I recently finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow. I highly recommend the book for its argument about how evidence from recent decades disrupts the common idea that people moved from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and cities and “civilization.” The reason I put civilization in quotes has to do with the argument they make regarding the freedoms humans used to have:

If we do not have these freedoms today what went wrong? The argument and the evidence is worth considering.