472. The Endless Quest to Define Humanity: Exploring Prehistory feat. Stefanos Geroulanos

Historically, how were narratives used around race, species, and the beliefs of Western civilization? What have been the contemporary implications for those earlier societal beliefs?

Stefanos Geroulanos is the director of the Remarque Institute, a professor of history at New York University, and the author of several books. His latest book is called The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. 

Greg and Stefanos discuss the complexities of defining human nature and the role of prehistory in understanding humanity's origins. Stefanos explores the ongoing debates about human progress, the impact of scientific discoveries like new fossils, and the culturally loaded interpretations of those findings. 

They also discuss how perspectives on indigenous populations and humanity's past are shaped by evolving scientific interpretations and narrative constructions, highlighting the intersection of science and politics in the research of human origins.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Tacitus
• Charles Darwin
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Thomas Hobbes
• Napoleon Chagnon
• The Dawn of Everything
• Jane Goodall
• Max Müller
• Maurice Olender
• Raymond Dart
• Neanderthal
• The Clan of the Cave Bear
• Gustav Victor Rudolf Born
• Memento mori
• Ozymandias
• Adam Smith

Guest Profile:

• Stefanos-Geroulanos.com
• Faculty Profile at NYU

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
• Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present
• The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept
• An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought
• The Problem of the Fetish
• The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War
• Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History
• The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas
• Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History
• Writings on Medicine
• Knowledge of Life
• Selected Writings: On Self-Organization, Philosophy, Bioethics, and Judaism

Episode Quotes:

Understanding who we are as humans is key to recognizing our differences

47:37: If we can begin to admit that we are people who are culturally fundamentally, economically fundamentally different—our lemons come from half a world away, the meat that we consume from another half a world away, and so on. If we come around to understanding that our family structures, our relationships, our religious questions are structured in a different form, that our world is technologically bound, and that ultimately, one way or another, we have biological connections, but even our microbiomes must be fundamentally different from what ancient microbiomes were, then we will not end up having this need to say, "Here's where it's all begun."

Recognizing fundamental problems in our story opens paths beyond human origins research

54:49: Recognizing that there have been fundamental problems with a story is one path to recognizing that some of the things we believe in, and some of the hopes we want set, are not necessarily bound by that story entirely, nor were they ever necessarily or entirely bound by that story. I don't think that moral arguments would have ever utterly depended on human origins research.

How human origins research helped overcome traditional views

02:53: Human origins became really key at several stages, and at each of those stages, something absolutely current or something truly urgent was in play. Some of these moments had to do with overcoming traditional religious answers. Others had to do with an overcoming of ideas of human nature, so that certain kinds of stability of human nature and so on. Let's not pretend that they simply disappeared, but they did become secondary. And so human origins research came to fill that void. And in some respects, that's a real advance. And in some respects, that's a problem.

Two stories that helped convince people about evolution

44:40: I kept thinking, in some way, whether these stories of prehistory helped convince people about evolution. And I really thought that there were two of them that did. One was the bit that we were saying before about the thin veneer—that people came to use the expression so much and to believe there is a continuity between our antiquity and now. Not simply between another, meaning an indigenous person somewhere, but that person was a reflection of who we were. And that helped create the broader belief in human continuity. But the other one was this sense about a renaissance, that people would have to somehow come to this astonishing realization that their body is made of hundreds of thousands, millions of years, which is a story that they couldn't think of without these ruins within.