「经济学人」The Invention of Pre-history

What humans’ perspective on the past says about them

The Invention of Pre-history. By Stefanos Geroulanos. Liveright; 512 pages; $29.99 and £22.99

There is no doubt that the past can shape the future in profound ways: consider climate change, for instance. It is also true that imagined pasts can influence real-world events. Vladimir Putin invokes history to justify his invasion of Ukraine, picturing it as a child that was snatched from Mother Russia and should be returned. Ukrainians see things differently. This clash of visions underpins the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945.

Imagined histories can shape the present in subtler ways, too. Take pre-history, the 3m or so years of human evolution before the invention of writing (thought to be in the fourth millennium bc). A new book by Stefanos Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, offers a sweeping exploration of Western ideas about early humankind. He shows that theories about the ancient past have exerted a strong and sometimes pernicious influence on the modern world. “Pre-history is about the present day,” Mr Geroulanos writes. “It always has been.”

Interest in pre-history grew in the 18th century. The discovery of new continents and rising disillusionment with religious creation myths encouraged thinkers to devise new theories about human origins. Yet the Enlightenment belief in the scientific method did not guarantee its application. The idea of “stages” of human development, typically divided into three—savage, barbarian and civilised—persisted.

Indigenous people were excluded from this concept of progress. European thinkers considered them to be much like humans’ long-ago forebears. After the publication of “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, the concept of the “struggle for existence” took hold. Travelling in Africa, the Americas and beyond, Charles Darwin observed that “The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.” As such, the slaughter of native peoples was seen to be in line with a ruthless natural instinct.

Archaeological evidence has sometimes reinforced misguided judgments rather than rectified them. In 1908 a French scholar examined a Neanderthal skeleton, but downplayed signs of arthritis. Its bent spine was subsequently thought to be a typical trait of the species rather than one man’s affliction. Partly thanks to this, Neanderthals were for decades depicted as dark, hunched, hairy and often miserable-looking brutes.

There are plenty of villains in this story, many of them respected sages in their own time. In 1925 Raymond Dart, an anthropologist working in South Africa, wrote about his discovery of a child Australopithecus africanus. The species would come to be understood as the direct ancestors of Homo, the genus of modern humans, and the region known as “The Cradle of Humankind”. But Mr Geroulanos suggests that racial prejudice coloured Dart’s attitudes. In the 1950s he offered almost ghoulish descriptions of imagined prehistoric savagery; Dart’s argument “certainly hinted that the brutality of Africans’ origins influenced Africans in the present day”, Mr Geroulanos observes. The theories thus appealed to supporters of apartheid.

Historians today are more meticulous, though the author gently chides Yuval Noah Harari, a popular writer, for asserting on thin grounds that civilisation started with cooking. Recent scientific advances—such as the Nobel-prizewinning work done by Svante Paabo, a Swedish geneticist, on sequencing the Neanderthal genome—have unlocked new areas of inquiry. But Mr Geroulanos insists that “However much we may ‘know’” about Neanderthal man and his predecessors, “he continues to say more about us.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Who are you calling a Neanderthal?”(June 20th 2024)

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