Historian Stefanos Geroulanos says we need to “take responsibility for what humanity is becoming,” rather than looking to prehistory for easy answers.
Is war our genetic destiny as humans? And how does learning about violence among our ancestors influence our expectations about today?
Over the past decade, archaeological discoveries of Homo sapiens and older human relatives from hundreds of thousands of years ago have led to new understandings of early human cultures and those that preceded it.
And for some, the findings—coming at a time when armed conflict is pervasive and inescapable—have raised sobering questions about the nature of humanity itself.
“War may be a long-standing mainstay of human life, an inheritance from our deepest past,” Ross Andersen of the Atlantic wrote in November, 2023. “But each generation gets to decide whether to keep passing it down.”
But New York University historian Geroulanos, author of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (WW Norton, 2024), offers a strong challenge to that perspective.
“War today has nothing to do with human origins and has nothing to do with war a century ago,” he says. “What we would refer to as war today involves drones, involves extraordinary capacity to level city blocks, involves attacks on the computer networks of enemies, and it involves the threat of nuclear destruction.”
“We may find archeological answers to some of these questions, but they’ll be completely immaterial to what war is today,” adds Geroulanos. “So if we had begun with the idea that we will solve the problem of war by way of these questions, we are misunderstanding the problem to begin with.”
Geroulanos’s research is not on illuminating human nature prior to written records but, rather on analyzing how others have sought to understand humanity through excavations of “prehistory.”
“I do not write to cast aspersions on particular researchers, their good will, or their ability,” he writes in the new book. “Nor is scientific inquiry my target here. I am much more interested in how these concepts shaped modern humanity.”
Here, Geroulanos, director of NYU’s Remarque Institute, explains historical inquiries into humanity’s past, the contradictions these pursuits reveal, and how they influence 21st century life: