On Deep History and the Brain
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Daniel Lord Smail |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of California Press |
| Honors | |
| When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history. | |
This is a little book about 50,000 years of human history that finally connects modern history, and medieval history, and ancient history, and what’s still called prehistory . Offering a fascinating digest of the significant scientific discoveries of recent years, Harvard History Professor Daniel Lord Smail presents a new paradigm for understanding changes in human culture, commerce, hierarchy, and civilization throughout time. First he debunks all the ways in which historians have justified continuing writing about 6,000 years of history by talking about writing, civilization, or historical consciousness. Then he guides the reader accessibly through an enormous literature on recent, ‘hot’ work on evolution, Paleolithic studies, and neuroscience—and shows how this can change our view of history, human life, and historical writing. Lastly he shows how history of all peoples at all times can be understood through psychotropy (humans using substances or actions to alter their own brain-body states). Through fascinating stories that range from religious ritual to coffee drinking, medieval knights to nineteenth-century gin, Smail finally brings the latest developments in the humanities and sciences together to put an entirely new, holistic cast on our understanding of ourselves.
