The Invention of Prehistory: Empires, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

• Stefanos Geroulanos

LIVERIGHT PRESS: 2024. 512 pp. £22.99

The study of the human past matters for an array of positive and negative reasons. A new book from historian Stefanos Geroulanos promises to explore those reasons — but also to question the worth of studying human origins altogether — by reviewing the histories of the European–British–American quest to study human evolution, its allied projects, and its often racist, sexist and colonialist products. Geroulanos focuses on some of the more popular and political takes on this topic and the impacts and actions of some key scholars and popularizers (interestingly, including Sigmund Freud). Notably, he examines the sociopolitical implications of select aspects of human evolution scholarship, popularizing and politics across the late 19th and 20th centuries. In this respect, the book is a solid contribution and gets a lot right about the endeavour across the past few centuries. It would all be fine if Geroulanos intended this to be only a particular history of the subject. But he does not. Instead, he makes a more specific assertion: that the very “concept of humanity that follows from [the study of] prehistory rests on hierarchies and exclusions, on ideals of purity and power” (page 399). As a researcher of the field of human evolution today, I find its characterization incomplete and uninformed.

中文翻译：

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不平衡的历史歪曲了对人类进化的研究

史前史的发明：帝国、暴力和我们对人类起源的痴迷

•  斯特凡诺斯·杰鲁拉诺斯

LIVERIGHT PRESS：2024 年。512 页，22.99 英镑

对人类过去的研究之所以重要，有一系列积极和消极的原因。历史学家斯特凡诺斯·杰鲁拉诺斯 （Stefanos Geroulanos） 的一本新书承诺通过回顾欧洲-英国-美国研究人类进化的历史、其相关项目以及通常带有种族主义、性别歧视和殖民主义的产品，来探讨这些原因——但也质疑完全研究人类起源的价值。Geroulanos 专注于关于这个主题的一些更流行和政治的观点，以及一些主要学者和普及者（有趣的是，包括西格蒙德·弗洛伊德）的影响和行动。值得注意的是，他研究了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪人类进化学术、普及和政治的特定方面的社会政治影响。在这方面，这本书做出了坚实的贡献，并且对过去几个世纪的努力有很多正确的描述。如果 Geroulanos 打算这只是该主题的特定历史，那就很好了。但他没有。相反，他提出了一个更具体的断言：正是“从[史前研究]中得出的人性概念建立在等级制度和排斥之上，建立在纯洁和权力的理想之上”（第 399 页）。作为当今人类进化领域的研究人员，我发现它的描述不完整且不知情。