Stefanos Geroulanos is the author of The Invention of Prehistory, out this month.
In 1935, in southern Libya, the German painter Katharina Marr put on desert sandals and a sombrero and climbed a rope ladder hanging off the side of a 15-foot rock. She slipped a thin sheet of paper behind the ropes, held it in place with two of the ladder’s rungs and began to trace a petroglyph. Suspended a few feet to her right, her colleague Elisabeth Pauli did the same. The two...
Recognition of a past without people yielded a centuries-long ‘obsession’ with trying to find the essence of humanity in its supposed origins. More often than not this has taken the form of Western...
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