Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 273 | Stefanos Geroulanos on the Invention of Prehistory

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Humanity itself might be the hardest thing for scientists to study fairly and accurately. Not only do we come to the subject with certain inevitable preconceptions, but it's hard to resist the temptation to find scientific justifications for the stories we'd like to tell about ourselves. In his new book, The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos looks at the ways that we have used -- and continue to use -- supposedly-scientific tales of prehistoric humanity to bolster whatever cultural, social, and political purposes we have at the moment. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/04/22/273-stefanos-geroulanos-on-the-invention-of-prehistory/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Stefanos Geroulanos received his Ph.D. in humanities from Johns Hopkins. He is currently director of the Remarque Institute and a professor of history at New York University. He is the author and editor of a number of books on European intellectual history. He serves as a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Web site NYU web page Amazon author page Google scholar publications

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Aging is real. And so are the benefits of adding vital proteins collagen peptides to your daily routine. New vital proteins collagen sparkling water. Your daily glow-up now in three fresh flavors. Strawberry blossom, lemon, lime, and blood orange. Improved skin health in as little as 30 days thanks to collagen peptides? Cheers to that. Or go with our classic collagen peptides. So you can stay vital, stay you. Visit vital proteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or preventative. any disease. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As I'm recording this, a report was recently released by the University of Rochester, which looked

into claims of malfeasance and misconduct by one of its faculty members, a physicist who had claimed to have discovered a room temperature superconductor last year in 2023. And it turns out that the data was fake, it had been manipulated, a lot of falsification going on, just bad conduct all around. And on social media, people were asking, why in the world would you make up that kind of claim?

Why in the world would you claim to have found that a certain material was a high temperature, a room temperature, superconductor, if it wasn't actually true. You know that someone else is going to check it, right?

You know that this is going to be tested independently, and if you're just making it up, it probably will not be confirmed. It will probably not be replicated. Well, you know, there's probably lots of deep psychological reasons going on here, but the overall answer to the question, why would you do that, is that scientists are human beings. This is a cliche. We've said this many times in many different contexts, but scientists are actually not perfect reasoners. They're not perfectly rational. The world is rational. The world behaves according to rules, but we are human beings trying to figure out what those rules are, and we're subject to biases and incentives and all of the different temptations that we're subject to as human

beings in all sorts of other capacities. So even in something as cut and dried as a claim that a certain material is a superconductor, we can fool ourselves into saying things that we really shouldn't think are true. And if that's true, then just imagine that the the situation for scientists who are not physicists, who are studying subjects which are much less well-defined, much harder to verify. Imagine, for example, the situation of scientists and other people for the last several hundred years thinking about the prehistory of human beings. By definition, the prehistory of human beings is what was going on in human culture, civilization, and what have you, before we had written records, before we were writing down what happens.

So for a long time, that was largely conjectural, right? We made up myths and religious stories about the origin of humanity and so forth. Eventually, we became more scientific about it, but still, for a very long time, arguably even to the present day, there's as much we don't know as what we do know. That leaves room for human judgment and bias to roam free, to shape, to shape, the narrative to tell ourselves stories that we want to hear for one reason or another. So today's guest, Stefanos, Yarralanos, is actually a historian of science, and he's written a book called The Invention of Prehistory, Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins,

which interestingly, I say this right at the beginning of the podcast, it's not about the origin of humanity, it's about how over the last few hundred years we have talked about the origin of humanity in ways that serve the purposes of the moment, political, cultural, social, whatever. We can't resist, as it turns out, the temptation to tell stories about our human origin that are relevant in some way that we take to have lessons for our present-day status. And it works both ways. Sometimes you want to tell stories that make our ancestors seem very glorious, and that we are in this tradition of awesomeness. Sometimes, on the other hand, we want to tell stories of ancestors which are primitive and violent,

so we are better for having overcome that, right? It all depends on what the local conditions are that you want to sort of tell the story about. So it's very hard, even for scientists, even for people who are supposed to be dealing with data and objective truth and things like that, to really separate out what they want to be true from what is true. And it's nowhere more obvious than in how we think about the origin of human beings and how we imagine that what we discover about the origin of human beings reflects on who we are today. As Stephanos will tell us, it's not something that we have cured ourselves of. This is a thing that we are still very susceptible to.

We still like to tell stories about the origin of humanity and what human beings are, how they're different than animals, for certain purposes that our particular tribes and cultures have right now. So if nothing else, it's a warning to try not to do that. It's hard to do it with perfect fidelity. But, you know, we are human beings. Even if it's a cliche, it still remains true. We are subject to a whole bunch of biases. All we can do is try to be better.

Careful investigations like this and conversations like this are hopefully a step in that direction. So let's go. Stefanos, Sierra Lanos, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you so much, Sean, for having me. So I want to just be super sure so the audience knows, because we've talked about human prehistory and origins a couple times on the podcast, and you have a new book out, the invention of prehistory, and correct me if I'm wrong,

but the primary idea is not to tell us what the actual prehistory of humans was like, but to talk about how we've thought about the prehistory of humans, how we've conceptualized it and how we've sort of leveraged it for various reasons, for various purposes throughout the last few hundred years. That's exactly right. In many ways, I've tried in the book to zone out entirely to blackbox what prehistory was. It's not that I don't care about it. I'm endlessly fascinated by it.

But to be able to talk a little bit more about how it is, the particular theories survive? How is it that they make their way? How is that they become publicly accepted and successful? And why it is that that's important both for the way that we understand ourselves as humans and at the same time for the politics that we end up committing to. Often politics we don't know that we've committed to. Yeah, that's what was fascinating to me because, you know, as a physicist, I can study or we can ask questions about, you know, how many quarks are there? And it's fascinating and we just look at the data and look at the theories, but there's no resonance with our existence as human beings. But this is precisely

a field that it seems very hard for we human beings to overcome our biases and think objectively about. I think that's right. It's an extremely recursive field, including for scientists. It's very, very difficult to say, here's the science, there's the pop stuff. And instead, it's this kind of feedback loop in which every time we think that we have it right, and everybody for two centuries now has thought that they had it right, that seeps out into the public. Earlier ideas have also seeped out as somebody else who writes against, who performs what we perform as scientists, who debates, discusses, engages, comes with all these extra biases and ideas. And very often, these are productive, very often they're utterly fascinating as in you'll see ideas that people

had just rejected a few years earlier, sort of come back with a vengeance. And very often people would tell me as I was writing the book, but that's just bunk. Nobody believes that. I just would be like, I wish this were true. But people who I would utterly admire for every other reason seemed to believe just that. And then the other person would tell me the exact same thing about the other theory. You don't really believe that. So it's really quite fascinating that it really is about ourselves and that in many ways, even though we think we get to a better picture, we get in some ways to exhibiting our biases all the more and to watching these biases change. And that part is totally fascinating as well. Yeah. I mean, is there one question I wanted to ask,

