Sapiens in the Mist

In 1888, the British author Henry Strickland Constable pointed to discoveries of prehistoric human remains to explain the racial inferiority of the Irish. Thousands of years ago, he confidently postulated, the Iberians, “originally an African race,” had reached Ireland and mixed with the descendants of “savages of the Stone Age.” Isolation on the island had protected these natives from being “out-competed in the healthy struggle of life” to make way, “according to the laws of nature, for superior races.” In so doing, Constable used ideas about prehistoric human evolution that were circulating in his time to present the British colonization of Ireland as part of a story of human progress. In recent centuries, such theories supported the subjugation of peoples that many Americans, British, and Europeans perceived as stuck in the deep past.

The effort to solve the mystery of human origins has been disastrous for human beings, according to the historian Stefanos Geroulanos in his richly illustrated account, The Invention of Prehistory. From its start in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment through the present, the quest to understand the ascent—or descent—of man has again and again been co-opted into “a long, brutal history of conquest and empire.”

Geroulanos shows how the search for humanity’s prehistory in the era of European colonialism shaped major fields of inquiry—anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, psychology, and more—and made humans so susceptible, even in a time of existential crisis, to coddling reassurances about the inevitability of human progress (exemplified by the popularity of the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 book Sapiens, which Geroulanos derisively calls a “deceptive hodgepodge”). Surveying the horrors enabled by this “obsession,” Geroulanos argues that “it is time to wallow a little less in origins.” After all, people in the present have “almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers.” Whatever they may have been like, he wisely affirms, “we are violent because of what we do now.”

But in reminding readers of humanity’s ethical accountability to the present, Geroulanos paints with too broad a brush. He ascribes to the search for human origins flaws that belong specifically to the modern European and American chapter of that inquiry. But interest in the past, on any timescale, need not serve only nefarious ends. It can also stoke imaginings of alternative, better futures.

KILLER APES AND BARBARIAN HORDES

According to Geroulanos, the search for human origins began with European doubts about the biblical narrative of creation, which were triggered by encounters with New World peoples who did not appear in that account. As they displaced, enslaved, and slaughtered indigenous Americans, Europeans came to see them as primitive beings existing outside civilization and somewhere before historical time—and came to think about the past in new ways. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes had long used the term “state of nature” to describe an anarchic, “brutish,” social setting, but in the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reinvented the concept to refer to a utopian original condition, imagined temporally as something to which humans might return. This, according to Geroulanos, made it “possible to think of prehistoric humans” for the first time, precipitating a relentless effort to understand the deep past.

But rather than producing enlightenment, this quest proved immensely destructive. It unleashed zombie concepts, such as the idea of “noble savages” and the stadial triad for dividing humanity (for instance, the categories of “savage,” “barbarian,” or “civilized” states; or in slightly more modern parlance, “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and “developed”), that caused massive harm and continue to haunt the world to this day. These concepts, Geroulanos claims, enabled European conquest and colonization of other parts of the world, justifying the domination and killing of peoples in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere as either civilizational uplift or the evolutionarily required elimination of vestiges of the deep past.

Geroulanos details how European settlers, Nazis, and bomb-dropping states put the key ideas of prehistory to ever newer sinister uses. Even the concern of Victorian anthropologists about disappearing native populations merely helped states “treat land as empty.” By the early twentieth century, psychologists’ belief that, beneath a “thin veneer of civilization,” humans remained innately violent savages, had migrated into popular culture. Commanders and politicians then justified the “modern savagery” of World War I as the inevitable result of human ancestry, “with little evidence that those early humans had been savage themselves.” Similarly, the “killer ape” hypothesis (the theory developed in the twentieth century of a cannibalistic man-ape that emerged just before the dawn of humans in Africa) colored Western views of decolonization in Africa and lent cover to racist policies such as apartheid. Today, when European and American far-right leaders talk of “hordes” of nonwhite refugees “flooding” their countries, they echo the theories of ancient historians in the nineteenth century about violent Asiatic “hordes” sweeping into Europe.

Even as genetic research has made the science more reliable today, Geroulanos argues, the search for human origins remains “fundamentally deceitful” in its very effort to identify the timeless essence of humanity. It allows the powerful to make excuses for “the real humanity” that chooses to destroy the environment and ignore inequality while blindly believing in inevitable human progress.

CHECK YOUR HERODOTUS

Geroulanos’s dissection of the ideas of dozens of scientists is careful and fascinating. But it is undermined by his misplaced faith in intellectuals as the drivers of history. In fact, Rousseau, the catalyst of Geroulanos’s story, intended his idea of the “state of nature” to be purely “hypothetical.” The state of nature “no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist,” Rousseau wrote, disavowing any interest in “historical truths”—in the “genuine origin” of things. His thought remained within a biblical timescale, imagining God had “taken men out of a state of nature immediately after the creation.” Rousseau was not imagining the deep time proposed by geologists in the nineteenth century, whose scale and incalculability introduced a new cognitive problem. Prehistory was not, in short, invented with Rousseau’s more positive twist on the state of nature.

