What We Can Learn From Ancient History (and What We Can’t)

Pity the poor Homo sapiens. In the great museums of the future, the display on their lives ca. 2024 will surely be among the least impressive. Picture them now, hunched over their little laminate desks, faces lit by the dim glow of screens, their teeth crooked, their muscles flabby, their eyes faulty, their torsos robed in fat siphoned from hyper-processed foods. Six million years of evolution — and for this?

Tormented by a fragmented hyper-modernity, sickened by industry and banished from any authentic contact with nature — is it any wonder that we moderns have turned back to ancient history, and even prehistory, in pursuit of health and happiness? People today use the conjectured habits of our distant ancestors as a guide to diet, birth, sex, dentistry, defecation, and much else beyond. The Paleo diet counsels the elimination of such post-Neolithic innovations as sugar, alcohol and grain in order to gain fit bodies and healthy smiles. The Squatty Potty promises to return its users to primal bathroom mechanics. Proponents of polyamory draw inspiration from the book Sex at Dawn, which argued that having multiple partners was the default sexual setting for most of human history.

But if the ancient world is being used by some as a template for life in the present, for many others, events in antiquity are an omen of things to come. For those convinced of Western (or world) civilization’s imminent demise, the fall of Rome serves as a constant warning. In recent years, it has been joined by another, more distant and rather more obscure event known as the Bronze Age collapse. Around the year 1200 B.C., a string of calamities befell the civilizations that ringed the eastern Mediterranean. A number of these either imploded completely or suffered profound blows. When the dust finally settled, the Bronze Age was over, and a new, poorer, meaner, more parochial and violent era had begun.

The Bronze Age collapse has long been a topic of wonder and speculation among archaeologists. It entered popular consciousness more recently, thanks in large part to the historian Eric H. Cline’s 2014 book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. That book, which has recently received the graphic-novel adaptation reserved for the biggest pop-history hits, became a surprise bestseller for Princeton University Press. In it, Cline told the gripping story of sudden and seemingly inexplicable downfall of Bronze Age civilization, and he pinpointed its climax to an individual year: the titular 1177 B.C.

By the time Cline’s fateful year rolled along, the Eastern Mediterranean had been encircled by prosperous, literate, and culturally sophisticated polities for centuries. These included the Hittite and Babylonian empires, the New Kingdom of Egypt (home to Tutankhamun and the heretic-pharaoh Akhenaten), the Levantine city-states of Ugarit and Byblos, the Minoans of Crete, and the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland. All of these varied cultures spoke and wrote different languages, but they all also corresponded and traded with one another. Their rulers exchanged formal diplomatic correspondence written on clay tablets in cuneiform script. (Akkadian was to the 14^th century B.C. what French would be to the 18^th century A.D.) Ships routinely crisscrossed the wine-dark sea, bearing cargoes of ivory, perfume, glass, and most crucially, copper and tin. These last two, the constituent metals of bronze, were the epoch’s must-have commodities. Intricate trade routes stitched together a net spanning from Afghanistan to Sardinia to keep the great palace economies of the Mediterranean heartland supplied with bronze weapons and tools.

The late Bronze Age was a period of pomp, craft, splendor, and trade. We know it best as the period of the Trojan War, when Troy, on the northeastern tip of Anatolia, was at its height, as were Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, and the other cities of the Greeks that would one day put Troy to the sword. And something brought this age of efflorescence to an abrupt and crashing halt. In the year 1177 B.C., groups of ship-borne marauders nicknamed the Sea Peoples attacked Egypt and were narrowly repelled in a great battle. At the same time, a wave of destruction spread across the Eastern Mediterranean. Ugarit was burned, the Mycenaean palaces were abandoned (usually for good), and the Hittite Empire vanished from the pages of history.

1177 B.C. traced the scope of the Bronze Age collapse and inquired into its causes. Now, Cline has written a sequel, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, which examines the aftermath. It is something of a corrective to the doom and gloom of the previous volume. Cline points out that not everything went dark all at once, and that there were green shoots among the ruins.

The Assyrians and Babylonians, in fact, did quite well coming out of the collapse. The Phoenicians positively thrived, exploiting the sudden lack of imperial competition to become masters of the seas. Egypt entered a long period of decline, but it didn’t disappear either. The central Hittite kingdom did vanish, but a few smaller, poorer splinter states survived to take up its mantle.

The Greeks faced the toughest path of all. The centuries after the collapse were truly dark. Writing vanished completely. Cities shrank to fractions of their former size. Squatters occupied the ruins of faded palaces. Where they could, people took to the hills, to be as far as possible from pirates and other marauders. When things got going again a century or two later, life looked quite different than it had before. Gone were the gold masks and massive stone walls of the Mycenae. The protagonists of the new era were not the god-kings of old but warriors competing with one another for power and territory. Instead of gold masks, these armed freelancers liked to be buried with their swords, bows, and other tools of war. Indeed, burials provide our main source of information for life in this Dark Age. One archaeologist quoted by Cline describes these new men of the 11^th century as “ruthless warlords, warrior princes determined to create something new out of the wreckage of the old.”

After the collapse, we see a landscape of chaos, ruin, and war. But, on the plus side, ironworking took off in a new way — hence the era’s retroactive name, the Age of Iron — as did the use of alphabetic scripts. Both innovations had a democratizing effect: Iron freed far-flung regions from dependence on foreign trade, while alphabets made mass literacy a possibility for the first time in history.

What are the lessons in all this for us today, Cline asks? He suggests that, to become resilient like the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, we should be as self-sufficient as possible, as a hedge against fragile global supply lines; prepare for extreme climate events by maintaining healthy supplies of drinking water; and do our best to keep the working class happy. This last point is fine advice, though it doesn’t necessarily follow from what we know about the collapse, given that we have no specific knowledge of any working-class revolts coinciding with the end of the Bronze Age. “Defend the coasts from marauders” might be more apropos, if less applicable.

Instead of preparing for the next calamity, Cline might have spent a bit more time on the benefits of collapse. Getting rid of centralized power may seem like a step backward in the short run, but it has its advantages in the long run. In Greece, the world of the Mycenaean god-kings and their palaces vanished, never to return. Hundreds of years later, the polis, still our model for politics and political engagement, arose in its place. Similarly, in the Near East, the kingdom of the Israelites sprang up in the power vacuum left by the retreat of the great empires. Maybe the real lesson of the Bronze Age collapse is to go with the flow, and trust that after a few centuries of warlords and swords, something better will spring up in their place.

The intellectual historian Stefanos Geroulanos would surely scoff at Cline’s notion that there are “societal lessons” to be learned from antiquity. His new book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, an ambitious history of the quest to understand human life in deep time, is predicated on the idea that research into human origins always has more to say about the present than the past.

Geroulanos says at the outset that he isn’t interested in paleontology, or in the careers of individual scientists. The Invention of Prehistory is not the history of a discipline. It is instead the history of a complex of ideas that have accreted around the question of human origins since the Enlightenment, and it serves largely as an indictment. Geroulanos thinks that “our obsession” (his constant use of the first person plural is as much irritant as provocation) with prehistory has been a mistake from the jump. He states that “thinking about human origins has been one of the most generative intellectual endeavors in modern history. It has also been one of the most ruinous.” He blames the “Euromodern search for origins” for its complicity in colonialism, eugenics, and the construction of racist hierarchies. He also doubts it has any validity as science or history. For him, the study of prehistory has nothing real to say about human life in deep time. It is about “the present day” and always has been — less a “field of inquiry” than a source of “narcissistic fantasy.”

By making The Invention of Prehistory about an “obsession” rather than a field of inquiry, Geroulanos has freed himself to pursue an incredibly wide array of loosely related subjects across time. He describes the book as a “genealogy” of the way in which “human origins came to saturate modern life.” The trouble is that “human origins” proves to be an extremely broad category. For Geroulanos, it encompasses everything from Darwinian evolution to barbarian invasions. The list of the “concepts, expressions and images” he sets out to “identify and track” in the introduction contains everything from “Man the Tool Maker” to “the Sanskrit language and Indo-European conquerors.” More puzzlingly, it also includes “ruins” and “dinosaurs.”

This catch-all approach is at once productively eclectic and frustratingly diffuse. The Invention of Prehistory is a galloping gallimaufry of a book. It has room for everything: Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico, Mike Tyson, and Donald Trump’s lizard brain. This reach is both the book’s strength and its greatest weakness. Over twenty chapters, The Invention of Prehistory covers some 250 years of science and fantasy. It begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and proceeds from there to check in with most of the big names in Western social thought. Herder, Hegel, Marx and Engels all make a ppearances, as does Freud, at his most agreeably crackpot, speculating on Oedipal murder at the dawn of time, and Jung, who is included for no reason I can discern. Darwin, probably the single most pivotal figure in the story of the quest to understand human origins, flits in and out of the narrative. Some other major prehistorians, such as E. B. Tylor, John Lubbock, and Jacques Boucher de Perthes get some air time, while other key figures, among them Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, and Marija Gimbutas, merit barely a mention (or none at all, in Miklouho-Macklay’s case). Notably, each of these three fall outside the English-French-German axis, which is the books’ main concern.

In Geroulanos’s defense, however, his protagonists are not people, but concepts. These take many forms. Different chapters treat the infancy of mankind, division of human history into stages (stone, bronze, etc.), the “disappearing native,” and the “thin veneer” separating civilization from savagery. They vary hugely in time and space. The study of early man or human origins has generally focused on a range of time that used to be known as the Stone Age and now extends back a few million years to the earliest fossil ancestors belonging to the genus Homo.

With such a vast territory to range around — encompassing not only all of “prehistory” but all of history, with each era’s specific myths of the dawn of man — it’s easy to get lost. A number of chapters in The Invention of Prehistory seem to barely fit the already-ambitious scope of the book. Sections on World War I and the history of aerial bombing, justified in large part by Air Force generals’ threat to bomb the Vietnamese “back to the Stone Age,” feel imported from a different line of research entirely. The book’s chapter on Nazis seems similarly tacked on. Geroulanos notes that the various nationalist regimes that came to power in Europe after World War I “were profoundly invested in history,” keen to return their countries to a golden age located in the medieval or classical past. True enough – but this has little to do with prehistory per se. As the chapter continues, Geroulanos makes the case that “racial prehistory” formed the “rationale for the extermination of the Jews of Europe.” To do so, he runs through the various “concepts and images” that informed the Nazi idea of the past. These include the veneration of the ancient German heroes, as portrayed by Tacitus and Wagner; an interest in “Indo-German” antiquity; elevation of Ancient Greece as a pinnacle of civilization; and a general fascination with ruins. Furthermore, he points out that the Nazis drew on the opposition of civilization and barbarity, spoke about “flooding hordes,” and saw competition among races in terms of the “survival of the fittest.”

This is all true, to a point. However, Geroulanos’s emphasis on images and metaphors obscures the political nature of Nazism. The Nazi fixation on Jews drew on centuries of antisemitic prejudice and depended on a worldview adapted from crude social Darwinism. But, as Jeffrey Herf and Omer Bartov have shown, the drive to exterminate Jews hinged on an equation of Jews with a “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat, poised to stab Germany in the back at a time when it was engaged in a struggle to the death with the Soviet Union.

This capacious approach also muddles Geroulanos’s point about prehistory. If an “obsession with human origins” includes any backward-looking social or political philosophy, it ceases to mean anything at all. There is certainly a story to tell about the malevolent influence Nazism exerted on archaeology and anthropology, as well as a parallel one about the malign role versions of evolutionary thought played in eroding the borders of political morality in the early 20^th century. But Geroulanos’s emphasis on representations tends to obscure these particular developments and bury them in a free-floating play of ideas.

