Prehistory's Past and Future
Featuring an interview with Professor Stefanos Geroulanos
The Problem with Prehistory
Writing (and thus recorded history) began roughly 5-6,000 years ago. According to archaeological evidence, anatomically modern homo sapiens first appeared more than 70,000 years ago, though new research keeps pushing the date back. More than 90% of human history belongs to prehistory. Because we cannot depend on other humans to tell us what was happening then, we must piece the past together by the remains buried in layers of the earth, artistic remnants on the walls of caves, and carved flints likely used to create fire, weapons, and all types of tools.
Because we know so little about what human life was like in prehistory, we are inspired to speculate. Within the bounds of prehistory, we believe we can understand something about our “human nature.” Religious traditions took the first crack, weaving stories passed down over generations about what human life was like in its early stages. Influential writers like Jean Jacques Rousseau produced detailed thought experiments that caused us to imagine early humans as existing in a state of nature akin to childhood. Finally, in the early-19th century, the new science of geology started to teach European scholars that the earth was not, in fact, created in 4004 BCE, but was likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old.
Beneath the sedimentary layers of rock, old bones were discovered, driving imaginations wild about a previously hidden past. German philosophers imagined races of Ancient Germans, roaming a virgin Europe prior to being conquered by the pesky Romans. With the rise of colonialism, European explorer-scientists came in contact with more indigenous peoples and imagined that these groups could be treated as analogs for prehistoric humans. This approach persists to this day, despite its shaky logic and questionable tactics.
The crucial problem with prehistory-by-analogy is that it isn’t history at all. Popular works filling the history sections at bookstores purporting to tell us about our human nature by explaining what life was like in the past are duping us. We don’t know much about our prehistory, and admitting as much would serve us better in our quest for understanding.
Scholarly Sources
Stefanos Geroulanos is Director of the Remarque Institute and a Professor of History at New York University.
Listen to Stefanos discuss his new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, with Miranda Melcher.
Q: Who should read The Invention of Prehistory and why?
A: Everybody who likes science and history—but especially everybody who likes to think about how language works! The Invention of Prehistory is a history of how we talk about human origins. It explains why this talk is deeply political, overflowing with problems of power and race, even though it usually seems innocuous. The book is something else as well, because it too tries to render the visible visible: it is a book about how we define "human," how metaphors and expressions wrap us in their arms, how we always say more than we mean and mean more than we say.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I read a lot: for the classes I'm teaching; for a new project I'm researching; then some scholarly papers on the history of ideas for the journal that I co-edit. Let's leave all that aside. For enjoyment and for thinking: I've started reading Clarice Lispector, whom I already love for saying some of the things my favorite authors say and doing a more elegant job at it. Less predictably: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, whose stories about violence feel discomfortingly prescient.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to give to people and why?
A: That's such a difficult question—I recommend books every day! Lately I've been recommending Jeanne Favret-Saada's Deadly Words, in which she (as an anthropologist) studies witchcraft in western France. At first no one admits that witchcraft exists; then she gets caught into a whole world of double meanings. The book doubles as a study of how we imbue language with the power to create a meaningful and devastating world.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: I remember reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish for days and days when I was 19, often on the bus during a particularly hot Athens summer. Foucault's style and the sheer surprise of his arguments on prison were very counterintuitive and like a daily training regimen. The reading was hard, but it was worth it, even if I often felt stupid. I underlined everything. And I learned his expression that the philosopher should not try to make the invisible visible, but to render the visible visible. Even though I don't write like him at all, and am generally interested in quite different things, this idea remains very meaningful to me: it is an important task of the writer to guide others back to things too obvious and painful to notice.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: Probably Marcel Proust. I don't know any other writer who feels almost on every page like they said something I thought was particular to me. Plus, I can't help but wish he’d made some fun at my expense somewhere in In Search of Lost Time…
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: David Bates's An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence. It is a study of the ways in which philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and cyberneticians have entwined the mind with technology since the 1600s. It's essential for thinking about AI, and it's written in such a way that one can start reading at different points in the book, moving out from those subjects about which one knows very little to get a full history of ideas about technology and thought.
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: Films: I particularly loved Julia Ducourneau's Titane (2021), and Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1975).
Documentaries: I rewatched Chris Marker's AK, a film he made on Kurosawa directing Ran (1985). Marker's examination of little elements in Kurosawa's films is a poignant meditation on humanity, and in some ways way more contemporary than Ran.
Museums: My favorite recent museum exhibition was Africa & Byzantium at the Metropolitan—it reoriented my understanding of Byzantium, and it was a shockingly beautiful show, where arcane little objects raised to the level of ideas, each of them speaking for the movements of culture across vast distances. Sadly, the exhibit is now over.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge's World-Changing Rage. I like Kluge's way of writing scores of brief (hi)stories to offer us ways of meditating on bigger problems. In this one, he tackles rage—and if we are to think about anger and aggression in the public sphere, this kind of open-ended but pointed thinking strikes me as really important.
Host Jon Hartley spoke with Dani Rodrik about his career in economics, his views on globalization, and the shift towards industrial policy in recent years:
