The Invention of Prehistory Quotes

“We might flatter ourselves that we represent an improvement on animals. But all we gained was the knowledge of death, an incurable wound in our intimacy with the world.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Playing the role which has always fallen to the historian, the role of the traitor.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“We are violent because of what we do now, not because of what those hominids back then might have done.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“No, there are no peoples without history—it’s just that most people are not aware of other peoples’ histories.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“When did Europeans come to believe that they actually descended from savages? The answer would seem to be during World War I.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“In Brussels between 1909 and 1914, Louis Mascré sculpted away for Belgium’s Royal Academy of Science, creating a plaster cranium, a mother and child, the upper body of an elder. At a time when Belgium was brutalizing the Congo, the country’s Royal Academy compared Africans to apes and also depicted Neanderthals as simian rather than caveman-like.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“By comparison, the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous populations—which the Society, for one, consistently linked to slavery—was largely ignored by the public. For the most part, Britain and the US treated Indigenous peoples as belonging to the past, as active threats to modernity. Above all, they described Natives as “perishing,” as “disappearing.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“The novelist Evelyn Waugh noticed at the time that Evans and his collaborators blended contemporary styles into antique ones: they had “tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Commentators like the historian Cathy Gere have repeatedly pointed out that the “restored” Minoan palace came to resemble modernist works—Lenin’s Mausoleum or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“There’s the cooking-made-humanity theory, popularized by (among others) Yuval Noah Harari’s deceptive hodgepodge Sapiens.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“From its very beginnings, Teilhard argued, the universe was suffused with religious and spiritual force. In this distant past, even if no 'us' existed to see it, 'our' possibility was already embryonic.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins