1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 2/7)

When Duruy’s concise universal history was published in 1873, the field of history stood at a crossroads. What the Comte de Buffon had once called “the dark abyss of time” ( le sombre abîme du temps ), clearly, was not an abyss. It was more like a rift valley, with new land unmistakably visible on the other side. As an awareness of deep human time filtered into the practice of history during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, general historians like Duruy found ways to acknowledge the new findings. But they had no idea what to do with them, because deep human time did not fit the pre-existing frame used in the field of history.

By the 1930s, historians had come to a jury-rigged solution, resolving the problem of narrative by using the idea of the “Neolithic Revolution” to claim that human history itself came into being with the invention of agriculture and civilization. V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London: Watts, 1936). For the preceding half-century, however, historians floundered. In Duruy’s case, the few token paragraphs he devoted to humanity’s deep time were grafted clumsily onto the front end of the history. I have explored some of these issues at greater length in On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Today, the gulf between history and prehistory is no longer terrifying, but it remains nearly as deep as it was in 1873. The inability to close the breach in time was one of the signal failures of history-writing in the twentieth century. In the decades after 1960, the field of history gradually set about the task of recuperating histories that had been invisible to previous historians writing in the Judeo-Christian tradition: histories of women, peasants and workers, marginals, minorities, subalterns, and all those whom Eric Wolf once called the “people without history.” Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). These moves have enriched the field. But because the peoples of the Paleolithic “belonged” to another discipline—archaeology—they remained invisible to the historian's eye. Because their culture is extinct, moreover, the peoples of the Paleolithic aren’t a visibly suffering minority and have no need for justice. This political state of non-being renders them uninteresting to historians moved by advocacy.

If the discipline we call History is a political discipline designed to explain the modern condition, then there is little need for a deep history. But if History is an anthropological discipline designed to explain the human condition, as I believe, there is an urgent need to recuperate the history of Paleolithic peoples, to bring them into the purview of historical studies in the same way that we have brought in Incans, Africans, peasants, and all the peoples who have been denied historicity. This is the task of deep history.

A deep history is any history framed in the full spectrum of the human past, from the present day back to early hominins, australopiths, and beyond. A deep history is not just the study of the Paleolithic era, or everything before the turn to agriculture. Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists already do that. It is instead a philosophical perspective, an invitation to contemplate the entire span of human history within a single frame and treat it as part of the same narrative. For this reason, particular histories focusing on narrower spans of more recent time can contribute to deep history as long as they frame questions in the right way. Deep histories are genealogies. As genealogies, they span the narrow evidentiary bases and the methodological rules that have cut human history into isolated segments.