I'm doing it earlier than I thought I would, but it's an important one. Is there a general tendency that we want to tell stories about our prehistory that flatter ourselves? And what is more flattering to say that prehistory was terrible and we have overcome it? Or that our prehistory was glorious and we are the inheritors of this wonderful legacy? Right. I think people do both. And very often they do both more or less on the same line. Like, oh, you know, this must have been terrible. people were terribly poor and miserable and it was really cold and so on and so forth.

And vice versa, then there'll be a moment of purity or a moment of authenticity. You know, this is really how they were. So consider, for example, like the whole dieting fad. It's like our bodies supposedly were made to, all of this is in inverted commas. Our bodies were supposedly made to tolerate this and this and that kind of food. well, they didn't have very much of it, but that doesn't mean that we can have processed food. So you get into this double version.

And other scenarios, you have, with Neanderthals, for example, you get both elements. You have both the element that Neanderthals survived for a really long time, a lot longer than we have, that we. I have to stop myself every time. Then sapiens have been on the planet. They survived the cold for a very long, very long time. And yet pretty much, you know, they clearly were not having a party is the usual

way that this goes. And so why did they then disappear? All of the solutions that follow are solutions that tell about, you know, let's say Sapien's abilities to survive, to manage new European hostile climates, and at the same time, suggest that, you know, this could have been an absolutely horrific way of handling existing populations of, you know, non-sapiens beings of the genus homo in different locations. So you end up with both versions. Yeah. And the diet example is great because that's putting the audience, the listeners here, on warning that they're not going to be accepted from this fact that we like to think about prehistory in some way reflecting on ourselves right now. That is not a feature of only the past. That's still going on

very much right now. I think that's going on very much right now. When I was directing a small center at NYU that was partly funded by the French government, we had a Neanderthal specialist who was working in part on whether Neanderthals buried. And this would outrage people. He would get outraged letters and emails and so on in part because I think that people negotiate what they think about this sort of a past, about things that we can't really know everything about, so we sort of fit it in. And it was a little bit like, okay, okay, I'll go with you.

you scientists up to the point where we say humans are special, sapiens are special because they're God's creation. So I'm willing to go with evolution and everything else. But if you tell me that Neanderthals are it, then I can't actually handle that scenario. So people believe that all to this day. And the same thing, you know, we say it, we refer to a man as a Neanderthal if we think of him as like way too masculine or masculinist or just brutish. We refer to I'm sort of missing another example, but the aggression example is a good one. The question of when gender roles and patriarchy began is similarly a good one. The question of whether we need our tools is similar. How related are we to tools is a similar one. So these are things that we live

with. Not simply random ideas that have gone away and like the bad ones are gone. Maybe a good thing to just get as background, being a little bit more systematic here, is what was the discussion like before the scientific revolution? So, I mean, I had this vague feeling that we just either told myths or religious stories about Zeus or Teumot or the Garden of Eden or Brahma. And there wasn't that much educated discourse on what human prehistory might have been like. Is that right? Or is there something more subtle going on? I think that's correct. For the most part, it's a religious story. Obviously, these would not have been the only answers, various myths about, I don't know, Odin and so on, and some parts of Europe would have been relevant. But for the most part, it's a story of Genesis and how people would interpret Genesis. And then the problems really begin when suddenly there's all these native peoples around the world that Europeans are encountering who just don't fit within the narrative of Genesis because they ought to have been accounted for.

And certainly, you get all sorts of scholars, religious or not, who try to sort of locate them somewhere in the story, in the biblical story, but who also know that there's something wrong about this account. The distances are too long, that native people, that the sheer populations of native peoples that they find are too large to have been simply for the by the body. able to account for. And so what happens is that then space becomes time. People who are further away begin to be coded as being further back in time. And just as, you know, even before the geological revolution, there's elaborate debates and anxieties about is our timeline quite wrong? Can we work with 6,000 years? I don't think that anybody really works with 6,000 years by the 1720s. It's as though

this is established by Usher as like here's a hard claim, but most people who hear it who are not, let's say, who can have private doubts, we'll stick to the private doubts and maybe we'll discuss them quietly but will not print them. Warning, the following ZipRecruiter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at ZipRecruiter know you can feel frustrated, forlorn even, like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine.

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The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhouse Fresh Skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. So it was Bishop Buster who went through the Bible and figured out the universe was 6,000 years older, the Earth, I suppose. But when did he do that? Do you remember? That would have been in the 1670s, if I'm not mistaken. 1670. So by then... I could be wrong by 20 years earlier, but I'm thinking of multiple texts at the same time.

But I'm just thinking that by that time, the Europeans were well exploring the world, right? And I guess we're talking mostly about the European conception of these questions. So did people before him think the Earth was 6,000 years old? Or were they just not asking that question so much? I think the literal solution is not there. There isn't a sense that we need to think in human years about divine creation, let's say. And so there are versions of it. It's not like he came out of nowhere.

And there's long rabbinical traditions about the age of the world and so on. But there is also enough of a sense that you don't need to calculate quite in these terms. And so it's as though we link, we identify Usher because he does it so bluntly. And many, you know, so then, but this all happens with a number of controversies at the same time. Are there pre-adamite peoples? That becomes, that theory gets rejected at the time, but it gets rejected in large part because nobody wants to, you know, everybody knows what happened to Giordano Bruno. Nobody really wants to go down that direction.

And so if you can just have the conversation without somebody paying too much attention, that's one. The other side is that the age of the earth is being debated ever since shark teeth are found at a height also in the 17th century and are identified over and over. So the question of how the earth has changed is easier to pose than to answer. Okay. By before's time, the idea that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of years is quietly accepted, if not publicly debated. And I get the feeling that we think about the 1800s with Darwin and plate tectonics is really a revolution in how we think about ancient history. But there was this period, I guess, in between Galileo and Darwin, right? where it seems like the idea of, like you just said,

the world being ancient was coming to be thought of taken very seriously, but there wasn't that much data to restrain our speculating. So philosophers, for example, right, you know, Rousseau and Hobbes and Hume would just come up with opinions about what ancient civilizations were like. I think that's right. And in many ways, they come up with opinions on the basis of what they see. So already when Montaigne meets, you know, it's the essay called of Cannibals,

when he meets an indigenous person who's been brought back to, brought back to Europe, he uses this indigenous person mostly to mock European standards, more so for that. By resource time, looking far away to create distance was a regular, device. And Darwin himself does it too when he gets to Tehr de Fuego. He meets someone and he has anxious doubts like, is this

could this person be like me? Which doesn't mean this person is created differently. We know that Darwin is really opposed to polygenism. But it does stretch his mind to have that encounter. In the early 1800s, the real game is of course in geology.

That's where you start having answers, but even start having data that the earth is of an antiquity heretofore untold. But that actually, you know, perhaps surprisingly doubles down the idea the people's far away are quote unquote primitive, meaning really primitive that they are ancient and either they have stayed ancient or they have had a different path to that. But that path is very far behind, quote, unquote, hours. So Europeans have supposedly advanced a lot. And Darwin is a minor character in some respects in some of these debates.

Many of the anthropological debates happen before and parallel to him. And his solutions are sometimes excellent and sometimes more messy. And so, yeah, so I'm thinking of even before we get to Darwin, you know, Europeans were colonizing the Americas, the slave trade was going on. And what was the story being told? Was it entirely self-justifying? I mean, how did our image, how did Europeans image of these other kinds of people fit into some kind of chronology and story of progress? Right. So let me leave the chronology aside for a little bit.

Try the story of progress. In the 18th century, as they start thinking about progress, the Europeans begin to divide the world into various stages. And so Adam Smith, for example, does it in four stages, and he first speaks of hunter-gatherers, then of agriculture, then of trade, and then of established, quote, civilization. By the end of the 18th century,

the theory of progress gets organized into 10 stages by Condorcet, 12 stages by others. It just becomes this kind of cumbersome thing. It's kind of hard to teach, right? And so in the early 19th century, we have an important shift, which is that partly because of archaeological

findings that have an easy division, stone tools, bronze and iron, because there's a sort of tripartite division there. And because there's in parallel an easy conversation that has had about savages,

So, you know, virtually irredeemable, particularly brutal and violence and so on. Barbarians are somewhere in between and civilized. So as you get these triads of progress, you suddenly begin to have a kind of history that's based on stages rather than on chronology. That's why I was avoiding it just a second ago. Okay. So then various peoples get fitted into these. into these different blocks. And what's perhaps most interesting is that Europeans begin to create various categories of, you know, savagery to put them in.

And so that's the most brutal part that on the one hand, we have the history of the slave trade. And parallel to that, we have a history of locating indigenous people into particular boxes and trying to, work out how these boxes work to the advantage of Europeans who have gone so far, have progressed so far and so on. The ostensible evidence is so easy because they just say, look, we're industrialized. These or those people don't have iron at all. And so they create that kind of scenario and it allows them to justify various forms of violence, you know, and various forms of ultimately, you know, what would now be called genocide. For example, in Tasmania, but also in many other places.

Yeah, I remember, I'm not going to get it right, but later in your book there was a sort of a cheeky line about how we're civilized and they're not, and we're going to have to brutalize them to bring civilization to them. And, you know, that's a recurring theme in human history, as far as I can tell. Yes, that's right.

And so, I mean, the ugly part about the story of prehistory is that it serves this kind of violence, that it just sort of says, like, well, so the evolutionary answer, for example, is that not everybody survives the struggle for existence. And if you don't survive it, well, you weren't really, you know, you weren't really meant to. That's a eugenicist argument that then makes its way very often quietly because the argument usually is about like birds or squirrels or, you know, butterflies. But the scenario is played out. And so, originally anthropologists and missionaries are very opposed to an evolutionary argument, in part,

because they see this as a kind of justification for European violence. Okay. Now, so it is a, let's put it like this. So, yes, as you put it, it is a recurring theme. We're going to bring you to civilization and, you know, if you died too bad for you. but there is an additional element to this, which I had in mind a second ago, and now I'm blanking on,

but there is an additional element to this, which is that in many ways, it's not simply to say this is a legitimizing ideology. It's also that this kind of language seeps into the language that people use. And so, you know, one doesn't say we killed off the natives. One says natives disappeared. Yeah.

You know, who knows where they went, but diseases, this, that, profligate women, Darwin says, there's a constant sense that the natives can disappear. Then there's a sense that, well, some peoples may disappear, but the savage always exists within us just beneath the thin veneer of civilization. So the lines about the thin veneer survive. And I got really interested in that bit, let's say, where is it? it that having enough information or enough data, people begin to use a language that then is replicable, you know, I'm sure, I don't know about you, but I'm sure I've said thin veneer

at some point or other. Probably. You know, it's to say we all do it and we don't know we do it. We speak of, you know, being genetically coded to do certain things. that kind of language will probably, in some years, sound somewhat like this. There are ways in which that suggestion that we are the same people as the people who were there a long time ago. Yes, of course, in many respects, in many biological respects we are, but in many respects we really aren't. The story of this violence needed to rely on a suggestion that we are and we aren't.

We are the same but better, and we aren't enough like those people that we need to make them survive. We need to help them into civilization. Were there even at the time skeptical or dissenting voices, were there people pointing out, look, you're spinning a yarn because it flatters you. We don't really have enough information to draw these conclusions. Maybe these people are kind of the same as us. Yes. So there are versions of this that are, let's say they're the dearest to me, the skeptics in the story of prehistory, wherever they may be going, sometimes correctly, sometimes very wrongly.

