The invention of prehistory : empire, violence, and our obsession with human origins / Stefanos Geroulanos.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979- author.

Contributor:

Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Violence--History.

Violence.

Civilization--History.

Civilization.

Human beings--Origin.

Human beings.

Prehistoric peoples.

Anthropology and history.

Racism--History.

Racism.

Science and civilization.

Imperialism and science.

Genre:

Informational works.

Physical Description:

498 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2024]

Summary:

An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity--and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others.

"Books about human origins dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. 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 work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world. The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the "state of nature" and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the claims that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples "savages" allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of "killer apes" who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West's imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric Indo-Germans; the notion that colonialized peoples could be "bombed back to the Stone Age" was made possible by not only the technology of flight, but by the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than anything else--and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past." -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: The human epic

Part I: Scattered shapes of a fabulous past (from the 1750s to the 1870s). The infancy of humanity

Europe's 'Indigenous' noble savages

The creatures deep time invented

Humanity, divided by three

The conflict of the sciences

Part II: The concepts that tied it all together (from the 1830s to World War I). Mother love: primitive communism

The disappearing native

Neanderthals, 'Our doubles'

The thin veneer

On the antiquity of the psyche

- Part III: The horror, Part I. The hordes and the flood

Nazis

Bomb them back to the stone age

The Manchurian Catholic and the future of the humanity

Part IV: The new scientific ideologies: or the horror, part II (since 1930, and still ongoing). Darwin in the age of Unesco

A history of cave painting

Killer apes for an age of decolonization

Stone-age computers

The births and ends of patriarchy

Is violence ingrained, and how?

Epilogue: A storm blowing from paradise

Acknowledgments

Notes

Image credits

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [409]-466) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Edward Potts Cheyney Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781324091455

1324091452

OCLC:

1379265149

Publisher Number:

99996404937