The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

by Stefanos Geroulanos

An eminent historian demonstrates how claims about the origins of humanity have been used to justify many of the worst events of the last three hundred years. Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while major newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculation about what those findings might tell us about ourselves. 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 history of prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos moves from Rousseau’s “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled. Yet as he shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past, Geroulanos argues―and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. 101 images

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Sociology, Science, Philosophy, Prehistory

512 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2024

Reviews

[Joseph St Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book with little interest in accuracy, evidence, or scientific methods. Rather, all theories are seemingly just speculation grounded in biases, which are to be evaluated by whose interests they appear to benefit. Disappointing for those who would have liked to learn about the history of prehistory.

[David]

The title should have been The Political Uses of Prehistorical Language. But I'm not sure that is catchy enough.

[lindsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough start, but it really picked up once the book reached topics that the author is very obviously more interested in — colonialism and anti colonialism, the banality of violence of the liberal international order, the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. The problem was that this comprised maybe half the chapters, and the rest felt like filler. The epilogue is such a banger though that I ended up really appreciating the book once the author allowed his politics to shine through. An excerpt: “At this point, the concept of the human is the emptiest concept of all. The entire language in which prehistory arose, sustained itself, and continues today — a language that, as the scientists of our origins never tire of telling us, teaches us what it means to be human — is a language of real power disavowed. If it has on occasion helped break down some divisions between humans, it enables others to live on…. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, and that it is our “human nature.” When early humanity is presented as violent or weak, we pronounce ourselves triumphant. When it is presented as strong or complex, we empathize with it. Prehistory has been a mirror…. It is time for our existence, our politics, and our work for a more equal, more just, and plainly fairer world not to be refracted through that mirror.”

[(craig) · Rating 4 out of 5]

why is everyone else reviewing this book so annoying wtf

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

An examination on how the study of human origins has always been more about the culture of the studiers than the studied, and how the discoveries are far too often used to justify the subjugation and prejudice of living people.

I found the beginning of the book, in which Enlightenment-era thinkers study prehistoric skulls and use them as "proof" of their superiority over their neighbors was interesting, and sort of funny. The middle of the book, in which Industrial-era specialists use their findings to justify racism against colonial subjects, was less my jam. Not only was the subject matter far drier, the concepts about scientific racism and eugenics were all pretty gross to the modern reader. The later chapters, about modern anthropologists, I found the most interesting because they were based in more relevant ideas about empire, genetics, race, and gender.

This book would make a really good companion to The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Both go into how anthropologists end up projecting their own biases on other people, be they living or long-dead. But both books also have the same problems: Like the Davids, Stefanos Geroulanos spends a lot of time trash-talking best-selling nonfiction authors and doing deep dives into the word choice of academics and politicians. (Did we really need a whole chapter about what "getting bombed back to the stone age" really means?) I also got the sense that Geroulanos doesn't respect the field of prehistoric anthropology at all. My impression was that he has an attitude of "When we ask questions about prehistory, the answers are too often racist, so we should just stop asking questions." Ultimately, if the book had been written by an archeologist or anthropologist, instead of a professor of intellectual history, I think it would have been more interesting and even-handed.

[Gaby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not what I was expecting. I really really love history, and prehistory is one of my favorite subjects to learn about. Sometimes, I like to imagine there’s another version of me who studied anthropology or biology, focusing on human evolution, but in this reality, I’m just part of Corporate America.

That said, this book felt more like a critique of everything ever written or researched about prehistory. I finished it and still have no idea what the author was actually trying to say.

Three stars, only because some parts were interesting, but honestly, it probably deserves just two.

[Audrey]

Absolutely scathing critique of the field of study I dedicated 4 years to and the book that got me there in the first place (Sapiens by Harari) and I loved it…

Basically a history of the study of human origins, and how science has been both used for political/imperial/colonial means. Also does a good job of illustrating how our understanding of the deep past tells us more about our current time than about the period we are studying.
Author is NOT making the point we should not study prehistory, but to be careful in doing so

[Scott Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author has an agenda. I like the premise, and to some degree it is true, but not everything is some right wing plot. Yes, people use science and historical discovery for nefarious ends, but the author’s cynicism and sanctimony just gets old real quick.

[Sud666 · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Invention of Pre-History" was an interesting book. It is a look at the development of the idea of pre-history through humanity. This is not a study of pre-history but rather how people have approach the study of this field.

Starting in the 1750s till 1870 looks at the various scientific and historical explanations for pre-history and how the time and culture affected the study of this field. This time period started the true study of pre-history. During this time there were many theories concerning pre-history and some of it is rather fantastical.

Then from the 1830s till WWI we witnessed the changing times and the different theories that were espoused and moved on to the 1900s to the 1960s and then the final chapter covers 1960s till modern times.

This analysis of pre-history and how the study has been influenced by the times and biases of the researchers. Sometimes these studies were used to justify Imperialism, and other times it was a projection of values that were held by the academics onto the people of pre-history.

Where I have an issue with this author is his severe leftist biases. it is readily apparent in his through and detailed debunking of anything from the far-right or even conservative ideas, but every single leftist claptrap from "Primordial Communism" to the "Aquatic Ape" are never that deeply, or contemptuously, analyzed. The author is under some type of fantasy (maybe too much MSNBC or social media?) wherein he states that the far-right views Neanderthal man as some type of figure that was "replaced" by another minority. First I know this is a leftist fantasy since this sentence is never attributed or sourced (unlike all the other quotes, notes, sources and attributions) just thrown out there. Also, I find it incredibly hard to believe that a bunch of Klansmen hillbilly in a cornfield are swilling beer and discussing primordial man's historical development. I call BULLSHIT.

I also find it amusing the author is SO upset and angry that minorities, indigenous people and other sides he feels bad for are tarred and feathered by people with agendas he has no issue injecting his agenda and doing the lefty thing and throwing in two Trump references where he allows his biases to make statements that he himself would decry if it were used against any of his "protected" groups. As the saying goes- if the Leftists didn't have double standards then they would have no standards at all. Quite true.

A good book in pointing out the historical looks at pre-history. But just ignore his biases towards leftist ideas and sympathy for Communism, while decrying those very same biases in others when applied to the groups he cares about. Myself? I have a rather simple concept-if someone goes, and self-identifies, as outside the norm (norm being Conservative to Liberal) from far Right to Far Left are all extremists and ought to never be trusted.

[DJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read. Prepare to be disabused of all the "science" you think you know regarding the origins of humanity. The author lays out in excruciating detail how the various branches of study and thinking is really a great deal of speculation. The core result is the perpetual greed and exploitation of peoples and resources, and not much more.

[Matthew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful, provocative and insightful account of how ‘prehistory’ has been used in various ways from the late eighteenth century to the present as a justification for racism, colonialism and empire.

[Lauren Maresca · Rating 3 out of 5]

So much to unpack here but some particularly poignant observations included the likening of language around aerial bombing to the development of man (i.e. bombing defenseless colonized nations in WW1 and 2 "back to the stone age") and the general call out of how mass culture uses prehistory as a rhetorical tool to belittle cultures that are not western.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on humanity. It not so much the theory of human evolution as it is more about how we came up with the theory of evolution

[Elliott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'll need a while to gather my thoughts on this one, and might edit my review as it all percolates more. It was a weird sensation to read a nonfiction book where, for the first time ever, I felt like I was in a familiar intellectual circle- where I didn't just have to take the experts word for it. But this also limited my actual enjoyment occasionally as I was caught in a cycle of "weeeell I feel you're overreporting/underreporting the evidence here..."

Overall, I find a lot of his ideas, when he presents them, really excellent- a critique of an overwhelming humanism, of the idea that we understand our own origins, and, fundamentally, the idea that our prehistoric origins still shape us. I agree with him that they don't, really. Of course I'm deeply invested in knowing all I can about prehistory, but as a person who loves existing in modernity, I'm also driven by a deep belief that who we were as early sapiens matters not at all to current societal issues. However, I don't think a complete rejection of similarities is useful to us, either. In some ways, we are still fundamentally the same people, driven by much the same desires. But in my own personal philosophy, this applies more to things like the universal human desire to pick up a pretty rock and take it home- not some kind of "lizard brain violence" thing. So overall, I agree with him- our context is so different to ancient times that grand narratives are, as a whole, fairly useless .

I did have a fundamental problem with the book, and its that Geroulanos is not a great writer. The organization of the book, partially by ideas and partially chronologically, made the text overwhelming and often hard to follow. He almost never gave concrete examples, which left a fast-paced review of what different thinkers/scientists claimed at different times with very little in-depth analysis of how these ideas related. The public perception/reception of ideas is almost never talked about although I think its such an important part of this historiography (a bit of an ivory tower approach, really). I mentioned that I appreciate his ideas when he mentions them- but unfortunately I find that he's often shy of taking a big stance, rather letting the reader read into his beliefs between the lines. This both makes it a harder read and is unfortunately a bit deceptive to me- painting everyone else as having an opinion, but only in rare (and good) parts of the text admitting to his own.

I did like a lot of the later chapters, and especially the conclusion. If I could make a recommendation to fellow archaeologists, I would say this: read only the introduction and the last section of the book. Of course it's also important to know where all our modern misconceptions come from, and for that we have to trace the history of research back to the last 400 years. However, the massive focus on earlier periods did come at the cost of clearer and more in-depth writing on the state of the field, which I find overall more interesting. And, to be frank, the first half of the book covers pretty much what everyone should have learned about the history of the field during their degree anyway. (I also do recognize that the audience of this book isn't exclusively people with an archaeology degree don't kill me)

[Amanda Bolt · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author reflects his own prejudice and viewpoints on humanity as much as anyone else in this book, but does not necessarily effectively argue for them

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I read a book on a subject or topic that I think I have never really thought much about before but learn through my reading that the subject has colored my thinking and overall paradigm much more than I ever realized — and that I need to change, correct myself, as a result of the book. I believe this is one of those times.

In the present point in history, during which we have ample evidence of mankind’s propensity for violence and ability to harbor grudges, prejudice, and hateful ethnic otherness for centuries (think Mideast, the Ural region, and areas in eastern Africa as examples), Geroulanos offers a captivating and relevant book exploring the recurring human practice (need?) to create narratives for histories of our species intended to lead one to believe we (homo sapiens) are “progressing” beyond or above a primitive, “more” animal past being.

The book lays out how we have for three hundred years manipulated archaeological and anthropological “evidence “ to suggest we collectively, in various smug forms, have become more intelligent and less violent as we have genetically evolved and become more “civilized.”

Geroulanos shows how groups, particularly colonizers, arrogant tribal/nationalist, and morally “superior” religious zealots”, have used these narratives of human origins resulting in hierarchies of people who can be graded as different levels of competence, intelligence, moral wrongness, or genetic inferiority to justify our violence, conquest, subjugation, annihilation and over genocide.


The book presents a historian’s well crafted case for us to use history to see how complex humanity is, to learn of the gross mistakes we have always been capable of — and to realize we still make and will make without concerted effort to avoid repeating the errors of our collective past.

We learn through the book that there is no line of evolutionary progress to suggest we are better people now than we have been — and that suggesting otherwise perpetuates the harmful racist, and ethnic hatred and tribal otherness that so often manifests in violence and behavior that we, Geroulanos ably demonstrates, label as “inhuman,” “animal”, “primitive” and “beneath us.”

But the book isn’t a self-species-loathing diatribe. To the contrary, the author presents a well balanced and always-interesting exploration of the evolution of Western thinking on our origins. I enjoyed the book and learned from my reading. I suspect this is one I will welcome revisiting as I believe there are more rich rewards waiting.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

I admit that I did not get very far into this book. I knew going in that Geroulanos wasn't trying to establish an accurate prehistory, from an interview he did on the Mindscape podcast. I knew he was interested in the stories we tell about prehistory.

But I didn't appreciate how starkly our interests diverged until I read this: "I do not much care if particular theories are true: I ask what work they do, and at whose expense" (p. 9).

This is postmodernist bullshit. It is very relevant whether the theories are true. To take an example from my own area of expertise, imagine you considered Newton's theories of motion and gravity without considering if they were true. You could tell a marvelous tale of a mechanical mindset serving capitalists and industrialists, or a tale of god as an engineer serving some political or religious end, but that misses most of the point. Newtonian physics is a very accurate model of reality. That's the key story. The rest is interesting context and history, but without that central piece it's hollow.

Contrast this with something that is an incorrect theory, like Lysenkoism. There the entire story is about what work it did and whom it benefited, but that's true only because the theory was demonstrably false even by the evidence of the time.

So I think Geroulanos is not worth reading because he's missing most of the point.

Something else that pissed me off before I gave up reading was this line: "There is perhaps no grander story than humanity's emergence out of nature" (p. 3). As a human, I agree that this is a grand story. But to call it the grandest is an insanely anthropocentric view that misses almost the entire universe, or if you prefer biology, the emergence and radiation of life itself.

[Ella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again, I am asking modern historians to please be even slightly curious about the premodern historic past. There’s some embarrassing statements about the history of European antisemitism in here that don’t seem to quite realise that scientific racism and the popular press merely bolstered premodern stereotypes, rather than creating entirely exciting new concepts.

Also, I am definitely really into the book this book could have been: one that’s less angry about the study of prehistory as a whole and one that’s more interested in how curiosity about the past can be both abused and used for good.

[Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another tenacious blitz designed to deconstruct German theories on the origins of humanity. I'm curious as to why this remains such a tremendous fixation for intellectuals in our day. Curiously, he has a major grudge against Harari.

[‎Seth Studer · Rating 3 out of 5]

1.
We’ll never know everything we want to know about our distant ancestors. They’re gone.

And insofar as we gather evidence about the lives they lived and make conjectures about those lives, we still only see them through a glass darkened by our own shadows. That’s my key takeaway from Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory, a fun and frustrating work of popular scholarship.

In his epilogue, Geroulanos summarizes his overall project:

Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a strong criticism of our pretensions to grandeur, our thirst for powerful stories, our belief that we grasp the whole picture and spin it into a thorough system of knowledge. It’s always nice to blame others, the ideologies of the enemy; but this project is more of a criticism, as philosophical as it is historical, of our delusion—that we grasp the origin as much as the end, that we control the definitions, that we have master knowledge.

This tracks. The central thread that runs through Geroulanos’s book is his opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism. The project of humanism, he argues, has failed. The ideology of humanism put us squarely on a path toward violent colonialism, the genocides of the twentieth century, and climate catastrophe. Whether he wants to or not, Geroulanos joins a diverse group of grumpy scholars and anti-humanists like Giorgio Agamben, Alasdair MacIntyre, René Girard, and Girard’s pupil Peter Thiel in concluding that the Enlightenment was a mistake and humanism really messed things up.