Geroulanos’s book is at its best when he narrows his gaze and treats individual thinkers at length. The chapter on the French archaeologist Henri Breuil and the history of the reception of Paleolithic cave painting is excellent. So is the one on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit-turned-paleontologist who searched for fossilized remains of early man in interwar China and later tried to reconcile evolution with the teachings of the Catholic Church. It seems no accident that both of these figures are French: Both of Geroulanos’s previous books centered on 20^th century French thought, and it’s when he’s on his home turf that The Invention of Prehistory comes alive.

While Geroulanos is adept in dealing with questions of scientific reception and philosophical reinterpretation, he sometimes struggles with the science itself. He makes a few small errors of fact — describing, for instance, atomic tests taking place in Arizona, instead of New Mexico, and calling part of a skull a jugal hinge instead of an arch. He is unsure about, and indeed self-professedly uninterested in, the current state of play in the study of human evolution and ancestry. Geroulanos begins his book by observing that everything he learned about Neanderthals as a boy in the 1980s and 1990s has since been turned on its head. Where Neanderthals were once pictured as “hulking creatures, evolutionary failures, savage beasts just a step above the gorilla,” they now appear as “pensive-looking redheads.” Their skin has grown lighter and their gaze more quizzical. Some people even think they made art. Geroulanos interprets this transformation as a product of narcissistic self-regard. The more European excavators identified with Neanderthals, the paler and smarter they became.

There may be something to the idea of identification, but the main driver of the reinterpretation of Neanderthals in the past decades has come from new data. Twenty years ago, I took part in a summer field school in France, excavating a collapsed cave that had once been a Neanderthal shelter. During the course, lectures from leading anthropologists brought us up to date on the cutting edge of research into Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens. Most of what I learned is now considered wrong.

For Neanderthal behavior, much of this has come from archaeology. It was already known that in a few select cases, Neanderthals made jewelry. New dates (albeit controversial ones) opened up the possibility that they also made cave art. A stunning discovery of stalagmites arranged in circles in a cave sealed for 175,000 years demonstrated that they were making structures and thinking with symbols far earlier than we had ever supposed.

However, the real revolution in how we look at Neanderthals has come from genetics — especially paleogenetics, the study of DNA from long-dead organisms. Its progress has been somewhat herky-jerky. In 1997, the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo sequenced the first fragments of Neanderthal DNA (something Geroulanos alludes to, but doesn’t dwell on). These fragments, drawn from mitochondrial DNA, suggested that modern humans did not share any ancestry with Neanderthals. Twelve years later, Pääbo’s team published a draft of the entire Neanderthal genome, which flipped this story upside down. It became clear that all people of European and Asian ancestry share some Neanderthal DNA. Moreover, it was now possible to say specific things about what Neanderthals looked like and what we may have inherited from them. Further work on ancient DNA contained many more surprises: an entire species, the Denisovans — known from their DNA, but barely present in the fossil record.

New fossil discoveries have further complicated the evolutionary picture, turning our formerly straight-growing family tree into a wild and wooly shrub. Homo naledi from South Africa and the hobbit-like Homo floresiensis of Indonesia both look like relatives from our deep past. However, according to the most sophisticated dating, both coexisted with fellow members of our species. It now appears that, for most of their history, Homo sapiens shared a planet with numerous other hominids. Over time, we mated with some of them, and outcompeted (or maybe ate) the rest.

This is a wild idea, and one I think the popular imagination hasn’t fully caught up to. I wonder what will happen when it does. Will people identify with our lost hominid ancestors and celebrate the Denisovan within? Or will they become even more triumphant at having emerged as the victors in an evolutionary battle royale?

In the push and pull between science and culture, one sometimes takes the lead over the other. The Invention of Prehistory captures one side of that exchange. Geroulanos has done a redoubtable job of showing the ways in which the study of the human past has been deformed by prejudice, myth-making, and outright racism. Its companion volume — about the potential for science to open up a more complex and perhaps less vainglorious template of the human — remains to be written.