Already in the 1830s, the Society for the Protection of Aboriginal peoples in London says, how is it that we're so opposed to slavery? but we're letting these people die. And they say it's about the Cape Colony at the time, so South Africa now. This doesn't disappear. It becomes more pointed over time. There are times, you know, there are times when while writing the book, I would tend to find somebody deeply problematic in some respects or unscientific in some respects, but then you also notice that there is some sort of hard principle that they're not willing to give up on.

and that heart principle was often one of equality. Okay. And so that would be one element. I'm struggling to come up with somebody in particular right now. But as you said in the beginning, it's also in part because if there is a story of some, let's say, supposed native brutality in some cases, there are other versions of this which are also engaged. So he said, you know, were there skeptics? Yes, skeptics who considered the story of prehistory to be reductive and violent.

But then there were other skeptics who played it a different way. So, for example, we've been talking mostly about biological. It's a origin so far. But a major origin by the 1850s, 1860s was linguistic origin. So Max Miller has a strong disagreement with Darwin saying like, great, yes, we're all coming from apes, but this doesn't mean anything in so far as apes can't speak in any consistent complex language and we can't. We have to be able to tell not the story of our evolution from apes, but the story of our linguistic evolution. So for Mueller and Franz Popp and others, it becomes a story, it gradually becomes a story of Indo-European power. Now, let's not look at this as a kind of proto-Nazi idea, because at the time, that's not what it was.

It had multiple different plays. It was very interestingly, from my perspective, an attempt to say, how is it that these languages came from something? We still have that something. We call it proto-Indo-European. And where did they come from? Were they the superior peoples who spoke a superior, because they spoke a superior language to everybody else, and they sort of colonized in early history?

Or were they, you know, people who were just more brutal and they killed off everybody else? And gradually they move into both of these options take over. Both of these options become successful. And then people start. playing the same game as in biology, but in linguistics, where do I find evidence? Like, if there's a pot here, does this pot imply that the language came from this direction or that direction? And then gradually, this becomes a kind of story of European nationalism, particularly as most Europeans

decide that Indo-European languages were really Indo-German, and the original Indo-Germans were somewhere between the northern German plain, Denmark, you know, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. The alternative theory, that the system somewhere in the steppe also exists, but that only becomes really accepted after World War II, largely because the first one is politically unacceptable. Well, how do, like, Greek and Latin fit into that story? So, originally, William Jones and the, well, the story is classically told by William Jones, in the 1780s, though Europeans have learned about Sanskrit from before, from somewhere in the 18th century,

and they are curious about the relations between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, particularly about the roots of words. Jones has a famous phrase, which has remained kind of canonical, where he says, Sanskrit, more beautiful than the Greek, more copious than the Latin. they all come from the same, from some proto language. And then Schelling and others, in Germany especially, turned this into a story of derivation.

What's interesting is what happens to Greek and Latin as well. Because until then, the Greeks, especially were like the kind of big success of ancient civilization. But from here on, the storyline changes, it's not so much that they were the ancients. It's that you need to be able to tell the story up to that peak. And so gradually, it's as though the Greeks are a kind of, you know,

will be increasingly treated as a kind of sublime, but as a sublime where all the elements that were established in the 17th and 18th centuries ostensibly about Mesopotamia, Egypt, and so on, would drag up to that one high point. So it's a sort of low gradual rise to there. And that has to be explained in the story by some version of Dorians and, you know, Hittites in Egypt and so on and so forth.

That story congeals actually as late as the 1920s. Well, okay. Sorry, I'm going on too long. No, no, this is, it's great. And actually, I didn't want to lose one thread, which is you brought in linguistics, obviously, in addition to biology and evolution. but there's sort of a flowering of different scientific approaches to prehistory around this time, right?

Archaeology, anthropology, paleontology. I mean, do they all talk to each other and synergize, or do they all go their separate stories? I think both. So let's use one example, which is a famous book from 1865 by John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times. Lubbock is very well aware He is in London He's very well aware Of the Darwinian revolution

That's underway of Huxley and Anatomy He has these in mind But he also Has to establish That this is a partly linguistic Partly archaeological story I said before that Darwin is slightly minor In this period about humans

It's not that people don't think with evolution It's that he doesn't have the adequate evidence. The main evidence is usually anatomical. The explosive evidence is really that Paleolithic tools existed. And so that's also a story of the 1860s as the discovery of Paleolithic tools in Europe provides the evidence that skeletons couldn't provide. Skeletons degrade, stones, chipped stones don't. So if you can geologically find them deeper and deeper, you can tell the story of human beings having lived in a particular area at a much earlier moment. So then you suddenly get, you know, like technology or the study of these kinds of tools.

So they're, you know, archaeology, technology and so on. It becomes a scenario where that dive into the past has multiple sets. Now, obviously, the data from these sciences, it, isn't the same. Some sciences prioritize certain elements and produce some chronologies and others produce other chronologies and other priorities. And people generally aren't very happy when, you know, let's say Darwin too is really annoyed when somebody is trying to make the argument under separate cover as a geological story. The geologists of his time don't want to allow Darwin, you know, the limelight. And so,

this becomes a story of competition and where different approaches feed into one another. But in large part, it's a story, it's a story of competition and of who can get the best funding. In some ways, you could say the same thing has happened in the last 20 or 30 years is today genetics or archaeogenetics is not the same thing. The genetic study of ancient genome, for example, is not the same thing. as paleozoology doesn't use the same kind of evidence. The archaeologists are going to look at different setups and are going to different protocols and so on.

These are sciences that have, you know, they must thrive precisely in the gray zone where they cannot answer all possible questions. And so on the funding side, everybody, you know, gives that classic, their version of the classic Darwin line, you know, will be thrown on the nature of man. Everybody will put that into a funding application at the end of the day. It won't be like here we're here to study like this one finger or some teeth from bison at this point in Europe.

It'll be like here's why this is really important. But these are not necessarily commensurate and perhaps that's what's most exciting about them, that we don't know what human nature is and we're not going to get a good enough answer from any of them. We're going to get these competitions or alternatives. When Toyota builds an electric vehicle, we don't start with a blank slate. We start with everything we know. The BZ brings Toyota's proven engineering to electric.

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So I did want to ask, like, at what point in this story do people start focusing in on the origin of humanity? Like the idea that there was a place on earth where human beings originated, other than, you know, the Garden of Eden story, sure, but when did the somewhat more scientific account come about? Right. So there's the Garden of Eden scenario. Then there are origins as early as Leibniz. So again, in the 17th century, about the origin of language, where it began. In the 19th century, there is an elaborate debate and there's a general acceptance that it's not in Africa. Darwin is an exception when he says that he believes that it would be that it would be in Africa.

