Lamentable Stick Figure

The Earth​ aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a synthesis of sacred history and Persian, Greek and Roman myth, and so it satisfied both theologians and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century later, neither the church nor classics held much sway over scientific debate. Marine fossils found in the stones of the pyramids could no longer be explained away as remnants of the Flood; they were monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, thought that the Earth had been formed from the debris of a comet that had collided with the sun. He heated iron balls in the forge of his estate in Burgundy and, based on how quickly they cooled down, calculated that it had taken the Earth somewhere between 75,000 and three million years to reach its present, habitable temperature. At the Oyster Club in Edinburgh, James Hutton captivated the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment with his own account of how the ‘unconformities’ of granite and schist at Jedburgh and Siccar Point could have been produced only by the gradual, indefinite mutations of the Earth itself. In revolutionary Paris, Georges Cuvier found an explanation for why the strange bones unearthed in Ohio, Argentina and Siberia resembled no living creature: they belonged to mammoths, mastodons and megatheria that had gone extinct thousands of years before.

Humanity became a relatively marginal figure in this grander story of nature. Man ‘flatters himself that he is eternal, and calls himself king of the universe’, the philosopher Baron d’Holbach wrote in 1770, but in reality he is a latecomer, an ‘ephemeral thing’. Fifty years ago, the historian of science Paolo Rossi argued that this kind of existential humility characterised the Enlightenment’s reaction to the discovery of deep time. Mourning the ‘death of Adam’, European intellectuals embraced a ‘less narcissistic’ self-image. Man no longer descended from the gods but instead emerged from beasts. In The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos makes the opposite argument. 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 intellectuals projecting their own biases onto the deep past, usually to justify the violence and hierarchies of a world from which they benefit. Eighteenth-century political economy told the story of the progressively efficient use of resources: man ascended from hunter to shepherd to farmer, before realising his true potential as the self-interested merchant of commercial society. Today’s narratives flatter the aspiring coders and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. For Yuval Noah Harari, the ‘march of civilisation’ has always been driven by the innovations of visionary technocratic elites.

Not all accounts of prehistory have been quite so triumphant. According to Geroulanos, Rousseau was the first to articulate modernity’s fascination with the distant past. The idea of the state of nature had been invoked by Hobbes to explain the anarchy of civil war and by Locke to justify land grabs in the Carolinas. But Geroulanos argues that for Rousseau this wasn’t so much a literary device as historical reality. Humanity had once existed blissfully in nature, ‘without industry, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no desire to do them harm’. But innocence had been corrupted over time by property and progress. Rousseau’s history of the species was in many respects his own autobiography writ large, the purity of childhood giving way to artifice and obligation. The earliest humans were no different from a young Jean-Jacques in Geneva. How’s that for narcissism?

Rousseau and his contemporaries read the travel journals of French missionaries to the Americas in search of a humanity relatively untouched by civilisation. Indigenous populations like the ‘Caribs of Venezuela’ were the ‘children of history’. They were ‘savage’ and untamed, not quite as advanced as the more familiar nomadic ‘barbarians’ of the Eurasian steppe, who had at least managed to domesticate animals, and far less so than Europeans. The modern obsession with prehistory has its origins, therefore, in the intellectual discourses spawned by colonialism in the 18th century, when Europeans consolidated, in the words of the historian J.G.A. Pocock, their ‘conceptual dictatorship on the rest of the planet, judging all other peoples by their understanding of themselves’. Older categories of savage, barbarian and civilised gave way in the 19th century to the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages of archaeology, while anthropologists classified cultures according to whether they believed in magic, religion or science. Economists later organised their theories of development around the more prosaic language of Third, Second and First Worlds.

Europeans adopted these temporal schemes to make sense of the colonial encounter, but also to absolve themselves of responsibility for its violence. Darwin wrote from Sydney in 1839 that ‘there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ Fifty years later the French zoologist Armand de Quatrefages described Indigenous Tasmanians as ‘fossil men’, alive but doomed to extinction. Until they were wiped out, he suggested, they could be studied for clues about the origins and nature of humanity. Not every anthropologist looked so dispassionately on the spectacle of the ‘disappearing native’. Lewis Henry Morgan combined writing ethnography of the Seneca and the Sioux with legal and political activism on their behalf but, as Geroulanos points out, even he seemed to accept that the extermination of Native Americans was inevitable: they were ‘perishing’, ‘declining’, ‘dissolving’, as if time were the agent of dispossession and genocide, not the United States army or the Ogden Land Company. Museums ‘salvaged’ artefacts from vanishing cultures and displayed them to sympathetic middle-class visitors, who were led to believe that ‘Indians suffered because they were Palaeolithic men from a bygone age.’ Sometimes ‘Indians’ themselves were part of the exhibitions. In the 1910s, Ishi (meaning ‘man’ in his native Yana language), one of the few Yahi people who had survived the California gold rush, was a main attraction at the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco. He became a source of fascination for the local press – headlines referred to him as ‘the wild man of California’ and ‘a genuine survivor of Stone Age barbarism’ – before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1916. Museum officials dissected Ishi’s body and sent his brain to the Smithsonian.

