Prehistory’s Original Sin: a review of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos (Connor Grubaugh, 5/07/25, The Hedgehog Review)
Geroulanos’s portraits of major thinkers and movements in fields such as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, psychology, and religious studies are well-drawn and often devastating. He is right to argue that these disciplines emerged together as the authority of Christianity declined in the eighteenth century, becoming bearers of a modern faith that the origins of humanity and the meaning of human existence can be explained in naturalistic terms alone.
Beginning with the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage and the Romantic lore of the untamed Indo-Aryan, then proceeding at a clip through stadial theories of prehistorical “deep time,” the diffusion of innumerable rival Darwinisms, the savage Id and collective unconscious, and more, Geroulanos demonstrates how speculation—and projection—have always run rife in these arenas of purportedly scientific research. Academic disagreements about the deep past and their popular representation have always tracked with the dominant ideologies of the times. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he writes. “Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.” And every generation gets the Neanderthals it deserves.