And this becomes important later. But the scenario that most of his contemporaries believe in is really that it's somewhere in Asia. North India is the usual scenario in Heckel, for example. Ants Heckel draws this beautiful map that I've included in the book, which is a sort of story of outward movements. So that is, let's say, 1870s into 1880s, but it is kind of a common debate by this point. And by the 1890s, when you have homo erectus discoveries and Java, you really begin to have this debate in earnest.

So Java Man and inverted commas is the, let's say is one widely accepted. likely progenitor. Before that, they're Neanderthals, but most European scientists very quickly suggest that either Neanderthals were an extinct race, a disappeared race. That's one alternative, or otherwise that there are separate species and they're not a progenitor of human,

of sapiens. So that's an interesting twist that you can't quite tell who's who and where they are. By 1900 or 1920, let's say, the two main theories are that what is now called homo erectus in East Asia, so then Java man and later Pekingman or synanthropos

are one origin, and the second one is centered around the piltown controversy, the forgery of a skull and mandible, and the 19-teens in England, which is an extremely convenient one. Like, look, we found the first European and he's a great Brit. But that was not even a mistake. That was an explicit fakery, right? Yes, that was explicit fakery. There's still a measure of debate, and I paid no attention to the subject as to who the faker was.

but most likely it was the it was it was it was uh the key figure uh in establishing uh almost a museum of retreated skulls and who used the same techniques in clearing up the and clearing up the the piltown but everybody else who was involved in those expeditions has been blamed at some point or other about the which is also fun. I guess I didn't know about the prevalence of theories that humanity originated in India in particular or modern-day India. Does that go along with, or is it sort of reinforced by the linguistic story,

Indo-European being the origin of our languages? In all honesty, I don't remember Heckel doing the two together. I think Heckel is so committed to constructing the you know to popularizing evolutionary theory and to constructing and understanding of evolutionary theory as the real game in town that the linguistics isn't really so key to I think it's mostly in his case a story of geographical expansion okay or of you know movements that go it is also because by that point the Germans he would probably have avoided it too because the Germans at the time really had moved into speaking of Indogermanen.

Indogermanen is basically for them a kind of movement backwards from the ostensible ancient Germans who were noble and pure and free and destroy the Roman Empire. That's the basic national myth as it works. It's like you take that story and you project it further back in time and you create Indo-Germanen. instead who, you know, like basically populated Europe in the first place with high, you know, proto-Germanic cultures.

You know, I'm teasing, but it's not like the others actually were any better. No, no, of course. Yeah. But, but look, you know, speaking of the Germans, it's impossible to tell the story without facing up to Nazism, eugenics, the whole bit. I mean, I presume that was kind of the height of leveraging stories. about human origins and purity and raciality to serve some local political purposes? Yes, it absolutely was.

The way that I would put it is that the British Empire also used prehistory, let's say, to organize the world, but it didn't deploy it as an active argument as to why you should kill off a part of your population. In the German case, Hitler already in Mein Kampf divides the world into three. He refers to Aryans as culture creators, to Slavs as bearers of culture and to Semites, Jews in particular, as culture destroyers. And that, what I've tried to show in the book is that that uses many of the themes that were prevalent. In a way, it's just a slight switch around of things that people would have thought already existed. Here are cultured people.

Here are people lacking culture. And so he and many in the Nazi regime, because the Nazi regime was not a single-minded ideology. You have very different directions within it. They use every plausible version of this past. Great Greeks, you know, originally Germans, Aryans versus Jews. They try to negotiate,

oh, good barbarians versus bad barbarians. You use all of these scenarios. And gradually, it's as though it's not so much that the, it's not that this becomes an ideology that every German believes in, but it becomes the background for actively making the arguments. that here is why, even though this person appears to be, you know, entirely innocuous, in fact, their blood carries all of this story. That's the supposed argument, according to the Nazi, not only the Nazi elite,

but really the gauntletters, like the low-level officials, they're part of the motor that pushes things. And in World War II and during the Holocaust, these are very much used by the SS, for example, to create the hierarchies. And to listen to Primo Levi, for example, when Primo Levi wrote survival in Auschwitz, one of the things that he describes in extraordinary detail is the sense that the SS had created the campus. a laboratory in which their theories would be quote-unquote proven. So that basically then if you watch people in utter misery, you know, half conscious of their everyday life, starving and trying to make it for another day,

well, here's a state of nature for you. The Nazi argument became that like, or sorry, Primo Levi's response is like, look, the Nazis basically affected into the world their theory of what the distinction between them and us Jews was. And so I tried to track that in the book, not as a cause and effect story, but as it like, here's a general set of beliefs. Here's a mobilized set of ideas and beliefs. And here's the effect on the concentration camp and extermination camp universe. You know, one might have hoped that scientists or philosophers in that context would have stood up and said, well, no, you're misusing some ideas.

And my impression is occasionally that happened, but to a large extent it did not. Too many people went along with it. And it speaks to our, you know, we're all human beings, no matter what it is that we do for living. Yes. I think scientists, for the most part, did not, and many German scientists enthusiastically endorsed these ideas. It's, you know, we're all human beings and we all live in a world filled with language, and it's language is not neutral. It carries the values, it carries sets of values that we negotiate in our everyday life. And in many respects, many of these people, you know, could translate what had been private resent.

or would have been institutional resentments into an ethno-nationalist theory. They found ways of supporting it. And when they didn't agree, for the most part, they were like, yes, but this is because, you know, that branch of the Nazis are just peasants. We are really with a modernizing branch of the Nazis. That's what I was saying earlier that one of the really scary bits about prehistory is often that it involves this sort of a negotiation. It involves a negotiation in which we say, like, not this, but that. we're not cool with this element, but we're cool without ignoring that this has consequences too. So I think many of them did do this.

And there wasn't, you know, we sort of wish that both politically, ethically, morally people had had a different approach. But elsewhere in the world, this wasn't necessarily better either. It was just easier to hide the targets. and so and it was easier in that nobody was actively saying, you know, we must erase the world of these people. So most of the discussion around voluntarism, most of the discussion around eugenics is about voluntary. Wouldn't you want your children and your children's children to live in an ever better world? Doesn't this mean that people who are deficient should perhaps be removed? that's about the extent to which it would go.