To be clear: Geroulanos isn’t a post-humanist. Rather, he seeks an alternative, more humane paradigm through which we can live together on the planet. In many ways, the field of prehistory is incidental to his overall project. It’s one of several lenses he could have chosen through which to examine the problems inherent in humanism. Our acquisition of knowledge about any subject (especially history) always always always always reinforces the ideology of the present day, for better or for worse (and usually at the expense of actual knowledge). This is true whether we’re talking about the deep past of our hominoid ancestors or the human past since the beginning of the historical (re: written) record.

To be fair, Geroulanos admits that the field of prehistory does produce legitimate knowledge about the past that is probably worth having. But what we do with that knowledge is usually problematic. Geroulanos writes: “We telescope at will back in time to draw meaning from the deep past about ourselves and the world we want.” Yes, that’s true…and show me a scholarly discipline that emerged from the Victorian era that wasn’t used to justify obscene criminality. I don’t think you’ll find one.

But it’s not really until the epilogue that Geroulanos finally admits that recent discoveries by geneticist and paleoanthropologists have revealed much solid information about our lineage. But really, he asks, what do we want to know about our ancestors? That question changes with every generation and within every cultural and political context. And usually, the answer to that question has disastrous results for people on the social, political, and cultural margins. Geroulanos writes:

The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway; by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed subhuman by Nazism; by all those who were racialized by ideas about prehistoric humanity; and by refugees, still disdained today as a watery mass and a horde.

Later, he writes:

The problem lies less with science or museums rather than with the humanist impulse that accompanies them. The story told in this book is in part a story of scientific horrors. But it is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, that it is our ‘human nature.’

A noble sentiment, I think. “Human nature” is a term that is usually invoked to push people around, to oppress people who are marginalized (look at how often neoliberal economists “naturalize” their theories and justify their most brutal policy recommendations by appealing to “human nature”).

But even here, I’m a little irked. To minimize the DNA we share with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago is, in my view, to minimize something genuinely important. Our shared DNA does indicate that we share something—perhaps a lot—with our ancestors.

2.
Don’t get me wrong: The Invention of Prehistory is a fantastically entertaining and informative work of popular scholarship. I loved the chapter about the Catholic paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose theory of the teleological “omega point” at the end of evolution was…just wild. Geroulanos seems to sympathize, a little, with Bataille’s attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of human life amid our discoveries about the distant past (Bataille described the Lascaux cave as “the holy of holies”: problematic but beautiful).

And Geroulanos’s epilogue departs from a lot of the moralizing that precedes it. In the final pages, he encourages caution when we study human ancestry and (especially) disseminate knowledge about human origins to the public.

But on the whole, I was frustrated with The Invention of Prehistory because, too often, Geroulanos conflates our paradigms of knowing (and interpreting knowledge) with the acquisition of knowledge itself. He writes with a very moralistic, sometimes shrill, tone about the men and women whose work has produced a lot of our best knowledge about our distant ancestors. At times, it seems like Geroulanos believes that such knowledge is not worth having if it is used to justify atrocities.

Geroulanos claims that The Invention of Prehistory “is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy.” You could have fooled me. He has virtually nothing good to say about any scholar, professional or amateur, whose work he examines. Two of the exceptions is his treatment of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and (to a lesser extent) Sigmund Freud…all darlings of what Paul Ricœur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Geroulanos has adopted these hermeneutics wholesale.

Take Saussure. His linguistic analysis (in Geroulanos’s account) bucks the most politically problematic accounts of the origins of human language. Saussure sees through his contemporaries, whose morally reprehensible racial ideologies framed their theories about language. Nevermind, of course, that Saussure’s account has been widely rejected by linguists, and that today’s most credible theories of the origin of language a) amount to corrections of the morally reprehensible models or b) rest on new models of genetic and cognitive analysis. Saussure got the morality right, even if he got the knowledge wrong.

Geroulanos writes: “The fantasy [of humanism and prehistory] allows us to forget that in reality, humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers. We live in the world we have created.” Okay, fair enough. But who is the we here? I don’t live in a world that I’ve created—other people created it for me. And other people created their world for them. And on and on back…all the way, perhaps, to our “paleolithic forefathers.” The past is a foreign country, it’s true. But it’s not utterly inaccessible, as some post-structuralist critics have implied.

In Courting the Abyss a study of the contradictions of free speech within the English liberal tradition, John Durham Peters divides Anglophone society into three camps: religiously-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through revelation; empirically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through the scientific method; and critically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through rational (often skeptical) inquiry. Two groups in these three camps will often unite against the third group, and the religiously-minded and critically-minded typically “team up” against the empiricists in order to undermine the authority of “science” per se (especially when they don’t like the products of scientific knowledge).

And few people are as skeptical as me of “science” as a category of ultimate knowledge acquisition. The scientific method is a powerful process of knowledge acquisition, but it is viewed by most English-speaking people as an ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a problem, and it actually contributes (I think) to scientific illiteracy. People in general have no idea what “science” actually is, and at the same time nothing shuts down an argument like “scientific evidence.”

