Why do human beings make war? Why, come to it, do they make love?
We tend to see these patterns of human behaviour as part of our psychological essence. Call it, quaintly, “human nature.” But it’s “nature” as opposed to what? The traditional answer has been “culture,” or even more quaintly, “civilisation.” The norms of civilised life—our complex systems of law, custom, and etiquette—are typically seen as things grafted onto our natures, not strictly essential to our humanity.
What, then, is essential to being human? And how could we ever know? A simple answer suggests itself to the second question: We can look at what human beings were like before civilisation. That’s the period of time that we call “prehistory.” But it’s in the nature of prehistory that there is no conventional archive. We are left to speculate or, more dully, to infer what we can from archaeological remains—a bone or stone tool here, a cave painting there.
The study of prehistory will never yield a story with anything like the granular detail and certainty of even a short history of the First World War. But given that studies of our prehistoric past have been going concerns for well-nigh three centuries now—engaging some of our best zoologists, neuroscientists, archaeologists, geneticists, and philosophers—one would hope that they have culminated in some knowledge of what those very early humans were like.
Stefanos Geroulanos is sceptical. A historian who teaches at New York University, in a new book titled The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, he declares that pretty much every hypothesis about the prehistoric origins of humanity is not science but “pure ideology.” He is using the word in its Marxist sense of a belief that is held not because there are grounds for supposing it to be true but because it serves somebody’s interests—typically, the interests of those with power. The study of prehistory, Geroulanos writes, claims to be scientific and objective, but it is “often more a narcissistic fantasy than a field of inquiry.”
His dense and fact-rich book makes the case for the prosecution at compelling length: The so-called science of human origins can tell us little worth knowing about humanity. Its record, he claims, is grim. It has helped to rationalise the destruction of Indigenous peoples around the world, to dehumanise the victims of Nazism, and to provide pernicious metaphors for thinking about refugees. He dramatically concludes: “Humanity still bleeds because of our obsession with defining some group of our fellows according to a supposedly savage past.”
These are bold charges. In 20 punchy chapters, Geroulanos takes us through several episodes in the history of prehistory: the quest for the lost “Aryan” language from which many of the languages of Europe and Asia evolved, the constantly changing scientific consensus on what the Neanderthals were like, the many political uses of prehistoric hypotheses to justify one or another contemporary practice as being truer to an essential human nature undistorted by the pressures of civilisation.
"The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins"
Stefanos Geroulanoshttps://t.co/umxfTbe2eH pic.twitter.com/f8J2iO7qu1
— Tim Howles (@AimeTim) March 21, 2024
The relatively well-known figures in his history are given their due: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his influential ideas about the “state of nature,” Charles Darwin’s account of human evolution in The Descent of Man, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s account of the “primitive communism” that may have marked prehistoric societies, and Sigmund Freud’s theory of neurosis as an “atavistic vestige.”
Geroulanos doesn’t stop at rehearsing these relatively familiar ideas. He also provides detailed and stimulating discussions of the French utopian thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, the attempts made by once-popular Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to reconcile Darwinian theory with Catholic doctrine, and The Inheritors, William Golding’s excellent novel featuring gentle, intuitive Neanderthals. Nor does Geroulanos restrict himself to literary texts, commenting insightfully on the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the alternative history of the world depicted in the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther, and the claim of certain popular weight-loss techniques to be based on our knowledge of prehistoric human diets.
The book is rich in revealing anecdotes. It is fascinating, for instance, to learn that when the anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers stood as a Labour Party candidate for the British Parliament in 1922, he was greeted by the charge that his party’s principles were fundamentally opposed to human nature. He responded by delivering lectures on the communism of prehistoric man to assure his voters that socialism was entirely natural to human beings. When the German army lost Southern Italy to the Allies, Nazi military commander Heinrich Himmler still thought it worth dispatching an SS detachment to San Marino to find the earliest existing copy of the Roman historian Tacitus’s Germania, which some Nazis believed might give their expansionism a justification in prehistory.
Geroulanos connects ideas and people not commonly discussed together, revealing historical patterns not much remarked upon, making his book informative and valuable even for readers who may know something about the particular authors and historical episodes that he writes about. But Geroulanos is not only interested in a critique of particular authors or hypotheses. His claim appears to be much more sweeping.
Prehistory is not, as he sees it, an honourable pursuit that is often dishonourably carried out; it is rotten through and through, and we would be better off without it. Can he sustain this stronger claim?
I am not sure that he can. For one thing, Geroulanos does not make it easy to follow his argument. Attitudes toward his style will inevitably differ, but I did not take to his persistent sarcasm. Darwin is accused of assembling “masses of tedious evidence,” 19-century linguists of “mind-numbingly dry comparative analysis.” But what else is a scholar supposed to do? The art historian Kenneth Clark’s influential 1969 BBC documentary series, Civilisation, is dismissed as “astonishingly priggish,” the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as Carl “Jung’s shallowest disciple,” and the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling Sapiens as a “deceptive hodgepodge.” These drive-by shootings of fellow scholars strike me as unbecoming: Why not simply set out their arguments and explain what’s wrong with them?
