The confluence of these two innovations led to an explosion of writing on prehistoric times. By studying early humans (who were now allegedly accessible in the form of Indigenous people), scholars believed they could illuminate what qualities are rooted in our human nature and which ones we acquire by living in civilization. This ambition went hand in hand with a profoundly new understanding of time. To explain why they were so different from their subjugated victims, Europeans and North Americans also began to argue that colonial subjects belonged to a much more ancient period, one that went far longer than biblical stories. In the 1830s, for example, the Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen claimed that humanity evolved through three long eras: stone, bronze, and iron ages. Each lasted a long period of time and entailed a slow and gradual adoption of new technologies. A few decades later, Charles Darwin extended time ever further back. In On the Origin of Species (1859), he suggested that humans emerged from processes that unfolded over millions of years. The belief in deep time was so widespread that it even extended to the days before men and women. Paleontologists maintained that the giant bones and fossils they found belonged not to griffins or giants, as some imagined, but to massive and frightening creatures that from 1842 became known as dinosaurs.
While the discipline of prehistory evolved and changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Geroulanos claims that it remained mired in racist and colonial mindsets. Scholars excavated the past to justify the present, especially the racial hierarchies and taxonomies that they crafted. Historians and social scientists, for example, pored over religious texts and archaeological findings to explain why Jews, Roma, or Muslims were inherently “foreign” to the West’s allegedly homogeneous racial makeup. The British-German writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain warned in 1889 that history was an eternal struggle between European civilization and the “Semitic flood” that sought to overrun it. The Nazis seamlessly built on this tradition when they sought to “restore” the lost world of ancient times, which in their minds was defined by strict racial boundaries. They spent considerable energy mapping humanity’s different origins, which they then used to justify their harrowing campaigns of sterilization, war, and genocide. As The Invention of Prehistory shows, racist anxieties continued to animate writers also in the era of decolonization. The American Robert Ardrey, for example, warned that African liberation movements were the vanguard of a race war that would send the world back to the “state of nature.” His bestselling African Genesis (1961) then went on to popularize the theory that human society emerged from “killer apes” that conquered the world.
Another obsession that reflected prehistory’s disturbing concerns was its grim fascination with violence. Novels and scholarly journals overflowed with murder and mutilation, depicting prehistoric humans as inherently aggressive. In Geroulanos’s telling, this was a reflection of colonial anxieties: Because Europeans and North Americans believed that Indigenous and “primitive” people were governed by violent impulses, they assumed this was true also for their predecessors in the deep past. For many commentators, however, the atavistic drive to destroy continued to shape humans even after they matured into civilization. H. Rider Haggard, the popular adventure author of the colonialist novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), mused that civilization was just a “veneer” that hid our stubborn “savagery.” Sigmund Freud, who was fascinated with prehistory, was the most articulate figure to make this point. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he claimed that civilization emerged after early humans felt guilt over an act of murder. For Freud, prehistory showed that laws and morality could never eradicate violent impulses, even in modern societies. “Prehistoric man,” he ruefully concluded, “is still our contemporary.”