Actual fossils haven’t provided much more reliable access to the past. In the early 20th century Neanderthals were thought to be ancestors of humans: they ‘served as metonyms for colonial subjects, for Europeans of a past that had been overcome’. Today, the racial logic has been reversed. Some now view Neanderthals as a species of indigenous Europeans that was, in the words of the anthropologist Fred Smith, ‘demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of homo sapiens’ – an argument that fuels right-wing fears about migration and ‘white replacement’. The familiar lesson that Geroulanos draws from this and countless other examples is that speculations on the origins of humanity and the deep past always reveal more about their authors than their objects. Occasionally he makes the stronger claim that discourses of prehistory don’t just reflect but contribute to the violence and inequities of the modern world. ‘We know that concepts do more than we want them to; sometimes they hurt and even kill.’ The Third Reich’s obsession with ‘Indo-German’ forebears – the Neolithic Aryan conquerors of Europe, or the tribes of Tacitus’ Germania, proudly resisting a decadent Roman Empire – ensnared ‘ordinary, boring un-Nazified Germans’ in ‘a web of ideas that gave metaphysical value to the killing’. And as Primo Levi testified, the concentration camps were designed to reduce Jews, Roma and homosexuals to beasts – to force them into a recognisably prehistoric, subhuman condition.

Geroulanos thinks that most theories of prehistory have been, if not dangerous, then ‘absurd’, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘silly’. Why do they endure? Jung argued that the assault on religion by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution destroyed the symbolic structures of psychic and communal life – paternal king, virgin mother, Trinitarian God – and left secular moderns scrambling around in vain for new myths in which to invest ‘the surplus of libido that had once been laid up in the cult of divine images’. Geroulanos, a historian of postwar French thought at NYU, forcefully rejects everything about Jung: the conservatism of his worldview and the antisemitism of his politics, but also the validity of his historical interpretation. The moderns did find a mythic substitute for crown and crucifix in the figure of ‘humanity’ and its abbreviation, ‘man’ – an invention, Foucault declared, of recent date. Theories of prehistory have been such a persistent feature of modernity, Geroulanos argues, because they have provided ‘pretend foundations’ to its organising concept, lending the abstract idea of man essence and telos. The task of his book is to show that the political projects these theories have enabled have always rested on guesswork and fantasy, not ‘good, reliable science’. In that respect he is an unlikely heir to Voltaire, who mocked the geological theories of the Enlightenment as ‘charlatanry unworthy of history’.

A more subtle argument competes with the book’s myth-busting polemics. Geroulanos doesn’t think all prehistory is bad or exclusionary; he objects only to theories that claim certainty and seek legitimacy from an essentially unknowable past. He is enthusiastic about ‘proudly speculative’ ideas that undermine the status quo, like those of the 1970s feminist anthropologists who dismantled the gendered assumptions and erotic fantasies that credited evolution to male aggression. In The Descent of Woman the Welsh writer Elaine Morgan popularised the ‘aquatic ape’ theory, which located the origins of social organisation not in the African savannah, with violent hunter-gatherers gaining control over inferior competition (as per the ‘killer ape’ theory of the mid-century anthropologist Raymond Dart), but in the shallow sea, where female hominids learned to seek protection from predators, secure ample food supplies, and nurture their young. Morgan’s argument was controversial – other second-wave feminists criticised it for essentialising womanhood and reinscribing a gendered division of labour in childrearing – but Geroulanos applauds its attempt to find ‘better origin myths’ for an otherwise chauvinist discourse. Better still was Juliet Mitchell’s critique of feminists who sought inspiration from some primitive matriarchy that might be restored if only the right historical account of its demise could be found. The point, as Mitchell saw it, was not to ask when patriarchy began, but to explain how it endures in the present.

Another source of inspiration is Georges Bataille and his reflections on the caves at Lascaux. In the early 20th century a series of entrepreneurial archaeologists, chief among them Leo Frobenius and Henri Breuil, had promoted the idea that prehistoric cave paintings, which often depicted large animals and hunting scenes, served as totems around which spiritual communities had formed. Breuil thought that the ‘artists’ of these images were not simply painting something the community desired – a dead predator, a successful hunt – but mediating with the world of spirits and animals through the act of representing them. The artist, in other words, was a shaman: a visionary capable of transcending the self and controlling humanity and nature alike.

Breuil’s interpretation resounded with interwar Europeans who had no trouble attributing quasi-shamanic powers to modernist artists or charismatic party leaders. But it didn’t suit the disenchantment and anxieties of the atomic age. In a series of essays written in the 1950s, Bataille read the paintings as an ecological drama about humanity’s domination of and alienation from nature. One particular image at Lascaux caught his attention: a speared bison, its entrails spilling out, lies dead next to the stick figure of a human with an avian face and an erect phallus. For Bataille, the scene captured the eros and grief tied up in the moment humanity achieved control over its natural surroundings: man asserted himself as the king of animals, then hid behind an animal mask. Whereas the bison is rendered in beautiful detail, the man, as Geroulanos puts it, is ‘nothing better than a stick figure trying hard to re-embrace the animal itself’, as if he wanted to retreat into a world he had mastered.

Geroulanos says he prefers myths of prehistory that recognise themselves as partial accounts, self-consciously addressed to present concerns. The heroes of the book accept that they are trying to interpret evidence that is ‘unwilling to be interpreted’, that ‘refuses meaning’. I’m not sure this is quite right. Cave paintings and fossils and ancient DNA might refuse truth, in the sense of revealing what actually happened, or of yielding ‘good, reliable science’. But they contain a surfeit of meaning, as this book itself demonstrates. And it’s not as though the thinkers and ideas Geroulanos is drawn to – Morgan on the aquatic ape, Bataille on animals and humans, André Leroi-Gourhan on the role of technology in evolution – are reluctant to draw grand conclusions about deep history. Perhaps their appeal lies simply in the fact that they provide no easy affirmations about human nature and progress, and no utopian solutions to contemporary problems. Rejecting Jung’s theory of an unmoored collective unconscious that might be redeemed by National Socialism, Geroulanos is ‘far more sympathetic’ to Freud’s argument that civilisation began with and continues to be structured by remorse over the killing of the primal father: ‘Even though it too tasked prehistory with explaining everything, it offered no respite, no assurance of racial superiority, no comfort in one’s heroism, only guilt and conflict and work without any encouraging resolution.’ It offered, in other words, not a flattering image of man, but something more like a negative anthropology, or a solitary, lamentable stick figure, prostrate with an erection.

In​ the 1930s, French philosophers began to examine the responsibility of humanism for the crisis of the First World War and the rise of totalitarianism. The chaos of the young 20th century couldn’t be attributed solely to the ‘death of God’; man also had to take some of the blame. Where some, like Jung, embraced the secular religions of state, nation or party, Bataille, Sartre and Levinas argued that modernity had failed because it was based on the flawed concept of the human, with innate qualities and rights. Scepticism about humanity matured into a fully-fledged anti-humanism in the wake of another catastrophic war. One year after the liberation of Paris, Sartre claimed that the ‘cult of humanism’ could only have ended in fascism; the task for postwar Europe was to reject the religious and metaphysical baggage of ‘human nature’ and to recognise that man was ‘still to be determined’. But his peers refused to accept even this minimalist defence. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a sustained denunciation of Sartre at the end of La Pensée sauvage, insisted that the purpose of anthropology was ‘not to constitute, but to dissolve man’. Not long afterwards, Foucault identified man as the invented object of 19th-century sciences – history, biology, economics – that were becoming obsolete. The death of man was imminent and promised to reveal new intellectual and political horizons.

This tradition of 20th-century anti-humanism was the subject of Geroulanos’s first book, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010). His second, Transparency in Postwar France (2017), addressed a similar assortment of thinkers and themes. The human sciences since Rousseau had claimed that self and society were essentially legible, and that knowledge could easily be communicated across different cultures. Foucault’s generation rejected these assumptions and replaced them with ‘the image of a non-human and anti-humanist complexity’ that rested on structuralist theories of power and information: language always exceeds the speaker’s grasp; norms are not natural but constructed; both self and other will always remain, at some level, unknowable. The Invention of Prehistory is something of a departure: it deals with the past two centuries, not just postwar France, and is written for a general audience. But in other respects it might be thought of as the final instalment of an anti-humanist trilogy. Taking inspiration from the protagonists of his first two books, Geroulanos insists that our flawed ideas about prehistory both rely on and reproduce essentialist concepts of the human that prevent us from taking responsibility for the present, or from thinking about alternative futures.