So it's a kind of appeal, you know, and you're like, oh, maybe. So people didn't have a strong objection to this. It matters to me that we realize that in a way, we have deeply problematic commitments as well, which are so easy to ignore because nobody can live by thinking about their deeply problematic commitments and those alone and somehow morally resolve all of them. My best skin ever at 45?

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Toyota, let's go places. Yeah, that's a very good point. It's sort of what I was going to get at because the Nazis are almost in our current conception, you know, the cartoonish villains and we can all agree they're bad, et cetera, et cetera, largely, not everybody. But some of the themes are still around the idea that there are subsets of people who are naturally better than others, more deserving, so forth. And also I take it that, just because these ideas are so resonant, even fighting against them, you can overcorrect, right? It's very hard to get exactly that balance of being scientifically accurate or giving a correct picture of reality while recognizing your bias is and overcoming them, but not just sort of simple-mindedly going in the opposite direction either, I guess.

Yes, I completely agree. It's part of the great difficulty, and it's a great difficulty that we all have to live with. There's no point in pretending that we're simply going to improve on all this to the point of perfection. But yes, this is very much still alive, the sense that there are parts of the world that are, you know, we no longer speak of a terra nullius or a kind of empty space argument. But we do certainly, let's just say there are parts of the world in Papua New Guinea and Brazil, especially, where the idea is that, you know, these are uncivilized people who live there. There may be cannibals. They're definitely more violent than everybody who's in a civilized world.

So the Yanomami in Brazil, a classic example. And the New York Times just reported how elaborately, maybe I would have said like two, three months ago, how elaborately the Bolsonaro government took advantage of the image of Yanomami brutality in order to perfect extractive policies that would allow for, you know, the extraction of minerals from their areas of the Amazon. In Papua New Guinea, it similarly, at some point I tried to say in the book that there are that moments of showing and discussing native violence in the 20th century were well intended. They weren't intended necessarily to say, look at these horrible, brutal people. They were intended to say, look, this is actually very limited violence. We can, you know, nuke the world and end everything in minutes.

But these people basically have a kind of almost like a ritual kind of warfare that at most aims at one fatality at most. Now, those images from the 1970s, 1960s, are images that then get re-easterners, are images that then get re-reactual. used into being like, look, what is their place, the place of these people into modernity? Either we need to educate them. So that's one deeply problematic scenario that assumes that there is no culture there to speak of. Or, you know, well, we'll go about our business and, you know, they can do whatever it is that happens to them, which is a little bit like, you know, closing off an entire area,

which their culture aside was once an actual habit. environment. So one tries to fix things by going the other way and that then becomes, that opens the way for, you know, for new forms of violence. Have you followed the, this is a slight tangent, but it amuses me. The controversy about the indigenous land in Vancouver that has recently been going on. So this is hilarious. Please tell me more. Yeah. So there's this. prime real estate in the middle of the city of Vancouver that is governed by indigenous peoples, whatever their government structure is. And they finally decided what to do with it, which is to build gigantic apartment skyscrapers. And the people of Vancouver are outraged, not all of them,

but many of them, they're like, that's not what you're supposed to do. We were expecting, like, you know, tents or a park or something like that. And they're like, you know, we're going to make money and we're going to provide affordable housing for a lot of people. This is great. But it's once again, they have an image. People have an image of what these people are supposed to be like and they don't go along with it. What kind of agency move is that?

Yes. Yes. I think that, okay, so that is a great story all of its own. Versions of it, you can see all the way in the second half of the century. And very often when versions of it do not quite work, then you, get more aggressive responses. So, you know, suddenly to, so let me use as an example, one of the last chapters of the book, which is around aggression.

There are, in large part, the post-war period is divided between those scientists who try to suggest that what is key is, again, technology, that we are technological beings and most culture, language included, works with technological developments. And that explains some of our history. And another group that has paid a lot of attention to human aggression. Is human aggression a modern thing? Does it come with estates or with the establishment of cities? Or else is it really a kind of, are we wired for aggression?

It's not so much that particular peoples are individually targeted as aggressive. it's more that the debate hinges on the ability to shift, you know, to push people into, to create this impression that people are more aggressive than they are or less aggressive than they are. Because we can't accept that somebody who lives in a fundamentally different world will have different premises and different cultures for recognizing what that might be. So the scenario that follows is these hard bifurcations that people will say, yes, you know, animal ethology, for example, like Nicholas Tinberg and Conrad Lawrence and others will go with the argument that there's a kind of wired in aggression into human beings.

And others will go into a scenario that's far, or, you know, that it is about the relationship between being in its environment, a certain species in its environment that generates a certain kind of aggression. So technically, it's still as though we do it. Others will come around into saying, no, no, no, no, no. We don't really, it's not really a fundamental

biological element. It's only particular groups or particular circumstances or particular kinds of misery that generate this kind of violence. And these two get mapped onto politics. Yeah. It's, in a way, these become solutions.

That's the way that I would like to put it. I think that with the past, a lot of the work that we see into prehistory, it becomes a sort of solution. We just say, this is the, here is the problem. The problem is we can't figure out where violence comes from. Do we blame ourselves? Do we blame modern technology? Do we blame geopolitics? no, we can, you know, carefully blame a certain vision of the past.

Or we can blame exceptions who are those people who have not been socialized properly, so to speak. So we get all of these mutually reinforcing arguments because not one of them will ever win. You'll get alternatives that play out. Do I remember correctly from your book? There was an amusing anecdote about Raymond. Dart had theories about Australopithecine violence that ended up influencing Stanley Kubrick in 2001 Space Odyssey, the opening scene. So 2001's opening scene, the dawn of man, is very much intended to be a scene that's based on

the work of a man called Robert Ardry, who was originally a Hollywood screenwriter turned amateur. and later, you know, how amateur was he? This was his world, paleontologists. Now, Ardrey got really excited by the work of Raymond Dart. Dart had first described the Australopithecus Africanus, or at the time known as the Tong Baby, which is on the basis of a skull that he had been handed. And that's in the mid-1920s. His theory that, you know, the cradle of humankind is in Southern Africa doesn't hold much water with his mentors because they all believe that it's in East Asia. And also because of various debates in England regarding the origins of culture that were going on at the time.

He also, Dart also was a kind of difficult man in. many ways. He had taken his mentors, you know, the sort of very loud, we strive for truth. We're the scientists who have all the truth with us. But he had actually targeted them as well. Okay. And so in a way, he created an argument that everybody just said, like, well, this guy's just too kooky. His mentors are difficult enough. He's just way out there. Let's just leave this for a little bit. And after World War II, when the remains of synanthropus are lost, ostensibly, the American army loses the remains of Peking Man in a retreat in China from the, from the Japanese army. After the synanthropos remains are lost, in 1948, 49, the British Museum, Kenneth Oakley at the British

Museum demonstrates that Piltown is also fake. This becomes public in 51, 52. And so suddenly now the main theory or the best theory is really the Africa theory. There is a wonderful researcher at the University of Chicago, Emily Kern, who's writing the story at great detail as a book. But what happens at this point is that suddenly DART theories come to be discussed much more massively. And so Darts has various other theories about Australopithesis in violence. And this is about, you know,

breaking into the skull and scooping out the brain. It's about murder between one and the other. All the apes are damaging each other. And he uses super Gothic language. It's it's super aggressive stylization. So Ardry loves this. And Ardry, Darts politics is decidedly pro apartheid and Ardry's politics is decidedly anti-decolonization and later it becomes pro-apartheid too. So this too needs to be said.

They're not random aside. But you get versions of out of Africa that are that kind of scenario, you know, thank goodness we escaped Africa is the way that it's played out. Another version goes toward Kubrick, which is like, well, that was violence back then. but now we are our problems are more technological. So 2001 and Hal 9,000 are the, show a different kind of problem and a different kind of violence in place, a different anxiety. And so Kubrick replayed that scene of primordial violence between two groups fighting over a territory, a pond. And he uses that particular scene as a, as a start.

of leading all the way to the end. Kubrick's 2001 shows up in several chapters in the book because it also uses some of these quasi-religious theories of transhumanism that were at the time supported by the Jesuit Pierre de Yard de Chardin, who was banned by the Catholic Church from publishing anything theological in large part because he was both a theologian and an evolutionist, and who has now been brought back into the fold as both John Paul II and Benedict the 16th gradually started citing him. And there's a question of some debate now, whether because his celebration of the universe is and his prayers about the universe are so

beautiful, whether that and his, you know, he's a skeptic, as we were saying before, his skepticism toward both, especially toward church positions. There's a measure of a question whether he will be canonized to some extent or other. Do you know that Stephen Jay Gould hypothesized that he was behind the Piltdown Man hoax, Tehar Desha D'Sher Dan. Yes. Yes, and I remember that with just mostly a kind of great joy at watching Gould kind of put on a detective's hat. But the story doesn't really make very much sense.

It's, I think that it speaks more to the threat that Gould felt from someone like Dejard. And by the fact that Dejard became such a bizarre celebrity. He was handsome and photographable and the church treated him badly. and he tried and tried and tried and wrote, you know, like thousands upon thousands of pages, including in paleontological pieces, especially about synanthropus and wolves. But there were others who had a much greater claim to the fake, and he, you know, he gained nothing from it, if anything. He simply never had very good answers because little did he care in the post-war period. about this. He had been involved in much bigger and more, you know, to his mind, influential and work discoveries. So I guess one thing that we've had here in the discussion is that we have always told stories of human prehistory and origins to serve the purposes of the moment,

whether or not those stories were, you know, the prehistory was great or it was not. One more aspect that we haven't quite focused on, but I wanted to get on the table is what makes human beings unique, right? Like, what is it that turns human beings to be so? Clearly, I'm completely on board that humanity is different in some ways. But, of course, famously, when you try to pinpoint what it is compared to other animals and so forth, you always find exceptions. And how does that move or that question play into these issues? So, I mean, it really is the key question. It's the question that everybody tries to answer.

A somewhat harsh way to put it is that everybody tries to own the answer to this. So the linguists need language, neuroscientists need to be able to explain, feel like they need to be able to explain certain things in order to own, you know, a kind of human development as a neuroscientific matter or as a matter of the brain or as a matter of, neuroplasticity for example, who's a matter of neuroplasticity, for example. And then the story gets then the story gets into

measure of debate when it is that literary figures or philosophers come into the game and they just don't want to tolerate that that would be the only possible solution. My favorite answer to this question

which I'm going to describe because it's just so far out there. Is the answer offered by George Batai? Batai basically says he goes to see the Lascault cave and the cave paintings in the Lascault cave, and he is overwhelmed by their beauty. He spends time then thinking that, you know, why is it that the ancient painters could not really paint humans. They painted stick figures or humans with animal parts, but they painted these

utterly gorgeous three-dimensional bison and aurochs and horses and lions and so on. And he says, well, it's as though they were trying to be close to the animals, the animals that they were killing. It's as though they had come to understand death and representation, really, that, you know, the animal that you represent is dead or you're trying to be in a relationship. It's as though they were apologizing to the animals that they were killing. They could no longer be one with the nature that they lived in. Now, that is a little bit of an out there answer, that that's what's unique to human. It's not really out there if we say that death and representation, our relationship to death

and our relationship to our capacity to represent things really do mark us as human. But even so, you couldn't have an adequate answer in this. this regard. Everybody needs it. And in some respect, they think that as hard philosophical answers, you know, left center stage after World War II, as most philosophers did not try to give a kind of foundational definition of humanity, a definition of humanity as a foundation for everything else, all these different sciences came in. If we can't have an exact answer, we don't want to to give the room back to religious answers. So we need to be able to give a long history as an answer itself.

I don't think there's anything glib about this. I mean, Thorot helps again with a funding thing, but I don't think that that's the only part. I think that's a genuine sense that we need to be able to teach children why it is that they're equal to the people around them, why slavery and the destruction of indigenous people are, are, you know, profoundly immoral. and why it is that we need to be able to look to humanity as a single unit.

