Why does this "rewrite" seem so familiar to those Marxists familiar with the writings of Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, The League of the Iroquois) Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) and Vere Gordon Childe (Man Makes Himself, What Happened in History) and many other historians, archaeologists and anthropologists in the Marxist tradition. I haven't read the book under discussion but there is nothing in this review that will not sound old hat to those educated in the tradition of Marxist historiography and dialectical and historical materialism. If you have had a throughly conventional bourgeois education, reading this book would probably be helpful, but if it's an American education you probably won't know anything about what they are discussing unless your own curiosity and initiative has led you to study these issues.
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