Some of the more strident epistemological claims in The Invention of Prehistory might be explained by Geroulanos’s fondness for anti-humanism. It’s one thing to say that Europeans tried to impose a conceptual dictatorship on the planet; it’s another to suggest that they succeeded, and in doing so precluded other ways of thinking about history and the human. Like the structuralist anthropologists of the postwar period, Geroulanos believes that we can neither fully understand nor escape our own codes of meaning. Whether they’re an archaeologist, geneticist or pop historian, the investigator of the deep past is condemned to use concepts that have, as he writes in Transparency, ‘a life of their own’. By this standard, even those who challenge grand narratives of civilisation head-on will remain trapped in the prison house of prehistory. James Scott, in Against the Grain, questioned ‘the social will to sedentism’ – the idea that Neolithic nomads couldn’t wait to settle down, cultivate grain, obey laws and pay taxes – while David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, recovered evidence that humanity has experimented with forms of collective life beyond the modern state or the primitive tribe. But for Geroulanos these authors all make the same mistake as Rousseau, conscripting early humans into a thoroughly modern debate: anarchism good, capitalist state bad. We should stop looking to people from the deep past for answers; we cannot know them and they are not ‘worthy of our love’. Better to accept that we live inescapably in our historical present, as ‘compound beings, webs of meaning, and cyborgs’.

There’s a section in The Dawn of Everything where Graeber and Wengrow discuss the Baron de Lahontan’s Dialogues with a Savage, one of the most influential travel narratives of the 18th century, in which a Huron named Adario brilliantly criticises Christian hypocrisy and French customs. Graeber and Wengrow take seriously the possibility that Adario was real, and that he did actually articulate to Lahontan ‘an Indigenous critique of European civilisation’ – that, in other words, the Enlightenment’s attack on superstition, absolutism and inequality owed its origins to an ‘American intellectual’. Most historians believe that Adario was invented by Lahontan to avoid censorship, and that Europeans like him were too ethnocentric and genocidal to be interested in what Indigenous people thought about the world, still less to translate their ideas faithfully. But Graeber and Wengrow characterise this line of thinking as another form of Western arrogance dressed up as critique: the historian assumes that someone like Adario lived in ‘a completely different universe’ long since destroyed by colonialism, and is thereby excused from learning anything about it.

You can sense in passages like this a frustration not only with standard interpretations of 18th-century travel literature, but also with the broader claim that the Other must always be a construct of the colonial imagination. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Graeber’s former adviser and collaborator, used to complain about scholarship which, while claiming to expose the destructive effects of capitalism, inadvertently made colonised peoples the passive objects of a hegemonic and homogenising Western culture. These kinds of arguments, Sahlins complained, complete in theory what imperialism began in practice – ‘as though the West, having materially invaded the lives of others, would now intellectually deny them any cultural integrity’. Difference remains, however awkwardly it might be grasped. Why not try to find it in the deep past? Geroulanos’s warnings about the mythical and ideological work prehistory has been made to do are well taken. But it would be a shame to wilfully restrict our historical imagination, to accept confinement in our 21st-century webs of meaning.

It might also be a mistake to abandon prehistory to racists and cranks. One of the most popular series on the History Channel in the US is Ancient Aliens, which takes its inspiration from Erich von Däniken’s theory that extraterrestrials were responsible for the achievements of early human cultures. Geroulanos would get a lot out of Ancient Aliens. A typical episode will begin by questioning the ability of ‘primitive man’ to build such complex structures as Stonehenge, the pyramids or the Nazca Lines, which could have been the work only of ‘otherworldly beings who descended from the sky’, or ‘space gods’. It will sometimes liken those achievements to the wonders of modern technology: the pyramids were power plants that distributed electricity through obelisks; the Nazca Lines are the remnants of ‘a mining operation for advanced beings in the distant past’. The show is proof of modernity’s ability to find itself reflected back wherever it looks, in the distant past or in outer space. But it also suggests that the abuses of prehistory can just as easily stem from a low estimation of humanity and an insensitivity to cultural difference. In an episode about the Moai of Easter Island, von Däniken, a frequent guest, refuses to accept that the people of eastern Polynesia would have made symbolic objects that bore no resemblance to themselves: ‘The statues they created, they have long narrow noses, narrow lips … They look like robots.’ In any case, the monoliths are so heavy they must have been put there by a ‘more profound power’ than ‘man’s hard labour’.