Books about the origins of humanity 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 favour of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the "state of
nature" and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals
killer apes and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled Geroulanos captures the sheer variety
and strangeness of the ideas 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
IndoGermans the idea that colonialised peoples could be "bombed back to the Stone Age" was
made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilisation
advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues accounts of prehistory tell us more about the
moment when they are proposed than about the deep past-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.