But for Geroulanos and other scholars in the humanities, scientific knowledge is not merely one type of knowledge among many. It is inherently compromised by its imperialist origins. And yet, as I’ve reiterated throughout this review, every imaginable field of knowledge and art since the Enlightenment has deployed in the service of empire.

After a while, I began to feel guilty for being curious about ancient hominids at all!

Reading The Invention of Prehistory, you get the impression that it’s virtually impossible to acquire scientific knowledge without hurting someone. Geroulanos’s struggle with the ethics of knowledge acquisition is most apparent in his chapter on Neanderthals. He rightly criticizes the racist framework within which specialized knowledge about Neanderthals is presented to the public. And he admits that, given the power of recent genetic analysis, we have a much clearer sense of what the Neanderthals’ lives, including their relationship with anatomically modern humans, was like. But, he writes in that chapter’s conclusion, “We still cannot reach the Neanderthal. However much we may ‘know’ about him…he continues to say more about us.” Consequently, Geroulanos’s hypercritical approach to knowledge acquisition, his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” often deploys the same language and critical tools that creationists, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, and medical charlatans use when they attempt to overturn scientific consensus.

This is not a party I would be eager to join.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing intellectual history charting the concept of prehistory from the moment of conception that there could be something called prehistory up until the modern day.

It far exceeded my expectations on three points. The first and foremost is the genealogical take to ideology. What the author consistently raises is how much the ideas that arise out of the study (and imagination) of prehistorical life are ones that exist in contemporary life: prehistory as trope factory. Even when existing in a vestigial form, where the ideas are at such modern disconnect from their original forms as to be unique (more or less) the functional connect is stunning to see.

And see you do, which is the second point. This is a sumptuously visual book (even on Kindle!) where the author considers both paleoimagry as well as visual representation. What they mean is considered but also how they are used. It is a stunning to witness the transformations and variations, and how each visual act is used to enforce or upend theory or ideology.

Third, it is wry as ****. I notionally try and avoid reading reviews before writing my own, but I peeked here because I was surprised that I had not heard of this book before happening across it in Libby, and was wondering if there was something I was missing about it. I write about my love of polemic, but this is the, er, rule that proves the exception. Polemic is interesting because being fair is difficult, so a full-throated assertion is more useful to understanding both sides. A critical reading can fill in the gaps better than the author needing to spend time doing so. Here, since the author's point amounts to ideology being a sort of idee fixe for prehistory, to the point that the book has almost a downer ending, he is free to retain a casual distance from most of who he discusses. This is hard to do; this is enlightening, and this is frequently glib, adding a further layer of joy onto a book that is already full of wonderful material.

This is also somewhere between provocative and infuriating if you are unwilling to go along with the premise, if your objective is getting the thing the book is arguing is not specifically relevant as revealed through history-history.

My singular complaint (other, perhaps, than feeling that way when it hit on my own priors, before I got over it) is that it is too much of a good thing. This is not a slow read because it is unreadable. This is a slow read due to the volume and scope of what is going on. Overall, this is one of those books where the first thing I did on finishing it is to order up a copy so that I can re-read it later.

[Chad Hogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover of this book jumped out at me and I had to buy it. This cover reminded me of my grandpa and I imagined his similar excitement in seeing this cover and reading the content. I recall looking through his books sets on ancient, pre-history man. I just looked into it and I think it was the Emergence of Man Books from Time Life Series. There are so many books I yearn so much to discuss with my late grandpa. I speculate on what his viewpoints might have been. He was a wealth of knowledge and so passionate about so many areas of learning.

Maybe my fascination with early man started with my grandpa’s old Time Life book set. The Invention of Pre-history was packed with paintings and depictions of the various Homo species and I couldn’t get enough.

One of the main take-aways for me was how much many of our “knowledge” of pre-historic man is based on various speculative viewpoints which many have been de-bunked or discounted. That what we proclaim to know about ancient man may say more about us than about them. I love learning about the flurry of anthropological and Paleontological activity in the 19th century after Darwin’s shocking discoveries. Thinking of the various anthropological society’s back-in-the-day reminded me of the old stodgy and staunch aristocratic men in Laika’s beautiful movie The Missing Link. There’s something romantic about it. The book delves into Freud’s forays and theories related to ancient man (Totems and Taboos) and my mind goes to his office cluttered with the archaic relics, artifacts and talismans found from various early religions, cultures and civilizations.

I really enjoyed the theme of each chapter. It covered a wide range of topics and each chapter was refreshingly short.

I definitely learned a lot about how various theories have impacted modern cultures and ideologies. I finally have a better (not perfect) understanding of the basis for the race theories Nazis encouraged German’s to adopt which is based on the German’s being the early Indo-European, Aryan people who conquered Rome and then defended civilization from the Huns and other Asiatic and nomadic hordes. I had no clue how political the views on ancient man could be. Apparently whether the African Sapiens committed Genocide or assimilated (bred) with the European Neanderthals could have a lot to do with your political slant. I haven’t researched but have a feeling the author is definitely on the left. On top of his take, he took some cheap shots at Jordan Peterson and Stephen Pinker.

[Lilya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes:
- History arranged by current observers to further narratives that will one day become artifact as well
- Is all history fueled by narcissism ?
- Prehistory, much like the orient, is used as a tool to create meaning for the lives of the west
- through prehistory, it is decided as to who is human and who is decidedly not
- Indigenous communities being linked to both children and barbarians; pure and violent living cohesively as one. Sooooo heart of darkness coded
- If Germans will do one thing it’s co-op history to systemically oppress others
- Anthropological positivism to make racism respectable in academic circles
- Passivity in history allows for individuals and communities to “disappear” from archives
- Prehistory justifying the savagery of the western world
- Terrible elegance of cave paintings that have lasted a millenia doing nothing to inform us of those who made them. BEAUTIFUL
- Centering historical analysis around ideas of “when did patriarchy start” are BORING and a nonanswer. Better to ask what conditions led to this and when it shaped society
- Refusal to see historical actors as flawed is one of the biggest pitfalls… Darwin can be a genius while also being a WIERDO DUH !!!
- Using prehistory to disassociate from the terrible shit we are currently doing to each other, ourselves, and the planet
- Fetishization of humanity -> epic of human grandeur robs and injures -> museums

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling companion to The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Read this first to disabuse yourself of all the reactionary ideas that colour so much of our received understanding of prehistory. Then move on to Graeber and Wengrow (Graeb-grow?) and fill your head with equally preposterous but more ideologically stimulating ideas of beatific matriarchal Neanderthal utopias.

[Saul Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the criticism of Yuval Noah Harari as just another extension of racist 19th century anthropologists who would rather indulge in the primitivizing of certain cultures and create an idealized version of humanity. The constant adulation of these writers that gets their theories into the public sphere and create what Geroulanos explains, “…it allows them to misidentify and make excuses for the real humanity that burns forests and oil and cares little for the poverty right outside our door or on the other side of the planet.”

[Daniel]

podcast.

[Onno · Rating 5 out of 5]

a necessary book highlighting the myths we use to justify ourselves.

It covers the idea of human origins from Rousseau to today, and laments the failure of seeing those myths as reflections of what we look like in the mirror: How else could such a brutal civilization self justify itself? I would have liked to see him draw a line to Kant, who attempted to make Rousseau more rigorous, and in the process, answers many of the questions on which the author concludes, but hat would have been a different book. .

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Really great, with one small asterisk at the end.

By the end of the introduction, I knew it was about excoriating “-isms” in the world of creating prehistory. But, more than just that. As an amateur philosopher, I’m against system building in general, so I knew I had a good one here. Add in that by name, the excoriated in the intro included Steve Pinker (totally deserved) and Yuval Noah Harari (perhaps not hated by me as much as the author, but he’s made himself a “brand,” so that’s that, but see more below). I hit the index. Yes, David Graeber gets a skewering. Others do throughout the book, including (sorry to fellow secularists) St. Charles of Darwin.

In a fair chunk of this, issues of race and even outright racism lurk in the background. In a smaller but not insignificant chunk, issues of progress, often but not always Marxist or related, are the backdrop. And, if not race, gender becomes a major problem — including in some modern feminist anthropological reactions, Geroulanos warns, essentializing it as much as men do.

In dealing with this, Geroulanos cites British feminist Juliet Mitchell as a stimulator.

And, behind the oftime focus on race? Colonialism. Geroulanos discusses this more in a chapter on “vanishing,” on how worries about vanishing “primitive” peoples at worst becomes an excuse to finish them off, whether quasi-genocidally, or quasi-culturally genocidally, and at best, often is little more than rank paternalism.

OK, without hiding them behind a "spoiler alert," there's major details about the book ahead, so don't read if you don't want to!

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Good details inside the book. Darwin “invented” sexual selection just for humans and for Descent of Man to dodge race issues, and even more, Geroulanos claims, to avoid humans being a “plaything” of natural selection. (Sexual selection is real, of course, but certainly not limited to Homo sapiens. " The Evolution of Beauty" is entirely about sexual selection in animal biology.) Re race, sexual selection, Geroulanos says Darwin argues, becomes the tool of human domestication of itself. But, he has enough black marks otherwise that evolutionary biologists don’t like to discuss, like playing at the edges of race on issues like colonialism.

In a chapter near the end, Geroulanos looks more at Darwin’s words from The Descent of Man, which inspired UNESCO’s antiracism booklet in 1950, to also be the inspiration for conservative thinkers in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, notably and specifically Pinker and E.O. Wilson.

Those words, in full, are:

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

The chapter on “Is Violence Ingrained,” which starts with that quote, is good for stimulating the question of what war is, as well as whether or not prehistoric savages were inherently violent, in general.

Later in this chapter, he totally harshes Israeli native Harari for saying in Homo Deus that today, contra antiquity, most people don’t worry about war — “surely not those people who live just a few miles east of Harari’s home.”

Later yet in this chapter, Geroulanos says, bluntly:

“Darwin’s expression … is today mostly of value to those who take a position that modernity is peaceful and the future will be better still.”

Besides Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon is among those getting a specific elbow at this point. Jared Diamond did earlier.

