Historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.
Thorough and sensitive ... Not a history of prehistory, exactly; it is a history of how various accounts of prehistory have been put to political use ... It complicates the increasingly widespread narrative that paints pining for the past as an exclusively conservative pastime.
Spirited ... Geroulanos, who started his research for this project more than a decade ago, includes so many thinkers and theories that it can be hard to keep track of the mounting contradictions. But the tumbling cadence of conflicting ideas also serves to illustrate his point. He is dismantling, not synthesizing.
Geroulanos surveys many of the fantasies and self-serving myths that have been used to fill in the dangerously wide-open blank space between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing ... The strength of Mr. Geroulanos’s book lies in its breadth. It ranges easily from the pseudoscience of Freud and Jung (for both of whom idiosyncratic notions of prehistory were important) to Nazi obsessions with origins.
