The Invention of Prehistory
Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity—and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others.
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.
The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.
As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NYU historian Geroulanos (The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe) offers an incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory. Tracing how modern notions of humanity's origins have often mixed scientific research with political mythmaking, Geroulanos characterizes prehistory as a "pretend foundation" that does little more than codify the current era's hierarchies of power. First galvanized by contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, Enlightenment-era speculation about deep-time history was influenced by existing social theories, according to Geroulanos. The most impactful of these was philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's description of Indigenous Americans as more virtuous and "primitive" than Europeans, which drew on his already developed ideas about the naturally pure condition of children. Across the ensuing centuries, Geroulanos shows, this notion of Indigenous peoples as a version of humanity still in its childhood gave rise to phrenology and "race science," which further bolstered bunk prehistorical narratives. Examples include 19th-century research into humanity's origins via the study of contemporaneous Indigenous peoples' bones—as if they were living fossils—and the 20th-century idea of a pure "Aryan" race poorly extrapolated from the theoretical existence of an Indo-European proto-language. Indicting today's research into prehistory, Geroulanos charges that reconstructions of ancient DNA rely on inherently biased data sets. In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It's a must-read.
