believe either. He rightly takes scientists like Steven Pinker to task for cherrypicking data in “The Better Angels of Our Natures”, but he does the same thing himself to paint the rosiest possible picture of pre-agricultural societies. He also lost me when he started going on about magic mushrooms. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining book and the author makes a lot of very valid points. For further reading on this topic, I highly recommend Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and Craig Dilworth’s “Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind”