Neanderthals are People Too

Daniel Smail came back to Mount Holyoke for a lecture this semester, which gave me a good excuse to reread his book, On Deep History and the Brain.  (I had invited him out two years ago to talk about the subject as a part of the First Year Seminar program.  This year, one of my colleagues in history invited him out to talk to Medievalists.)  This is one of those books that makes you look at the word in a whole new way.  It’s clever, really clever.  Well worth reading. But, it suffers from one really big problem.

First, the clever part.  When did human history start?  For the Genesis is Literal crowd, 4004 BC.  For the Genesis is not Literal Crowd?  Oddly, right around 4000 BC.  Why?  As Smail extensively documents, it’s hard to say; it looks like nothing other than pure intellectual inertia.  What marks the start of when historians can start talking about human history?  The invention of writing?  So, do non-literate societies have no history?  That they do not is the obvious conclusion of the “No documents, No history” argument.  When a society itself begins to think of itself as having history?  Same problem.  When political society develops?  Same problem again.  So, why not trace human history all the way back?  Way back?  Where is the natural break-point?  And as soon as you realize there really isn't a natural break-point, then deep history is born.  And then you realize that the entire idea of "prehistoric" time is odd--what does it mean to say there is a time before history?

But, in the absence of documents, how do we study that deep history?  Smail argues that Science gives us great tools.  We could, for example, trace the DNA record and learn a lot about man’s deep history.  If we trace the development of the brain, we can learn a lot about human history.  And so we work backwards from what we know from the later ages, through the scientific record,  into the past and watch the development of man over thousands of years.  History books shouldn’t in other words begin with the Fertile Crescent; they should go back even further.

Now that is an interesting idea, and once you start to think about it, it makes history seem much longer.  The last 2000 years are just a small part of the whole scope of human history, just the tail end of a very long development.  (Of course the Genesis is Literal crowd disagrees vehemently, but that’s another blog post.)  The mind really reels when thinking about all that history still waiting to be discovered.

But, then we run into the problem of the book.  Once you get intrigued by the idea, what exactly do you do now?  Once I think this Deep History is fascinating, how do I actually go about studying it?  It’s not at all clear.  Smail’s book doesn’t show what the Deep History is, it just points to the tantalizing possibilities.  And his talk this last semester was a foray into showing the possibilities; the talk was nice enough (Smail is a good lecturer who knows how to give an entertaining, informative talk), but the content was still more of an appetizer than a meal.  It isn’t obvious how to study Deep History; it isn’t obvious how much we can actually learn.  Smail mentioned that he has started on a project studying credit; I am really looking forward to that project (in fact, I suspect I’ll invite him back again for another talk in two years to find out about the topic (I really like thinking about the history of credit (shocking, I know))), but I am not at all sure how much can actually be learned from or about Deep History.

But, come to think of it, perhaps there is another way to learn Deep History—after all, there is one truly great song about the Neoltihic Era (aka, the modern stone age).