THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY

A historian casts a wide net across the ages to look at how the concept of the “deep past” has been used to justify and project wrong-headed and arrogant theories about human behavior and motivation.

In a stunningly comprehensive work of epistemological research, Geroulanos—a professor of history at NYU, where he is the director of the Remarque Institute, and the author of a number of academic books—looks at the ways man (and they have been mostly men) has organized prehistory to fit his uses, from Rousseau’s writing on the “noble savage” to what may be revealed by the recent mapping of the Neanderthal genome. Scientists have long been fascinated by what the earliest humans can tell us, and the author gradually chronicles how the more we learned about our distant ancestors, the less we have actually “evolved.” The author clearly shows how Eurocentric standards still prevail in how we organize history, and he concentrates much of his prodigious research on the power of language in determining our “epic myths”—e.g., the use of the term primitive in characterizing Indigenous peoples and thus justifying exploitation and extermination. Throughout his consistently illuminating narrative, Geroulanos explores the work of many influential writers, scientists, and theorists, including Darwin, who spurred new theories about “the ascent of man”; Thomas Henry Huxley, who “demonstrated structural homologies between human and ape skeletons”; and Freud, who “proposed that…there is no individual without the group first” and theorized that “guilt, murder, and the renunciation of sex had launched civilization.” Given the catastrophic destruction of the world wars and other massive conflicts in the 20th century, the Holocaust, and other genocides that continue to occur around the world, Geroulanos effectively exposes how little separates modern humans from the idea of the “barbarian.”

An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.