In short, ev psych is used to go back to the idea of the primitive savage, and no, that needs to be rejected.

Modern Rousselians like Marshall Sahlins face the skewering just a page or three down the road, as does Graeber. Pace Hannah Arendt, whom Geroulanos cites as saying we shouldn’t lean too much on ethology, chimpanzee warfare and even murder — both discovered after Arendt’s passing — offer something of a backstop in refuting the modern Rousselians. (I’ve read James C. Scott, two books — I thought Against the Grain was very good for showing how "progress" isn't linear, but I see and agree with where Geroulanos is coming from — and a bit of Sahlins as well as a fair chunk of Graeber. I found a lot not to like on "The Dawn of Everything.")

Geroulanos then ties them together:

“(I)t matters that a direct line of descent takes us from Sahlins and (Pierre) Clastres through Scott to Graeber: Scott was inspired by Clastres and painted a similar picture of the state’s intrusion into nomadic societies; Graeber was Scott’s colleague at Yale, and he coauthored a book on kings with Sahlines. A certain kind of scholar NEEDS [caps mine] the state to have been brutal and repressive from the start, and those who were not within its purview —nomads, hunter-gatherers — to have been limber anarchists who offered a superior vision for life.”

Geroulanos goes on to call this more than an academic spat, noting that “primitive warfare” is a sentry against access to the deep past, and at the same time is a “Westernized” influence on its interactions with the rest of the world.

Diamond gets skewered again here, for ignoring how mining claims in Papua New Guinea have intensified previous levels of Native violence even as he attacks other authors.

Back to earlier chapters moving forward.

The chapter on the “invention” of matriarchy? Great.

The chapter on changes in perception of Neanderthals, including changes in portrait of their skin color? Even better. Neanderthal extinction, diversity and related are now part of dark web/alt-right talk.

The chapter on shamanism, with how it was espoused by fascist and semi-fascist types, and some non-fascist racists? Perhaps better yet.

Stanley Kubrick, over, of course, 2001, gets skewered in the chapter about the violent ape.

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His conclusion? Yes, we know more about the past than a century ago, or even a half century ago. Svant Pääbo’s Nobel Prize for mapping the Neanderthal gene alone shows that. “Yet the epic myths on which this book has focused remain very much alive. Many have been recycled under new names.” He notes that stadial theory and its savage/barbarian/civilized became adapted to First/Second/Third Worlds. Cites the QAnon Shaman despite shamanism being basically laughable in academia. Darwin’s faults get papered over lest anti-evolution types get a foothold.

Harari gets skewered again here for butchering the idea of Mitochondrial Eve.

The lizard brain, despite being about two steps removed from pseudoscience (and first proposed as an alternative to Freud) of course still surges up. And, even V.S. Ramachandran gets a call-out for too much speculative thinking.

Finally, he notes Indigenous people still often lack legal power in the nation-states where they reside to push back against cultural appropriations of material objects, let alone reclaim items of their past.

All the fantasies obscure that “humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forbearers.” The problem isn’t capitalism, or anarcho-communism. Rather, to riff on Shakespeare’s Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.”

And, we should move on, says Geroulanos:

“For there to be any future for humanity, we must see that the deep past, however enchanting, isn’t worthy of our love. It must become another time. … (D)oubt about our claims and doubt about our answers and doubt about the capital ‘h’ we put in Humanity … should again become our operating principle, a skepticism that never rests, a skepticism in the of a better theory for tomorrow.”

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I will add one note: I radically disagree with his claim that Freud is among thinkers “who did not hide their contempt for purity and certainty.” The man was creator of a cult around himself and his theories, always ready to expel anybody who would not be a slavish disciple. (And I emailed him that.)

He notes back that it is an odd twist, and that he was referring above all to Freud's take on group psychology, which I'll accept!

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Per a couple of other reviewers? On page 9, Geroulanos is not rejecting the truth value of scientific theories in general; rather, he’s explaining his evaluative measuring stick in this book. Guess that needed to be said. A couple of two-star reviewers probably had some favorite ox get gored, especially anybody claiming he had a political agenda, when a Graeber and a Pinker get skewered in the same breath. The claim is laughable.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few times when I found my mind wandering back to David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. A better book that deals with some of the same ideas, albeit Geroulanos narrows in far more explicitly on the question of our demonstrative obsession with the question of human origins.

I really liked the idea being explored, less fond of its approach. Given the way the chapters are structured, moving in a linear fashion through the different points of history as it tracks the development of our obsession with prehistory and human origins, the later chapters lose some of their force and their power once the pattern of this obsession has been established. I already understood how this established itself in the Holocaust, for example, long before we get there.

Thus I found the earlier chapters the most interesting and the most compelling with one small caveat. At one point the author suggests that our obsession with human origins is actually fundamentally about the present and wrapped up in the language of our present. So there is this sense in which the closer the book gets to where we live today, the more it makes sense of its general conceit. You can feel some of what the author is arguing sort of proofing itself in the process of understanding how even my interest in the earlier chapters and their emphasis on the earlier history is interpreted by and shaped by the world I am living in now. As the author says, prehistory ultimately says nothing in and of itself. It cannot speak on it's own. We arrange it, and them (Neanderthals for example) in our present to say what we need them to say and in "whatever postion we need them to take."