Moreover, Europeans didn’t need prehistory to dispossess Native Americans. Beyond arguments based on religion and the right of conquest, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke had designated indigenous peoples in the New World as “wild” beings who had forfeited claim to the land by failing to enclose it. Such notions already provided sufficient justification for Europeans to treat the land as empty. Locke may not have had an idea of the deep past, but in his liberal vision of history, civilization was a state achieved through progress over time, entailing necessary evils that would be vindicated by the retrospective judgment of history.

But more than the thinking of any one philosopher, early modern Europeans drew on an older idea—inherited from ancient epics, Aristotle, the Bible, and medieval notions—in committing violence against Native Americans. This was the long-standing belief in the pastoral nomad as the adversary of civilization. Geroulanos claims that “since the eighteenth century, the word ‘barbarian’ has been used to describe peoples deserving of scorn.” But—check your Herodotus—this habit dates to the ancient Greeks, at least. Enlightenment invocations of these notions did their own damage around the world well before nineteenth-century discoveries in geology and evolutionary biology exploded European understandings of time and situated the conflict between nomad and civilization in prehistory. Existing racial colonialism was, in fact, the enabling context of the new theories of the deep past: the British genocide of the Tasmanians, for instance, happened in the early nineteenth century, well before European race scientists compared prehistoric skulls with those of the annihilated Tasmanians.

The effort to solve the mystery of human origins has been disastrous for human beings.

The Invention of Prehistory feels strangely unmoored from the developments on which Geroulanos claims prehistory had such ruinous effect. He describes a late-nineteenth-century European “craze for archaeology,” for instance, without mentioning the context of the imperial expansion in Asia and Africa that shaped it. He claims that ideas about prehistorically determined human nature fueled and excused the savagery of World War I, as if ideologies such as nationalism, racism, and blind faith in technology were not damaging enough on their own. Interwar European fascinations with ancient Mesopotamia and Arabs as “flooding hordes” appear without discussion of the European conquest of the region in this very period.

Without such context, the diverse indigenous victims of European ideas of human origins merge into an eerily generic category. Specific ideas about prehistory harmed specific groups differently. By the same token, individual scientists acquire an exaggerated greatness. With few exceptions, the string of European geological and fossil finds that Geroulanos details reads like the inevitable march of scientific discovery rather than contingent cultural and political developments shaped by the history of empire.

Geroulanos also sheds little light on how ideas about prehistory acquired practical power, merely asserting that they had “real policy consequences.” The nineteenth-century British historian Henry Maine, for instance, did develop influential ideas about primitive communism—the theory that all societies began with communal forms of property and evolved inevitably toward private property ownership. But surely it’s relevant that he was also a member of the British governing council in India and wielded enormous influence over policy, a fact Geroulanos does not mention. In fact, anthropologists and the discipline of anthropology had vast influence on colonial policies regarding famine, settlers, indirect rule, and more. (Unfortunately, Geroulanos neglects the work of many historians who have established these connections.) Geroulanos’s intellectual history, organized around various concepts of prehistory, comes at the expense of a sense of chronology and causality, obscuring the evolution and connections between the concepts.

He thus winds up putting the cart before the horse. The problem, as Geroulanos sees it, is that “the story of human origins has never really been about the past.” But if ideas about the deep past were really about their racial imperial present, how can they be understood as the cause of that imperialism? Perhaps it wasn’t that the science had “ruinous” effects but that the science was ruined by the context of empire. Racist theories of human origins gave racial thinking longer legs. The problem was not the search for origins but imperialism’s hijacking of that search.

THE VIRTUES OF THE PAST

But even then, the search did not have unremittingly ruinous effects. Prehistory at times abetted progressive causes, according to Geroulanos’s own account. The German composer Richard Wagner encouraged a virulent strain of German nationalism by drawing on the trope of the indigenous Germanic savage, but his contemporary, the French historian Jules Michelet, used that very trope to challenge the French government’s oppression: “The people” were “barbarians,” he affirmed, “that is, travelers marching towards the Rome of the future.” (In fact, this was an evocation of the ancient rather than the deep past—a distinction Geroulanos frequently elides.)

Similarly, although racist scientists used diffusionist theories of civilizational spread (the idea that human culture had spread out of a single original center) to claim that Africans were stuck in an evolutionary past, diffusionism also emboldened antiracist and anticolonial thinkers such as the American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the Senegalese statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor. Geroulanos stresses that the “Out of Africa” theory of human origins was no “celebration of Africa,” but it was to Senghor. Black intellectuals made Afrocentrism—a worldview that centers Africa and its peoples—the most lasting form of the theory, suggesting that interest in prehistory perhaps isn’t inherently disastrous. As the helpful inclusion of more women in the field shows, it matters who is searching for human origins. Ideas of prehistory were put to destructive use by policymakers drawn from a white male elite that believed itself destined to rule and that was tasked with maintaining a racially hierarchized geopolitical order.

Geroulanos’s central conceit, that “concepts . . . escape their human designers and the institutions meant to house them,” is fundamentally incompatible with his insistence on their necessarily poisonous effects. There is a meaningful difference between stadial views that saw indigenous peoples as stuck in prehistory and destined to vanish, and those, espoused by thinkers such as Friedrich Engels, that saw them as proof that communism is human nature and that a noncapitalist future was therefore possible for everyone. Geroulanos dismisses European thinkers who questioned the destructive ends that prehistory was put to as “mere theory and critique” by a few, while confusingly acknowledging that they “sometimes pioneered ways to fight” violent policies.

This confusion about the significance of dissent results from his larger disinterest in how and when ideas acquire force. Any intellectual history focused, even critically, on “great white men” risks underestimating alternative views. Geroulanos’s chapters bridge the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries without admitting interlocutors from colonized societies, although anticolonial thought had left its mark all over European and American ideas by the 1930s. He concludes, preposterously, that “it took until the 1930s for someone to frontally attack the idea that Indigenous peoples are literally ‘primitive’”—as if anticolonial movements had not been attacking that idea for decades by then. But influence, for Geroulanos, flows only one way: out of Europe. Apart from a passing mention of the Afro-Caribbean anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon, nonwhite contestation of Western views of prehistory remains unacknowledged even as the book moves into the period of decolonization, making one wonder how such dramatic political change ever happened in the first place.

Disinterest in the wider life of ideas about prehistory leaves Geroulanos feeling unnecessarily hopeless about their relevance in modern times. He is suspicious even of revisionist works that correct the older derogatory depictions of indigenous peoples simply because in these works, too, “the past performs tasks for the present.”

STORIES FOR THE FUTURE

Geroulanos asks readers to register prehistory’s lack of “success”—the way debates in the field have remained unchanged for three centuries. But that makes as much sense as ceasing to philosophize merely because humans continue to ponder the same questions of existence, ethics, perception, and mortality. History, including prehistory, is not about solving a mystery once and for all but rather an open-ended, ongoing search for truth. Hubris, forgetting “how little we know,” makes for poor scholarship in any field—and perhaps prehistory is more susceptible to it than others—but it does not make the field itself unworthy. It is also not true, going by recent scholarship from anthropology departments, that scholars “ignore the colonial baggage.” Geroulanos helps expose the public’s faulty understanding of prehistory (and the sticky influence of museums established in the colonial era to sponsor and showcase it); but as anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers show, prehistory is hardly the only arena of scientific research whose “public life” outruns its researchers’ control.

The search for human origins is, in truth, uncontainable; human curiosity about it simply exists. As Geroulanos notes, the first theories are found in religions. Telling stories to make sense of existence is—dare one say it—human nature. It is compelled by the very fact of human existence among traces of the deep past, from cave paintings to rock formations, fossils, and prehistoric artifacts. Calling for reduced investment in understanding human origins, as Geroulanos does, thus seems both futile and misguided.

Prehistory is needed now more than ever.

Geroulanos assumes that the modern European and American chapter of this inquiry is the version everyone subscribes to, that all humans believe the “story of human origins tells us . . . how we came to dominate this planet and each other” and “treat the story of our origins as the obvious triumph of modern knowledge over religious superstition.” But the quest for self-understanding, the search for who we are and what it means to be human, extends well beyond those invested in such colonial assumptions.

For most of history, such inquiry has led people not to vaunt the grandeur and separateness of humans but to admire divine majesty and human connection to all beings. Most faiths conceive of humanity as integrally tied to other breathing and soul-bearing species. The answer is not to stop searching for human origins but to do so in light of the harmonious and preserving purposes the search once served. The hubris of colonial-era inquiries into prehistory was the product of a particular time, not intrinsic to the inquiry itself. The problem is not so much that the search for human origins has “never really been concerned with an exact, precise depiction of humanity’s emergence out of nature,” as Geroulanos claims, but that for much of the modern era, it was shaped by values that, on their face, violated everyday morality.

Prehistory is arguably needed now more than ever. Minus the baggage of the Victorian age, Charles Darwin’s ideas of human and human-animal interdependence might support more constructive politics in facing the climate crisis. The historian Deborah Valenze’s 2023 book, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, uses revisionist prehistory to imagine new approaches to food production in the present. It’s not clear that for the sake of humanity’s future, “we must see that the deep past . . . isn’t worthy of our love,” as Geroulanos insists. Stories about the deep past can remind us now of the life-honoring and earth-preserving species we can be.