That said, all of the answers then given end up creating a mess each of their own, each in their own way. Yeah. And so on the one hand, you really want the answer. On the other hand, that ends up being more of a problem than anybody would necessarily want. Yeah, and you just reminded me, I didn't really give you a chance to comment on teaching children. I mean, these stories that we have about human prehistory, it's not some top-down dictation we have from the government,

here's the right thing. There's this complicated interplay of many things, and we end up building museum diaramas and writing children's books and curricula for kindergarten or whatever, and there's sort of a common story that gets told, and it's kind of fun and mysterious, is how that shapes, gets shaped, I guess. Yes, I think that that story was somewhat more,

centralized from the 50s to the 80s, let's say. Perhaps it was at its best in the 80s. And since then, it's kind of broken into different dimensions, into different directions, partly because the, let's say, because of the ongoing debates in American education, American primary education, which are too, let's say, centered at the state level and which do have political consequences, but also because that common story was something that the BBC, for example, could put up as a basic educational account. I watched a version of this called Once Upon a Time Man, which was made by a French and Canadian company in the late 70s or maybe early 80s, and which was co-financed by some 30 countries. Now,

what this gives you as a sense like this is a massive public education program. Nesco worked the same way. But now, in a way, if you have a Netflix account, we rely on the David Attenbrose. We rely on people who do come in. And a lot of the time that's great, a lot of the time in shows that are not as impressive, the history of the world in not the Mel Brooks, the what do you call it, History of the World by the BBC

in the early 2010s, enjoyed a little bit the drama. It was a high period, let's say, of trying to make documentaries that look like narrative movies. And there, the more dramatic the story needs to get,

the more you fall into traps. And the more you create stories of like, did Sapiens, you know, genocideally eliminate and eat Neanderthals, which is what Andrew Maher says in that, show. They have to create the crossing out of Africa as a high, you know, they put this like a natural bridge between two mountains and the people leaving Africa have to slowly and

great fear cross this. I think that that is, while it is well intended, again, it creates a kind of drama that then has to be outdone or that has to go back into this. competition that's less useful. I think the more general this stays and the more we learn a basic human story and the more we teach that basic human story to our children, giving a clear sense that this may change. Things have to be treated as tentative. It's probably not going to change massively, but we don't need to be closing them off. We didn't even know about Denisovans a decade ago, for example. All of that complexity gives us room to de-dramatize this. story that should simply be about us. It should be a story that can be at a little bit of a

distance so we can ask what, you know, not what's innate to human beings, but also what kind of, you know, promises and dangers modernity entails. What kind of violence we carry out, regardless of what had happened back then. It's a shame because that's a slightly optimistic moment that would be a perfect place to end the podcast. But I But I can't help but asking one more pessimistic question. I mean, you just mentioned sort of commercial dramatic pressures that, you know, that nudge our stories about human prehistory in a certain direction. But there's also just the splintering of audiences, right?

In the modern world, it's easier to target. And indeed, as you mentioned in the book, there's a kind of genre of telling deep stories about human history that seems to be targeting a kind of, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial class that wants to feel good about itself in a certain way? I think that's right. And it's, I think this is really the Yuval Harari sapient story. It's the immense success of 25 million copies sold after, you know, public support by Bill Gates, by Barack Obama, by Mark Zuckerberg and others. That's the scenario that says, we are creative beings, we're going to, you know, app develop our way out of this. The future is bright. We will

create new gods. We will ourselves be new gods. That kind of story, I think, is precisely what's wrong, is the newest version of what's wrong. This says, well, no matter really what extent of ecological damage we're doing, we'll figure it out. We'll get through it. It's a story that says that, you know, there are basically, there is a kind of class of creators who are imagining what the future would look like. And humanity will come to endorse and get together in this future.

That's a completely, you know, ultimately that's a very short-lived, a very Silicon Valley, and completely fantastical view of the world. Most people go about their everyday lives and cannot afford a gig economy scenario, nor can the rest of, of us afford the sheer electrical power that would be required for this kind of world to proceed.

So then you get the counter arguments, but they are scenarios really that are about making ourselves feel good and about imagining that we are like those early humans. Or, you know, not humans, those pre-hominens, really, who descend from the trees into the Savannah are, you know, at one with their world. We're profoundly not at one with our world. There's, and whether this is something that has a long history or a history that's maybe 20 or 30 years old, the fact of what we are doing is infinitely more important than in a way the who we are. The more we try to answer the who we are, the more we enable and allow this kind of destruction. I mean, maybe this is an unfair question, but the final one will be

from studying all of the different ways in which stories about our prehistory have been deployed for various local of the moment cultural political purposes and recognizing that we would still like to tell the correct story. Is there, are there strategies or recommendations you have for balancing our biases for admitting, you know, well, there's a natural tendency for me to tell this story, but I don't want to do that, but maybe it's the true story. I don't know. This is always the difficult line to walk. Yes. I think that providing a hard separation

between what the deep past was like and who we are now is the basic essential bit. I tripped over my words earlier. I said we. It still happens. It's very difficult to break the habit

of just saying this isn't about a we. It's about a they that was a different world that had a different set of relations that had a different set of imagined promises and terrors and beauties. And we have zero chance of reconstructing, let's say, socially, what that world was like, what, you know, the nightmares and the dreams were like of people who lived in. If we can create that separation, it doesn't mean that we have to say, we don't share humanity. We don't share certain basic elements with people

who are different. It just means we need to be able to justify how we relate to one another as human beings on different terms than where we come from. So in that scenario, it's not that it becomes exactly a curiosity, but it becomes something de-dramatized, something where we can have a relationship with our ideas about early humanity or about human origin that doesn't give us legitimacy. We shouldn't be getting legitimacy from that past. We should have a strong sense of what the species has been and has done. We should have a strong sense of what its promises and problems were and are

and how different these are. and we should be seeing it at a slightly greater distance, I think, than the scenarios we would want. Just as we don't, most of us, let's say, don't identify with the Mesopotamians that our kids study at school. The Mesopotamians in particular, it's such a great moment, agriculture, writing and so on. I don't mean that we need to ignore it. we just don't need to have a particularly strong emotional connection, which is what this has been creating, that we are human because. I'd rather we had that we are human because that has to do with today, not with, I spent back then. I like it. That is absolutely something to shoot for.

Stefanos-Jerlano's, thanks so much for being in the Mindscape podcast. Thank you so much. I really so love this discussion.