The first chapter, titled The Human Epic, sets the stage by noting that prehistory is ultimately about our need to tell a story. "The story of human origins tells us who we are, how we came to dominate this planet and each other, how we invented religion and then discarded it in favor of the gods of progress and technology. It supposedly reveals a million little things about human life, like why we desire and whom, how our emotions work, or how we love and care for others."

And yet, all "these grandiose claims prompt far more questions than they answer." No matter how many "impressive names" we give to this story, which is ultimately a "story of us", the only real truth that it can speak is that it is a story about "the triumph of modern knowledge", or the fundamental narrative of progress. As the author puts it, "the story of human origins offers as good an answer as any we have to the fundamental question: what, after all, is the human." And why do we tell this story? Because the narrative of progress demands it in order to be upheld, and without the narrative of progress we have no way of making sense of humanity's arrival on the scene (let alone anything that might supersede it). Thus it is not about the facts of our origin, which can never really be known, it is about justifying our actions in the present. "The deep past so exceeds our grasp... (and) matters so much to who we are" at the same time.

Here then we come to the authors most direct claim- "thinking about human origins has been one of the most generative intellectual endeavors in modern history. It has also been one of the most ruinous." What does he mean by this? He argues that at it's most readily observable crisis point we lack a good defintion of humanity, but this wasn't always the case. Modernitity and its appeal to the story of science and progress, born as it was from the soil of the 18th century and its hyper focus on our story of origins, has simply clouded it from our view.

So what then is the ruinous in this authors view, and what is the good defintion of humanity that he wants to recover? He's a lot clearer on the former than he is the latter. At the outset he says that "this is a book about science and speculation, about the space where each loses itself in the other, the great gray zone where rigorous research meets with righteous belief." That grey zone becomes the boiling pot where "human impulses" can take root, creating the ruinous. That impulse, for the author, is born from an inherent need to "convince ourselves" that we are something in comparison to the distant other (or in alignment with a more pure distant other). For the author, the better story is the present, a present that is telling it's own story about "compound beings, webs of meaning, and cyborgs." A story in which what we do now is what defines us, not some unknown past and non-existent and undefinable future with no real and actual aim. Here he puts forth an argument for a strident capital H humanism not built on the past but a "skepticism" regarding our answers and our doubts that can operate in service of "a better theory for tomorrow."

That last phrasing is important to me, as it becomes the grounds upon which I note an inconsistency in his reasoning. The author never takes the time to actually establish and justify a better story for humanity. He assumes a bunch of the ruinous outcomes to be bad, but he never actually does the work to establish why. If progress is built on the necesssdy ruins of the past, what argument are you going to give to the people of the present, the ones who are the apparent products of this ruinous past to say it is wrong? How do you tackle the problem that the modern West creates, a formation that dominates the bulk of this book, when you also want to uphold it as a portrait of a better world than what it left behind in the dirt? The author makes seemingly contrary claims all along the way, trying to build a case that the world is not better on one hand, and saying that it is on the other. And, this is simply my opinion, but I think this is the case because he doesn't commit enough to his own premise for it to actually say what it needs to say. As you can catch in that last line, he is still committed to a narrative of progress and Humanism. When he says,"There is no grander story than humanity's emergence out of nature," it is both tongue in cheek but also honest to his own viewpoint. However he reaches for meaning, it begins and ends with humanity. Stripping us of our need to locate that in our deep history of human origins doesn't really change the problem.

What is however evident though, and I think this where I found the book most helpful, is his ability to expose human penchants, in a particular worldview, for inventions and illusions to give us meaning, progresses penchant for selective ruination as the necessary driving force of a better future, and the permeating of an invented story in even what we might deem the best of our progress (science, feminism, LBTGQ+ rights, democracy). If nothing else, coming to terms with this reality and recognizing the problematic foundations we are building on today, in many ways which stand in stark and often desperate contradiction to nature itself, if not outright ignorance of the real story nature is telling, should humble us. Especially when it comes to revealing how it is that we come to speak in terms of good and bad. I think the author here, in stripping away the western myths (using his definition of myth), is right on a number of fronts. I just don't think he is able to find a better story, nor convincingly argue why the one the world seemingly naturally follows is not the best one. And this is just me, but I think one of the reasons this is the case is because he assumes religion to be an invention of the past that is necessarily left in the ruins using the very same reasoning and assumptions he is trying to deconstruct. His basic conclusion is, we all tell our own stories built from our own present, but the problem with this is that when someone is confronted by the basic idea that there is no true aim, or when that present legitimately sucks for a person or persons, or when the lessons of the past require those ruins by their nature, ect ect you need a better story. So where do you find it?

[Russell Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting amalgamation of a variety of theories and how society responds to those theories. The closely guarded secret origins of humanity and its implications to be taken advantage of by the first person to come along, makes for an interesting read.